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Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10 subchannels. It quickly becomes impossible to follow up. It seems it's by design, it's another atte

• theelous3 5y ago
  While I don't disagree with the spirit of most of this, some exceptions. 1. Server is used in the "classic" meaning of the word as it relates to online gaming. It's an old use of the term that probably predates about half the userbase on hn. 2. I doubt it's intentional. I don't think a lack of features is cause for an attention hacking conspiracy. Yes, all of those features you mentioned are desirable - but you can get halfway there by not having a movies channel to begin with. Discord has never been a particularly good bit of software. That's all there is to it.
  • packetlost 5y ago
    What GP entirely misses is that Discord is not really to blame for any of that. They provided the features, but really it's up to the admins of a particular "server" (the API calls them "guilds") to have too many channels, and there's not really an incentive for a server admin to 'attention hack.'
  • MereInterest 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by the "classic" meaning of "server". Typically that list of servers in online games was actually a list of different physical locations you could connect to. Each one was a different server, a different physical computer. Some were hosted by the company that made the game, and some were hosted by the community.
    • maxsilver 5y ago
      The "gaming classic" meaning of "server" is a dedicated hosted instance of a software. It's from late-90s/early-2000s era LAN party lingo, stuff like, "let's get a game of Quake going, start up a server" or similar. A single "server" (one physical computing machine) could have hundreds of "servers" (instances of the server-side of the game software) running on it. One physical tower PC could have "10 Quake Servers", "2 HL2-DM servers", "a Team Fortress 2 server", "a Unreal Tournament server" and such on it. Discord originally seemed to be using that era of lan-party style language for it's naming conventions. A Discord "server" is just an instanced section of the server-side of the Discord software, and not specifically related to any real-world physical machine.
      • ryukafalz 5y ago
        The thing about game servers though is that you could run them yourself and typically choose where to do so. On your PC during a LAN party? Sure. On an always-on VPS? Sure. But wherever it was, you were always able to run it yourself, even if you ultimately might have paid someone else to run it. You're just running a server program. By contrast, only Discord-the-company can run Discord servers.
        • MichaelBurge 5y ago
          There are "private servers" made by people other than the developers for games that don't release server executables or source code. So the remote side being named a "server" is independent of whether it is available to run(for gamers).
          • ryukafalz 5y ago
            Yes, but those are typically for games like MMOs where the servers are responsible for a large number of players. Those are never presented to the user as "your server," they're "the game's servers." Contrast with Discord where there's something of an illusion of ownership; people will refer to them as "my Discord server." EDIT: Incidentally, if you're actually running a private server for an MMO, I would indeed call that "your server."
  • jimmaswell 5y ago
    > Discord has never been a particularly good bit of software I really don't see how you can say that. How?
    • andai 5y ago
      You know, I'm glad you asked! I've been looking forward to writing these down. Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts restarting the call to work. The calls often die midway without telling you, until you realize you're just talking into the void. Tried on multiple devices (including mobile), same result. When I hear a message come in, I have no way of knowing where it came from. There is an inbox button, but the message at the top is not the one that made the sound, and the list appears to have some kind of infinite scroll (so it isn't at the bottom either! Or maybe it is but I'm in too many servers?). I actually did find a trick for identifying what channel a message was in, assuming it's part of a busy conversation -- clear the inbox and wait for the next one. (If it's just one message, that doesn't work.) It also logs me out every single time I visit, often just hours apart, which I can only assume is intentional, to try and get me to download their electron spyware instead of using the web version? At least I hope it's a dark pattern and not incompetence, because I'd prefer to believe I live in a world where competence is misdirected, than one where it is absent.
      • theshrike79 5y ago
        > Voice chat is unreliable, often requiring 2-3 attempts restarting the call to work. The calls often die midway without telling you, until you realize you're just talking into the void. Tried on multiple devices (including mobile), same result. YMMV We specifically switched one group to Discord just because the voice/video chat works every single time.
      • jimmaswell 5y ago
        I've never had any of those issues on the desktop or phone app, and they're not spyware by any but the most overreaching definition.
