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I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company. I've stopped using Discord for most purposes. For group chats I use Wire, which admittedly has much shittier UI, but it's free for small groups and E2E encrypts all conversations.

shabbatt 4y ago
What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of context with screenshots. I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
- dmix 4y ago
  I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice. Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often needing admin approval before posting, etc.
  - shabbatt 4y ago
    actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime, ferrarichat i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall. it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      > actually many communities still using phpbb like But the point of your complaint is that many communities have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > Having to sign up for the hundred forum account On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to sign up at all, and I can stumble across interesting things through either a web search or perchance a link from elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall. Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just happy to occasionally browse through, and quite a few more I just randomly stumble across while searching for information on whatever subject currently occupies me. While having to sign up separately for every forum might be considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now and than that I actually feel the urge to actively contribute something. The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter) works on the other hand means that all the serendipity stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm having can't even happen in the first place because like I said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall. So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for being able to just casually browse through and being able to find them at all in the first place.
tester756 4y ago
>They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company. what's wrong with that? did anything change in the way Discord works cuz of that? because I didn't notice
cyral 4y ago
> but then scrubbed every mention of games There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bool3max 4y ago
  They operated a games storefront and library for a short period of time, but that died pretty quickly.
- BrainVirus 4y ago
  Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider their real target audience.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Won't someone think of the gamers!
holler 4y ago
I'd love to get feedback on my project sqwok.im and whether it may interest you.
judge2020 4y ago
> Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. Like?
- jacooper 4y ago
  https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/ https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_neve...
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > There is no way the freemium nitro barriers keep discord from going under, Discord's entire hope is that eventually it will be bought out by a tech giant And yet they have not been purchased yet. > Discord collects everything you do inside Make a post on HN saying "disable newrelic if you value user privacy" and see how well that goes. > Things tracked outside the program include : programs you run and other system specific information that can identify your hardware (such as your HWID's) Discord does not collect the programs you run on their server. It does scan for them to enable the game tracking feature. See the post by u/GlenMerlin: > Logging your opened apps is an optional setting (mostly done to detect discord rich presence for games, so your friends can see you're playing halo infinite and join with one click) and you can turn it off and the data is stored locally. > All it takes is 1 breach to make every message you ever sent public information. I can assure you extracting any sizable fraction of Discord's messages will incur at least a few hundred petabytes of data transfer fees within a day, triggering DLP alerts or maybe even regular billing "unnatural increase in data transfer costs" alerts. Even if Discord were hacked, their infrastructure makes actually downloading user data both infeasible and riskier than just dumping the user DB containing emails and hashed passwords. To add, that's just for data stored on the server - the actual "science" api containing things like how you use Discord likely accumulates hundreds of petabytes worth of data a month on its own, it'd be easier to download the generated user behavior reports than to download the data itself. The E2E criticism is valid but users obviously don't care enough to move off of Discord, even with the privacy campaigns against them and efforts to move communities over to Guilded.
- jhgg 4y ago
unethical_ban 4y ago
I was talking with some friends about how the gaming community of today has no idea what Teamspeak, Ventrilo or Mumble are. What does Discord do that these others never did well? Screen share, video conference, filesharing (TS had a primitive fileserver), and rich text/emoji, persistent chat, and a better UI for moving from server to server. The mumble client already supports using certs for identity. I think if Mumble could make multi-server browsing easier and have screenshare/videoshare, that would be enough for many people to swing back to a decentralized tool. After screenshare and server browsing, having "Mumble as a Service" to spin up a new server instantly ala Discord would be the killer migration feature to compete. I wonder if any Mumble developers think about pivoting to a more direct competition with Discord? Or if any people with videoconference software dev experience would know where to start on Mumble?
jacooper 4y ago
Honestly, matrix.org is the best alternative. Its basically the new chat standard.

