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What about Discord besides network effect makes it a desirable holding? Do they have any technological advantage?

lostcolony 6y ago
Does anyone in this space? At least, that has any user facing affect (i.e., 99.9% uptime vs 99.99% uptime is not something users will be comparing). It's all network effect and business model.
kungito 6y ago
It's been a fucking amazing product from day one and they have a lot of features. I only wish they release a non gaming branded version
- red_trumpet 6y ago
  What would a non-gaming version distinguish from the current one?
  - TkTech 6y ago
    It's hard to pitch discord in the workplace, especially against an incumbent like Slack or Teams. It comes across as very "casual" and unprofessional, which is a shame, because it really is a top-quality product. It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work: > Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
    - meristohm 6y ago
      I’ve used Discord only for gaming and I would prefer all the non-voice stuff to be able to be hidden. If it wasn’t the most reliable audio for group voice chat that we’ve tried (Steam voice is still an echo-y mess for us three, Signal wouldn’t connect us, and then I conceded and went back to Discord), we’d use something else. I don’t like that it tracks what we’re playing, that it tries to be friendly with its treacly messages (it’s a tool; my shovel doesn’t say “welcome back, I missed you!”...), and that it keeps deleted accounts around. I can see that others may want all these and other Facebook-esque features. I like that Discord uses .opus codec, and that the audio is dependable and clear. Maybe Mumble to try next? What open-source options might work for enterprise?
      - melkhior 6y ago
        For gaming, you might enjoy Teamspeak. It's closed-source, but you can run own your server, it's very much focused on voice comms, uses Opus and (IMO) has better audio filters.
  - oneepic 6y ago
    Fewer pylons and other gaming memes.
  - bentcorner 6y ago
    Probably better support around auth and identity. They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth. But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.
speedgoose 6y ago
It provides a nicer user experience overall.
ganzuul 6y ago
Makes the users feel like the devs care.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > Makes the users feel like the devs care. Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO? After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers. Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered) -------- In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer. Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
  - ganzuul 6y ago
    I pay for Discord. They know how to wring money out of their customers.
prox 6y ago
It’s one of the most popular destinations for gaming/tech discussion rooms and teamtalk (during games) what they do, they do really well, that’s their advantage.
keb_ 6y ago
The UX and featureset of Discord is impressive. The UX in particular is superior to Slack, Teams, or any other modern chat application I've used. I'd like to move my group to Matrix, but Element (fka Riot.im) is nowhere near as polished or user-friendly as Discord.
- antris 6y ago
  Have you ever tried to disable notifications on Discord? I have tried to do it 500 times and still get those annoying red dots with numbers, red dots without numbers, and just a few weeks ago I started getting random notification sounds (after I had disabled them before) without any clue where they were coming from. My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned. edit: I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
  - Notorious_BLT 6y ago
    Right-click the server icon, select "notifications settings", press "Mute <server name>". When it asks how long, select "until I turn it back on". This will kill the white dot unless you're mentioned (or @everyone'd). Its a little tricky to find but that will solve your issue
    - antris 6y ago
      I want to change my global settings, not server settings. I'm on dozens of Discords and join/leave them and change their order on the sidebar all the time. Going through each of them (and remembering to do it every time I join a new one) sounds like a nightmare. Every time I hear/see a notification that I don't want, I'd have to go through all those dialogs for all of my servers? Nope, not gonna happen.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Its B2C software so its fundamentally designed for consumers - individual users and community creators. Slack, Teams etc. are B2B so end-users are forced to adopt it. The UX of both reflects this.
Varriount 6y ago
I don't know if you consider this a technological advantage, but compared to Slack, Discord puts a relatively heavy emphasis on its live voice channel functionality. You can join and leave them at a whim, mute and control the volume of individual users, etc. I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.
wayoutthere 6y ago
Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. Technology progress has plateaued in a great many industries over the last decade so it’s all about the product experience these days. Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  > Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. There is a vast gulf even in terms of „just working“ between garbage like Microsoft Teams and something like Discord.
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Honestly teams “just works” for a lot of companies. My company had a 100% in-office culture and transitioned to using Teams extensively within a week of the pandemic starting. The fact that it’s built off of Active Directory and integrates with existing Sharepoint and Exchange systems is a huge plus for business users. Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    I find this "Teams is garbage" vs the experience at our company quite interesting. We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit. Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever. There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.
wongarsu 6y ago
It's arguably the best software in the "modern IRC" space. Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.
- f1refly 6y ago
  > discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effordless voice channels and good UX Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.
devwastaken 6y ago
They have users. If they wanted to they could become the next Steam tomorrow by simply selling games and giving deals. The engaged userbase of discord far surpasses steam, epic, and all other gaming clients. Valve doesn't care about competing or innovating, theyll simply roll over and let it happen. But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > simply selling games and giving deals They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely. You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    The game store is still open. They just do not accept more paid games due to understaffing.
- Notorious_BLT 6y ago
  They already tried, it flopped and they killed off the feature. PC gamers already own games through Steam, no one wants to have to split their library if they can avoid it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
afpx 6y ago
Do they even have a lot of active users? I haven’t found many public discord channels that seem to be actively used. Or, is discord more for private chat? I’ve used it a few times for organizing online gaming. But, it wasn’t worth it to keep it installed.
Jweb_Guru 6y ago
They're way better at dealing with large communities than any other chat application I've used.
nesarkvechnep 6y ago
It has a technological advantage - Elixir.
Merem 6y ago
Data from a lot of users? I mean, they inspect all audio/video communications in real-time[1] and save all your messages, pictures etc. It also helps a lot that basically no one cares about privacy anymore, so further growth seems secured. [1] https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626 https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-di...
whoopdedo 6y ago
I assumed they wanted to buy the userbase. And use it to promote XBox and Game Pass. I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.
aphextron 6y ago
The network effect is what makes it desirable. Anyone can push bits these days. Web technology is completely commoditized. But a strong brand and a great product team is priceless (or at least worth more than $10bn).
m01 6y ago
They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage. In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir. [1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... EDIT: added reference and clarified that I don't know if they still use Elixir.
- davidw 6y ago
  https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 mentions 'Rust or Elixir'. Frustratingly, for the longest time, they were 'San Fran or bust' in their hiring, which seemed like an odd thing for a company supposedly enabling communication. Guess the pandemic finally forced them to start looking for remote workers. Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
  - dnautics 6y ago
    > Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO? My guess would be pagerduty is the first?

