10 ms·

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've see

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

PHGamer 5y ago
its just slack for gaming. the ui is ripped off as suck. it is better than ventrilo but its not like they are that much better, just they realized a good concept and took it.
Aeolun 5y ago
I don’t know about your definitions, but 300M is a fuckton of money to me.
dvt 5y ago
> ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.
- the_duke 5y ago
  > and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005 True, but to be fair: the next iteration of Teamspeak will be based on the Matrix protocol, which is quite a big iteration. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 .
- Scaless 5y ago
  For Mumble in particular, the devs had their heads in the clouds for so long that it is no surprise that it is no longer relevant. If you had a mic that had issues in any way (buzzing, volume, balance), "The Wizard" and "AGC" were supposed to fix it for you. Do not fret little one, for you do not need nor want to manually fiddle with settings, The Wizard will make everything right [1]! The pivotal feature that was the reason so many people I know stopped using it is the ability to change the volume of an individual person [2]. It has been a requested feature since the beginning of time, yet it took until 2016 to implement in dev branch and didn't actually make it into a release version until 2020! Too little, too late. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/FAQ/English#Can_I_change_to_volume_of_a_specific_user.3F https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumb... [2] https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156 https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156
  - rcxdude 5y ago
    That issue is pretty amazing, especially the developer straight-up accusing those saying 'this is a killer feature stopping us from moving to mumble' of lying (considering the substantial overlap between the features of the various options competing in the space at the time this is really obviously the kind of thing which could be a deal-breaker: I remember the arguments over which option to use based on far less substantial differences than this).
yelnatz 5y ago
Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market. I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical. Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  It works nice and is free, but for how long? How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?
  - SaltyBackendGuy 5y ago
    > It works nice and is free, but for how long? I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).
    - bonesinger 5y ago
      IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.
      - yawnxyz 5y ago
        we're trying to use Discord for our multi-site grant-funded healthcare project... it's pretty messy to use. Would love to pay for some decent support... People are getting locked out of their accounts for some reason and working with their support team is very painful.
      - grlass 5y ago
        I have some contacts who work for organisations use it instead of Slack for SMEs of 100-1000 employees. Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.
sascha_sl 5y ago
Discord's smart move was emulating the concept of servers (including all the teenage drama coming from having administrators and moderators more interested in (ab)using their power than community building) while making them accessible to anyone without technical knowledge. But it's important to remember that Discord is not that. Discord holds all your data, in luxurious detail, with no option to delete. They go as far as ignoring GDPR when people ask for their messages to be deleted. "Deleting" your account will not even anonymize your ID, it unsets your avatar, renames you, kicks you from all guilds and disables logging in. That's it. And if they ban you there is no place to move on to.
- tester756 5y ago
  and you aren't going to get DDoSed if you join server of not the nicest people :)
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    That used to be a huge issue, less with Client-Server model software, but more the P2P mechanisms in Skype. These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable.
    - tester756 5y ago
      >These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable. Hmm I didn't meant your server being DDoSd, but you being DDoS (but probably that's what you meant with Skype P2P example?)
      - sascha_sl 5y ago
        Well yeah. Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin). Skype (at the time, no idea now) was a very shoddily written piece of software. It was trivial to query the IP of any online user, even if they were not on your contact list or appearing offline. You had to use a VPN or carefully conceal your Skype ID, I did work with a somewhat popular live streamer back then (so a VPN wasn't feasible), and their ID was a very random string that was not to be shared under any circumstances.
kccqzy 5y ago
I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!
- Nadya 5y ago
  At my work we use Discord to have virtual "desks" (really just audio channels) so people can drop by and chat while you are at your desk. If you're busy or don't wish to be disturbed you can 'lock' your desk to prevent people from joining it (it limits the room size to 1, aka just you). It really has helped the social factor of moving nearly everyone in the office to remote working. Every department that has adopted the "virtual office" Discord setup loves it over Slack and basically never uses Slack anymore. It's way less awkward to call people, it's easier to not incidentally disturb them when they're busy, during breaks/lunch you can go to the "breakroom" and hang out and chat with everyone else. And it was all very easy to setup and with the Discord server template stuff we can even clone it for each department with very minimal work (renaming channels to that departments' people).
  - victortroz 5y ago
    Slack implemented something similar called Huddles, but I think is for paid plans only. I personally think Slack calls quality in general are much worse than other services or platforms like Discord or Meets/etc, so I don't know if it'll really help reaching people and companies that are using alternatives for voice.
    - didibus 5y ago
      Huddles uses Amazon's chime backend for audio, so it should perform much better then the current "audio calls" that slack had, though I haven't tried it yet.
      - moojd 5y ago
RHSeeger 5y ago
Honestly, I find discord super frustrating. Can't have multiple chats open at the same time, can't close the right rail, etc. It's UX is subpar in almost every way that matters to me. I use it because _everyone_ uses it, not because I want to.
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  In indie game dev, everyone’s on discord and so are your extremely-important potential players. Whether you enjoy discord or dislike it, you’re going to be on there. It has really strong networks effects
- tsjq 5y ago
  discord is maha complicated UX. close to nightmare
- mech422 5y ago
  I'm no fan of discord or Slack...but the fact that companies are using slack, and the slack 'threading' is sooo bad, drive me bonkers...
- jokoon 5y ago
  The top problem I have with discord is that you cannot have a list of favorite channels. I really prefer IRC.
- jonshariat 5y ago
  Ditto, feels fast and has a lot of features but to me the UX is very confusing.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Discord is somewhat of a power user UI. They cater to people who are in 10+ large communities and use lots of the features provided. It's not the simplest tool if all you want to do is PM a friend or two.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    everytime I open an irc client I feel lighter.. something about the discord web client is so dreadful. the android app focuses more on notifications and quick switches.. a bit better somehow.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
IMHO it is even better than Slack.
5faulker 5y ago
If that's 2017, imagine what it would be in 2021.
tschellenbach 5y ago
Better engineering than Slack, but not as good of a business
brightball 5y ago
Elixir ftw
- mrdoops 5y ago
  Want to build a real time chat app? Best build it on the BEAM.

