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It's because the whole Discord experience is modeled after IRC, which has (literal) servers. In order to get gamers to switch from IRC to Discord, they wanted t
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
It's because the whole Discord experience is modeled after IRC, which has (literal) servers. In order to get gamers to switch from IRC to Discord, they wanted to change as little as possible, including the verbiage.
- Arch-TK 3y agoWhat? Outside of like minecraft on espernet and a few obscure old games which have communities on quakenet nobody was really using IRC for gaming communities. Those existed largely on various forums, Skype, reddit, teamspeak and steam.
- prepend 3y agoIRC was used by many gamers and devs, including the discord founders.
- Arch-TK 3y agoIn the past, not really at the time when discord first became popular. This makes it questionable why they named their user silos "servers".
- livueta 3y agoSwiftIRC (as it existed a decade ago) would like to have a word.
- NikkiA 3y agoQuakeNet would like a bigger, boomier, word.
- Arch-TK 3y agoA word about what? When discord became popular, IRC as a gaming community platform was all but dead.
- livueta 3y agoThat's completely untrue, though, because I was part of communities that migrated from SwiftIRC to Discord upon launch. Basically everyone who played the first few years of OSRS at a serious level used Swift heavily. https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=SwiftIRC https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=SwiftIRC 1/2 to 1/3rd of its prime is diminished, sure, but far from dead. Today is what dead looks like. A few thousand users might not seem like much compared to Discord's current userbase, but mass migrations like that were a pretty good shot in the arm for it right out of the gate.
- junon 3y agoAnd before Discord existed, we had IRC.
- nvy 3y ago>Those existed largely on various forums, Skype, reddit, teamspeak and steam. IRC was a hub for gamers (among others) since well before Skype, Steam, and Reddit were conceived. Teamspeak itself never really had "communities", it was really just "the thing you log into to voice chat during the match" and was almost always a strict subset of the community that paid for the server.
- Arch-TK 3y agoYes, in the past, so what? It doesn't explain why the "server" terminology was used long past IRC's prime. Regarding teamspeak, you're wrong. That may have been your limited experience but I saw many actual communities which existed on teamspeak. People used it in many different ways (and still do).
- jrockway 3y agoSo what you're saying is that they embraced IRC, extended IRC, and extinguished IRC? Surprised they haven't been bought by 1990s Microsoft yet!
- jrockway 3y agoIt's funny because "server" is obviously revisionist history. Their API calls them "guilds". I have no idea why they changed the name to the less-accurate "server".
- CapstanRoller 3y agoThey use the word "server" very intentionally to convey a sense of sovereignty, seclusion, and privacy while downplaying the fact it's just a multi-tenant SaaS messaging platform. They do this probably because the SaaS reality seems repressive (i.e. they don't want to be seen as another Facebook), uncool with a younger audience, antithetical to 'gamer culture' which evolved out of self-hosted servers, and maybe gives a specific hint around pricing (just guessing, not a marketing expert).