Does anyone in this space? At least, that has any user facing affect (i.e., 99.9% uptime vs 99.99% uptime is not something users will be comparing). It's all network effect and business model.

kungito 6y ago

It's been a fucking amazing product from day one and they have a lot of features. I only wish they release a non gaming branded version

red_trumpet 6y ago
What would a non-gaming version distinguish from the current one?
- TkTech 6y ago
  It's hard to pitch discord in the workplace, especially against an incumbent like Slack or Teams. It comes across as very "casual" and unprofessional, which is a shame, because it really is a top-quality product. It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work: > Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
  - meristohm 6y ago
    I’ve used Discord only for gaming and I would prefer all the non-voice stuff to be able to be hidden. If it wasn’t the most reliable audio for group voice chat that we’ve tried (Steam voice is still an echo-y mess for us three, Signal wouldn’t connect us, and then I conceded and went back to Discord), we’d use something else. I don’t like that it tracks what we’re playing, that it tries to be friendly with its treacly messages (it’s a tool; my shovel doesn’t say “welcome back, I missed you!”...), and that it keeps deleted accounts around. I can see that others may want all these and other Facebook-esque features. I like that Discord uses .opus codec, and that the audio is dependable and clear. Maybe Mumble to try next? What open-source options might work for enterprise?
    - melkhior 6y ago
      For gaming, you might enjoy Teamspeak. It's closed-source, but you can run own your server, it's very much focused on voice comms, uses Opus and (IMO) has better audio filters.
- oneepic 6y ago
  Fewer pylons and other gaming memes.
- bentcorner 6y ago
  Probably better support around auth and identity. They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth. But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.

speedgoose 6y ago

It provides a nicer user experience overall.

ganzuul 6y ago

Makes the users feel like the devs care.

dragontamer 6y ago
> Makes the users feel like the devs care. Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO? After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers. Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered) -------- In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer. Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  I pay for Discord. They know how to wring money out of their customers.

prox 6y ago

It’s one of the most popular destinations for gaming/tech discussion rooms and teamtalk (during games) what they do, they do really well, that’s their advantage.