PHGamer 5y ago

its just slack for gaming. the ui is ripped off as suck. it is better than ventrilo but its not like they are that much better, just they realized a good concept and took it.

Aeolun 5y ago

I don’t know about your definitions, but 300M is a fuckton of money to me.

dvt 5y ago

> ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.

the_duke 5y ago
> and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005 True, but to be fair: the next iteration of Teamspeak will be based on the Matrix protocol, which is quite a big iteration. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 .
Scaless 5y ago
For Mumble in particular, the devs had their heads in the clouds for so long that it is no surprise that it is no longer relevant. If you had a mic that had issues in any way (buzzing, volume, balance), "The Wizard" and "AGC" were supposed to fix it for you. Do not fret little one, for you do not need nor want to manually fiddle with settings, The Wizard will make everything right [1]! The pivotal feature that was the reason so many people I know stopped using it is the ability to change the volume of an individual person [2]. It has been a requested feature since the beginning of time, yet it took until 2016 to implement in dev branch and didn't actually make it into a release version until 2020! Too little, too late. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/FAQ/English#Can_I_change_to_volume_of_a_specific_user.3F https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumb... [2] https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156 https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156
- rcxdude 5y ago
  That issue is pretty amazing, especially the developer straight-up accusing those saying 'this is a killer feature stopping us from moving to mumble' of lying (considering the substantial overlap between the features of the various options competing in the space at the time this is really obviously the kind of thing which could be a deal-breaker: I remember the arguments over which option to use based on far less substantial differences than this).

yelnatz 5y ago

Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market. I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical. Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.

m4rtink 5y ago
It works nice and is free, but for how long? How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?
- SaltyBackendGuy 5y ago
  > It works nice and is free, but for how long? I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).
  - bonesinger 5y ago
    IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.
    - yawnxyz 5y ago
      we're trying to use Discord for our multi-site grant-funded healthcare project... it's pretty messy to use. Would love to pay for some decent support... People are getting locked out of their accounts for some reason and working with their support team is very painful.
    - grlass 5y ago
      I have some contacts who work for organisations use it instead of Slack for SMEs of 100-1000 employees. Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.

