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> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden. Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately. Love it or hate it, let's not pretend it's like IRC, Slack or any of its competitors.

chx 3y ago
I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.
- vicktour 3y ago
  I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
  - chx 3y ago
    > I wish it would actually work on Linux. This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.
Levitz 3y ago
Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.
- xattt 3y ago
  Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.
  - vicktour 3y ago
    That must be something they added recently-ish. I wonder how walled it really is. I also wonder if they remove the arbitrary rules like the 5mb limit on files.
  - jaywalk 3y ago
    Can you share a link to information on this? I can't find anything.
    - xattt 3y ago
      I’m wrong. My friend group has a Discord server, which I assumed my buddy was self-hosting (like Mastadon). I hadn’t used Discord in the past and was really surprised to keep seeing promos for Boosts and stuff.
      - RadiozRadioz 3y ago
        I don't blame you for the confusion. Their usage of the term "server" is extremely misleading. Should have called them "guilds" or something like they do in their API.
        anticensor 3y ago
        If you actually want to self-host Discord, Spacebar Chat is a third party reimplementation of the Discord protocol for self-hosting https://github.com/spacebarchat/server https://github.com/spacebarchat/server
KronisLV 3y ago
> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately. It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried. But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.
- ajwilson 3y ago
  There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this. It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-Go-Live-and-Screen-Share https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Discord captures audio at the application level by inserting a DLL with a hook on the relevant system calls. This works remarkably well, all things considered, but it does have a couple side effects, notably the fact that if you're not streaming at the application level, audio doesn't work (they could probably work around this if they wanted to, but it's basically a natural consequence), and the fact that some applications will become unstable or crash when being streamed. It also requires every anticheat ever to whitelist Discord's DLL.
- worble 3y ago
  If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop. There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio. 0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio
jabroni_salad 3y ago
It pretty much replaced my WoW guild's forum overnight when we started using it for voice. The guy who was paying for the Mumble rental asked us to try it and we really liked it immediately. Pings that raiders will actually see, amazing. One click to join instead of having to dial thru a wizard with an IP and port (I know mumble had support for that but nobody knew how to use it, and WoW ingame chat does not let you copy text out easily while discord made sure their codes were easy to type). Sending gifs and videos to the team while waiting for an AFK was a nice new development too. That said, it doesn't make sense for me for huge communities. I definitely think it's the best for small/medium groups but once chat starts moving a too fast to follow, what is the point? Trying to follow older discussions is also super hard compared to a forum. It's also not a good knowledge repository. One thing that we used our forum for reliably was storing our personal tactics, common assignments, what addons we require etc in a central place. Trying to do it in a chat channel was like pulling teeth and we couldn't assign multiple people to edit the content.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Discord recently added a forum channel function for that. Its locked to the community server toggle though (god knows why with how much that is complained about), and it doesn’t solve the walled garden problem.
- pndy 3y ago
  All my GW2 guilds at some point created discord servers and all life moved there and in time in-game chat channels become ghost towns. When we moved from TS to discord the first noticeable change was audio quality and the fact that we "owned" the space - it no longer was a single audio channel on some community-run server. The links and media previews were also a nice novelty; nothing new anymore around social media at that point but it felt like this should be a standard feature. And years later this indeed become a standard feature around the Internet.
- imtringued 3y ago
  That is actually it. Discord was the first app that could hold a candle to Mumble and it did everything in the browser without having to install a client or run a server. I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition. When it was coming out it had basically no competitors. It was obvious as early as 2016 how popular discord will become. It is only now after the pandemic that the competition has established itself. Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord. Now people complain and argue against discord, because they have options.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions. Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable. It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.
- lezojeda 3y ago
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- avian 3y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up. If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    It might not make a difference when looking at a noisy straw man #general channel with strangers, but it certainly matters when you look at everything else like PM convos, PMs you received while offline, notifications while offline, and slower or more critical channels like #staff or a group of irl friends or announcement channels or almost every other channel type I can think of outside of noisy #offtopic channels.
  - xp84 3y ago
    To be super fair too, if you compare Discord to forums, (the thing lots of communities were using before Reddit) in terms of whether it’s good at managing a large discussion, remember when there would be a thread with 19 pages? People would be challenged to find the actually useful post on page 5 when there were dozens of pages on an active thread. So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the difference is Google would index those, so you could be landed right on the interesting page. With discord, an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost for everyone but whoever was looking at the chat when it happened :( so I guess my point is… it’s not so bad, but actually it’s pretty bad.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
Discord’s exceedingly low friction and general smoothness is a huge factor. Competitors, commercial or otherwise, should take note if they want to pull in users.
this_user 3y ago
This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps
  - paulmd 3y ago
    yeah people arbitrarily throw content federation and identity federation into the same bin. you can get a lot of the squeeze of a centralized reddit-style service (in terms of low-friction user signup) without needing actual content federation. One ID can still let you post on multiple boards without needing to sign up in 27 places, and that doesn't need content federation. It also significantly reduces the moderation problem because now you are letting {Google,Facebook,Apple} solve (or at least gate/significantly reduce) the spammers problem for you. That said, custom IDPs are inherently at odds with this value in spam filtering. If a spammer just needs to set up a custom domain, you don't get any signal as to user quality.
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Yeah this is how I feel about Lemmy. The only federation I care about is being able to use one account to post on many subreddit-equivalents, but beyond that the only link between communities on Reddit was plain old hyperlinks. No need for the backends to talk to each other at all. Assembling the feeds from all subs into a single timeline should be something the client does
  - dcow 3y ago