keb_ 6y ago

The UX and featureset of Discord is impressive. The UX in particular is superior to Slack, Teams, or any other modern chat application I've used. I'd like to move my group to Matrix, but Element (fka Riot.im) is nowhere near as polished or user-friendly as Discord.

antris 6y ago
Have you ever tried to disable notifications on Discord? I have tried to do it 500 times and still get those annoying red dots with numbers, red dots without numbers, and just a few weeks ago I started getting random notification sounds (after I had disabled them before) without any clue where they were coming from. My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned. edit: I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
- Notorious_BLT 6y ago
  Right-click the server icon, select "notifications settings", press "Mute <server name>". When it asks how long, select "until I turn it back on". This will kill the white dot unless you're mentioned (or @everyone'd). Its a little tricky to find but that will solve your issue
  - antris 6y ago
    I want to change my global settings, not server settings. I'm on dozens of Discords and join/leave them and change their order on the sidebar all the time. Going through each of them (and remembering to do it every time I join a new one) sounds like a nightmare. Every time I hear/see a notification that I don't want, I'd have to go through all those dialogs for all of my servers? Nope, not gonna happen.

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

Its B2C software so its fundamentally designed for consumers - individual users and community creators. Slack, Teams etc. are B2B so end-users are forced to adopt it. The UX of both reflects this.

Varriount 6y ago

I don't know if you consider this a technological advantage, but compared to Slack, Discord puts a relatively heavy emphasis on its live voice channel functionality. You can join and leave them at a whim, mute and control the volume of individual users, etc. I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.

wayoutthere 6y ago

Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. Technology progress has plateaued in a great many industries over the last decade so it’s all about the product experience these days. Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.

formerly_proven 6y ago
> Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. There is a vast gulf even in terms of „just working“ between garbage like Microsoft Teams and something like Discord.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Honestly teams “just works” for a lot of companies. My company had a 100% in-office culture and transitioned to using Teams extensively within a week of the pandemic starting. The fact that it’s built off of Active Directory and integrates with existing Sharepoint and Exchange systems is a huge plus for business users. Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  I find this "Teams is garbage" vs the experience at our company quite interesting. We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit. Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever. There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.

wongarsu 6y ago

It's arguably the best software in the "modern IRC" space. Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.

f1refly 6y ago
> discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effordless voice channels and good UX Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.

devwastaken 6y ago

They have users. If they wanted to they could become the next Steam tomorrow by simply selling games and giving deals. The engaged userbase of discord far surpasses steam, epic, and all other gaming clients. Valve doesn't care about competing or innovating, theyll simply roll over and let it happen. But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.

ehsankia 6y ago
> simply selling games and giving deals They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely. You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
- anticensor 6y ago
  The game store is still open. They just do not accept more paid games due to understaffing.
Notorious_BLT 6y ago
They already tried, it flopped and they killed off the feature. PC gamers already own games through Steam, no one wants to have to split their library if they can avoid it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

afpx 6y ago

Do they even have a lot of active users? I haven’t found many public discord channels that seem to be actively used. Or, is discord more for private chat? I’ve used it a few times for organizing online gaming. But, it wasn’t worth it to keep it installed.

Jweb_Guru 6y ago

They're way better at dealing with large communities than any other chat application I've used.

nesarkvechnep 6y ago

It has a technological advantage - Elixir.

Merem 6y ago

Data from a lot of users? I mean, they inspect all audio/video communications in real-time[1] and save all your messages, pictures etc. It also helps a lot that basically no one cares about privacy anymore, so further growth seems secured. [1] https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-discord-1976773f4626 https://medium.com/tenable-techblog/lets-reverse-engineer-di...

whoopdedo 6y ago

I assumed they wanted to buy the userbase. And use it to promote XBox and Game Pass. I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.

aphextron 6y ago

The network effect is what makes it desirable. Anyone can push bits these days. Web technology is completely commoditized. But a strong brand and a great product team is priceless (or at least worth more than $10bn).

m01 6y ago

They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage. In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir. [1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... EDIT: added reference and clarified that I don't know if they still use Elixir.

davidw 6y ago
https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 mentions 'Rust or Elixir'. Frustratingly, for the longest time, they were 'San Fran or bust' in their hiring, which seemed like an odd thing for a company supposedly enabling communication. Guess the pandemic finally forced them to start looking for remote workers. Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
- dnautics 6y ago
  > Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO? My guess would be pagerduty is the first?