shabbatt 4y ago

What I hate more is more ppl are using discord as default support. IT moves to quick, and repeat questions and answers needs bot. It's easier for people to piss in the well because chat is so fleeting, can easily take conversations out of context with screenshots. I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.

dmix 4y ago
I don't think many people miss the dauys of PHBB in practice. Having to sign up for the hundred forum account, often needing admin approval before posting, etc.
- shabbatt 4y ago
  actually many communities still using phpbb like nsxprime, ferrarichat i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall. it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > actually many communities still using phpbb like But the point of your complaint is that many communities have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > Having to sign up for the hundred forum account On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to sign up at all, and I can stumble across interesting things through either a web search or perchance a link from elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall. Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just happy to occasionally browse through, and quite a few more I just randomly stumble across while searching for information on whatever subject currently occupies me. While having to sign up separately for every forum might be considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now and than that I actually feel the urge to actively contribute something. The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter) works on the other hand means that all the serendipity stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm having can't even happen in the first place because like I said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall. So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for being able to just casually browse through and being able to find them at all in the first place.

tester756 4y ago

>They've used gaming as a ticket to fame, but then scrubbed every mention of games from their UX after receiving $100M from a VC company. what's wrong with that? did anything change in the way Discord works cuz of that? because I didn't notice

cyral 4y ago

> but then scrubbed every mention of games There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bool3max 4y ago
They operated a games storefront and library for a short period of time, but that died pretty quickly.
BrainVirus 4y ago
Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider their real target audience.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Won't someone think of the gamers!

holler 4y ago

I'd love to get feedback on my project sqwok.im and whether it may interest you.

judge2020 4y ago

> Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. Like?

jacooper 4y ago
https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/ https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_neve...
- judge2020 4y ago
  > There is no way the freemium nitro barriers keep discord from going under, Discord's entire hope is that eventually it will be bought out by a tech giant And yet they have not been purchased yet. > Discord collects everything you do inside Make a post on HN saying "disable newrelic if you value user privacy" and see how well that goes. > Things tracked outside the program include : programs you run and other system specific information that can identify your hardware (such as your HWID's) Discord does not collect the programs you run on their server. It does scan for them to enable the game tracking feature. See the post by u/GlenMerlin: > Logging your opened apps is an optional setting (mostly done to detect discord rich presence for games, so your friends can see you're playing halo infinite and join with one click) and you can turn it off and the data is stored locally. > All it takes is 1 breach to make every message you ever sent public information. I can assure you extracting any sizable fraction of Discord's messages will incur at least a few hundred petabytes of data transfer fees within a day, triggering DLP alerts or maybe even regular billing "unnatural increase in data transfer costs" alerts. Even if Discord were hacked, their infrastructure makes actually downloading user data both infeasible and riskier than just dumping the user DB containing emails and hashed passwords. To add, that's just for data stored on the server - the actual "science" api containing things like how you use Discord likely accumulates hundreds of petabytes worth of data a month on its own, it'd be easier to download the generated user behavior reports than to download the data itself. The E2E criticism is valid but users obviously don't care enough to move off of Discord, even with the privacy campaigns against them and efforts to move communities over to Guilded.
jhgg 4y ago

unethical_ban 4y ago

I was talking with some friends about how the gaming community of today has no idea what Teamspeak, Ventrilo or Mumble are. What does Discord do that these others never did well? Screen share, video conference, filesharing (TS had a primitive fileserver), and rich text/emoji, persistent chat, and a better UI for moving from server to server. The mumble client already supports using certs for identity. I think if Mumble could make multi-server browsing easier and have screenshare/videoshare, that would be enough for many people to swing back to a decentralized tool. After screenshare and server browsing, having "Mumble as a Service" to spin up a new server instantly ala Discord would be the killer migration feature to compete. I wonder if any Mumble developers think about pivoting to a more direct competition with Discord? Or if any people with videoconference software dev experience would know where to start on Mumble?

jacooper 4y ago

Honestly, matrix.org is the best alternative. Its basically the new chat standard.