        • 5y ago
  • GuB-42 5y ago
    Discord is indeed "not particularly good". It is an Electron app, for starts. But overall, I didn't find better elsewhere. I find it works better than Slack and Teams, it has both usable text and voice, with a persistant history, which makes more usable than open alternatives like IRC or Mumble, or even the pervious gamer oriented voice apps like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Microsoft had MSN messenger, then Skype that weren't that bad, but they messed up. So, not perfect, but good enough.
    • 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
      Telegram has all of the above + native desktop clients (built on top of Qt).
      • madeofpalk 5y ago
        Except it doesn't have people. shame.
        • ushakov 5y ago
          and no money to sustain itself
    • lrvick 5y ago
      Try Matrix. Open source, decentralized, and end to end encryption for privacy.
  • jrm4 5y ago
    For Discord, "server" is a relatable and convenient lie; based on IRC, of course -- I'm simultaneously impressed at how good Discord is, it kills pretty much everything else in its space, but also am hugely concerned about how centralized it is. I want to say it's "disappointing" how they use "server," but it was probably a necessary fiction.
    • thrashh 5y ago
      Based off IRC? Did you mean TeamSpeak/Ventrilo? Discord was a direct replacement for voice servers used in gaming communities. Not IRC.
    • bb010g 5y ago
      The internal name for a server is a "guild". "Server" came from TeamSpeak, where there was a deployable server service.
• loo 5y ago
  I know the 'server' term smells bad to anyone who knows better. But to me, the encouragement to explore / read conversations you may have no interest in is a good thing. Just like forums. The alternative experience on IRC can be stifling. People really do atomize their conversations there. And often avoid chatting from fear of stepping on someone's disinterested toes, or going even slightly off topic. At least on Discord, ~everyone in a server is present in all of the channels. So relocating a topic isn't "switch to a room with hardly anyone in it". It's more like a category move on a forum. Getting people to join in a new channel on IRC is like pulling calcified teeth!
• im3w1l 5y ago
  I think it's because a discord server is trying to model a group of friends rather than a topic. The point of the movies subchannel is not just discussing movies. It's about socializing with your friends by discussing movies.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10 subchannels. It quickly becomes impossible to follow up. It seems it's by design, it's another attempt of attention hacking. The most effective Discords I’m in have 1-5 channels. They’re also effective because everyone is there for a reason: Either to keep in touch with a specific group of people, or to discuss a specific topic. There seems to be an entirely different class of Discord where people are trying to create an entire community. These balloon into monstrosities with 10-100 different channels ranging from on-topic to off-topic. I have no interest in keeping up with all of the different channels or people coming and going. In the worst case I’ve seen, an initially helpful Slack was split into over 500 different channels for every possible topic. Every time someone tried to start a conversation, several people would jump in to tell the person “there’s a channel for that”. The person would join the channel, see that there were only 4 people in it, and give up. I left when it felt like 50% of the discussions were about policing which topics could be discussed in which channel. In the larger discords, the conversations seem to be dominated by a small fraction of chronically online users who involve themselves in every conversation. It’s very clearly a replacement for social interaction at that point. A lot of these seem to spring up in conjunction with people building e-mail lists and trying to amass Twitter followers.
• tobias3 5y ago
  Someone who actually used this and made the transition should correct me: I bet the usage of "server" came from the TeamSpeak world where you had to self-host it on your own (dedicated) server. Of course giving away the hosting for free is going to attract users and one doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
  • junon 5y ago
    Discord is pretty directly based on Slack. Slack had all of this first and while the app looks like Slack a bit today it really looked like slack a few years ago.
    • Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      Slack definitely didn't have group voice and video first. I think it's more accurate to describe Discord as a mashup of TeamSpeak, Slack and Skype.
  • Jxl180 5y ago
    My understanding is that “server” was never an official discord term — “Guild” is the official term but the community has used “server” so it just stuck.
• junon 5y ago
  Right click a sever, click Mute Server. Never had any issues with this. I don't particularly like discord but I don't buy this argument.
• Kiro 5y ago
  > Imagine if each IRC channel on freenode had between 5 and 10 subchannels Yes, we did exactly that back in the day by running our own IRC server. I don't see what the problem is, nor do I understand the arguments in this article. Very uncompelling imo.