6 ms·

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.

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."
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Sure but that hasn't been true since, like, 2003. Many games these days (especially popular console games) have no such option (despite the existence of a PC port). Only the company can "run" "servers" that the built-in (aka GameSpy is dead) matchmaking will see. Gone are the days that you can feed an IP address and port into a game and connect to a friend's instance. There are exceptions that prove the rule (Hi Factorio!) but they're rarer and rarer, especially if you want a dedicated (no graphics) server running. Still, technology has advanced to the point that we can run Quake2 in-browser via JavaScript+wasm (and I don't mean via a plug-in!), so the old ways aren't totally dead.
- theelous3 5y ago
  The general meaning of "server" as it relates to the world of gaming is; an instance of the application that more than one person can exist within at the same time. It doesn't matter how temporally limited it is, it doesn't matter if it's on dedicated hardware or not, or how many "servers" are sharing that hardware. It doesn't even have to be on a different machine. > Typically that list of servers in online games was actually a list of different physical locations you could connect to. And? If you saw me hosting two cs lobbies from the same box, would you stop calling them servers?
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    The key was that it didn't matter which hardware was hosting the game. You connect to that server, which may be from similar locations, or may be hosted by the community. Calling it as a "server" had the implication that it wasn't necessarily the game publisher that was running the server.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Yes but did we stop calling them servers when publishers stopped letting us run our own; accessible outside of their matchmaking process?
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.

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."
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Sure but that hasn't been true since, like, 2003. Many games these days (especially popular console games) have no such option (despite the existence of a PC port). Only the company can "run" "servers" that the built-in (aka GameSpy is dead) matchmaking will see. Gone are the days that you can feed an IP address and port into a game and connect to a friend's instance. There are exceptions that prove the rule (Hi Factorio!) but they're rarer and rarer, especially if you want a dedicated (no graphics) server running. Still, technology has advanced to the point that we can run Quake2 in-browser via JavaScript+wasm (and I don't mean via a plug-in!), so the old ways aren't totally dead.
theelous3 5y ago
The general meaning of "server" as it relates to the world of gaming is; an instance of the application that more than one person can exist within at the same time. It doesn't matter how temporally limited it is, it doesn't matter if it's on dedicated hardware or not, or how many "servers" are sharing that hardware. It doesn't even have to be on a different machine. > Typically that list of servers in online games was actually a list of different physical locations you could connect to. And? If you saw me hosting two cs lobbies from the same box, would you stop calling them servers?
- MereInterest 5y ago
  The key was that it didn't matter which hardware was hosting the game. You connect to that server, which may be from similar locations, or may be hosted by the community. Calling it as a "server" had the implication that it wasn't necessarily the game publisher that was running the server.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Yes but did we stop calling them servers when publishers stopped letting us run our own; accessible outside of their matchmaking process?

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.