sascha_sl 5y ago

Discord's smart move was emulating the concept of servers (including all the teenage drama coming from having administrators and moderators more interested in (ab)using their power than community building) while making them accessible to anyone without technical knowledge. But it's important to remember that Discord is not that. Discord holds all your data, in luxurious detail, with no option to delete. They go as far as ignoring GDPR when people ask for their messages to be deleted. "Deleting" your account will not even anonymize your ID, it unsets your avatar, renames you, kicks you from all guilds and disables logging in. That's it. And if they ban you there is no place to move on to.

tester756 5y ago
and you aren't going to get DDoSed if you join server of not the nicest people :)
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  That used to be a huge issue, less with Client-Server model software, but more the P2P mechanisms in Skype. These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable.
  - tester756 5y ago
    >These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable. Hmm I didn't meant your server being DDoSd, but you being DDoS (but probably that's what you meant with Skype P2P example?)
    - sascha_sl 5y ago
      Well yeah. Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin). Skype (at the time, no idea now) was a very shoddily written piece of software. It was trivial to query the IP of any online user, even if they were not on your contact list or appearing offline. You had to use a VPN or carefully conceal your Skype ID, I did work with a somewhat popular live streamer back then (so a VPN wasn't feasible), and their ID was a very random string that was not to be shared under any circumstances.

kccqzy 5y ago

I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!

Nadya 5y ago
At my work we use Discord to have virtual "desks" (really just audio channels) so people can drop by and chat while you are at your desk. If you're busy or don't wish to be disturbed you can 'lock' your desk to prevent people from joining it (it limits the room size to 1, aka just you). It really has helped the social factor of moving nearly everyone in the office to remote working. Every department that has adopted the "virtual office" Discord setup loves it over Slack and basically never uses Slack anymore. It's way less awkward to call people, it's easier to not incidentally disturb them when they're busy, during breaks/lunch you can go to the "breakroom" and hang out and chat with everyone else. And it was all very easy to setup and with the Discord server template stuff we can even clone it for each department with very minimal work (renaming channels to that departments' people).
- victortroz 5y ago
  Slack implemented something similar called Huddles, but I think is for paid plans only. I personally think Slack calls quality in general are much worse than other services or platforms like Discord or Meets/etc, so I don't know if it'll really help reaching people and companies that are using alternatives for voice.
  - didibus 5y ago
    Huddles uses Amazon's chime backend for audio, so it should perform much better then the current "audio calls" that slack had, though I haven't tried it yet.
    - moojd 5y ago

RHSeeger 5y ago

Honestly, I find discord super frustrating. Can't have multiple chats open at the same time, can't close the right rail, etc. It's UX is subpar in almost every way that matters to me. I use it because _everyone_ uses it, not because I want to.

Rd6n6 5y ago
In indie game dev, everyone’s on discord and so are your extremely-important potential players. Whether you enjoy discord or dislike it, you’re going to be on there. It has really strong networks effects
tsjq 5y ago
discord is maha complicated UX. close to nightmare
mech422 5y ago
I'm no fan of discord or Slack...but the fact that companies are using slack, and the slack 'threading' is sooo bad, drive me bonkers...
jokoon 5y ago
The top problem I have with discord is that you cannot have a list of favorite channels. I really prefer IRC.
jonshariat 5y ago
Ditto, feels fast and has a lot of features but to me the UX is very confusing.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Discord is somewhat of a power user UI. They cater to people who are in 10+ large communities and use lots of the features provided. It's not the simplest tool if all you want to do is PM a friend or two.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  everytime I open an irc client I feel lighter.. something about the discord web client is so dreadful. the android app focuses more on notifications and quick switches.. a bit better somehow.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

IMHO it is even better than Slack.

5faulker 5y ago

If that's 2017, imagine what it would be in 2021.

tschellenbach 5y ago

Better engineering than Slack, but not as good of a business

brightball 5y ago

Elixir ftw

mrdoops 5y ago
Want to build a real time chat app? Best build it on the BEAM.