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That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any
by def_true_false 5y ago
That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security.
WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled.
The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale.
Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)
- Zababa 5y ago> Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.
- rexreed 5y agoDiscord displaced Slack in our organization and we're never looking back at Slack ever again.
- def_true_false 5y agoIn my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).
- Zababa 5y agoFor my group this wasn't about mic settings but mumble being bad out of the box. Maybe because we didn't pay for the servers and used a free something, maybe because of bad luck, I don't know, but every experience we had with mumble was terrible. For teamspeak, while the voice part is great, the message part is (or was at least in ~2016) lacking compared to discord. We were coming from skype/twitter which had better support for """rich messages""".
- def_true_false 5y agoYeah, the text chat is just crap. I think most people use a separate thing for that, probably Steam in the PC gaming use case.
- pessimizer 5y agoWhatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.
- dnautics 5y agoalmost certainly part of it but not the whole story.
- def_true_false 5y agoIndeed. Discord even has a handful of blog posts about running into its limits.