paulmd 3y ago
Yeah. Does anyone actually remember Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, lol? Discord is an incredibly better UX. Those programs feel like they're from 2000, they're clunky to set up, and the reality is they're still way better than what came before (eg Roger Wilco). (for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.) Also, they need a hosted server (which most people see as a disadvantage, HN is not the norm here). Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason. I think that's what they're fishing for with the transition to unique global usernames tho. Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board. When your users keep trying to shove your product into another niche it doesn't fit... you listen.
- JD557 3y ago
  I'll always be surprised on how badly teamspeak dropped the ball (although it seems that they finally have an open beta for teamspeak 5!). Discord would probably win at the end anyway, especially because of the need for self-hosting (even though I don't think it was that bad... there were quite a few open servers), But they had such a dominant position and, while Discord kept evolving, TeamSpeak just stayed the same... With the network effect that they had, I think with just some small improvements (mostly on the text chat support) they could stay relevant for a long time.
- nicce 3y ago
  To be fair , Teamspeak UX is superior for voice only. At least on my opinion. Chat is another thing, but it was not meant for that.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board. What? Why? Names are never unique. That's not how names work. Why would usernames be different?
vhcr 3y ago
Discord's UX is on another level compared to the other apps, here's two examples: * If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G. * When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.
- eitally 3y ago
  On the flip side, literally the only app I've ever had BT earbud issues with is Discord (on Android). With two different earbuds that both support multi-point, neither one would reliably work with Discord.
dgellow 3y ago
I cannot stand discord. Everything in the screen is trying to grab your attention all the time, unless you explicitly disable all sorts of notifications. It’s also really hard to follow discussions if you’re off for some time or want to understand what people are talking about when you join a channel. The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  I mean, IRC was great for communities, and Discord is just a modernized, centralized IRC, for better or worse. And one of the "worse" parts is the incredibly cluttered, in-your-face, ADHD interface.
  - dgellow 3y ago
    It’s anti-ADHD. I have an ADHD diagnostic, using discord is a constant fight. You’re trying to follow fragmented discussions, while receiving notifications everywhere that more things are happening at the same time.
    - jabroni_salad 3y ago
      I am also diagnosed and I have an alright time. Here are my reccs: 1. Set your own notification preferences to @mentions only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever. 2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform. 3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.
      - tinus_hn 3y ago
        You can just change the ‘suppress @everyone’ setting for a server to avoid getting notified.
ouid 3y ago
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Conscat 3y ago
No, their app is buggy and has been for almost a year. I've confirmed this with fellow Android users. Discord will spontaneously stop displaying the last 20ish channels across all servers and it will spontaneously start cropping image previews wrong. You have to close and reopen it whenever this happens.
nsajko 3y ago
> Their app isn't buggy The Android app often has issues that make using it infuriating.
- vicktour 3y ago
  The sole reason I have the android app installed is for the QR sign in for my desktop.
Springtime 3y ago
> you don't even need to create an account immediately Maybe some users have found it different recently but while this used to be the case years back when I joined (it was IRC style where you just picked a nickname and began chatting) I tried this twice again recently for someone—both with and without an invite—and it required creating an account (ie: verifying email and in another case it required a phone, inexplicably). The prior onboarding experience was far superior and I have to think an important part of their earlier growth.
- Filligree 3y ago
  I believe it depends on the invite. I haven't done it recently, but on the server I manage there's a checkbox for amount of verification required; the middle level is 'require a telephone number', though low is the default.
  - Springtime 3y ago
    In this case the phone number was immediately required without an invite (and without joining any server yet), just using the regular sign up page as the only site interaction. While ironically no phone was required for a separate user with an invite.
SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
This seems to be an issue that only affects me, but I have no idea why: the discord mobile app more often than not takes multiple minutes to connect to their servers and load new content.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> you don't even need to create an account immediately Huh? It's extremely aggressive about accounts. This thing literally requires a phone number. Can't even create pseudonymous accounts.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  The worst part is that they have some sort of FAQ that asks "what if I don't have a phone/don't want to use my phone number" and Discord's official answer is use someone else's. And although I've never been burned by this, I've seen plenty of anecdotes where changing the phone number in account settings can mess up access to the account, or someone can't make their own account with their own phone number because a friend used that number previously. To me, that's proof that they want phone numbers for mining purposes more than verification ones.
babypuncher 3y ago
And most importantly, Discord provides free hosting. This is a huge deal, especially for people who aren't tech savvy. Setting up a Discord server and providing 24/7 availability to all your friends is as easy as sharing a photo on Instagram. No need to find a computer that you can leave on 24/7 or messing with your router.
wmeredith 3y ago
I've been building and designing software interfaces for two decades, and I think Discord's app has a shitty UX. Saying it is easy to use is a statement I find laughable at first, but it makes me wonder: compared to what? CLI apps?
- mthoms 3y ago
  As someone with ADHD, their interface gives me actual real-life anxiety.
- LightMachine 3y ago
  Well, then perhaps you need to reflect where your research failed, because it clearly did. Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. So, if all these clueless kids are there, perhaps it is time for you to realize the interface perhaps is actually easy and you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX.
  - vicktour 3y ago
    >Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. >you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX Just because people are using a app without any real competitors doesn't mean that the UX is great. There is a lot of software that does its job well enough that people deal with the bad UI/UX. Discord's UX is basically a slot machine from Vegas. Its obnoxious.
thefz 3y ago
And it's the primary way I reach a group of 20 people. Let's not fool ourselves, those not so much tech inclined find Discord way easier to set up and understand than Matrix.

chx 3y ago

I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing. If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.

vicktour 3y ago
I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.
- chx 3y ago
  > I wish it would actually work on Linux. This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.

Levitz 3y ago

Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.

xattt 3y ago
Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.
- vicktour 3y ago
  That must be something they added recently-ish. I wonder how walled it really is. I also wonder if they remove the arbitrary rules like the 5mb limit on files.
- jaywalk 3y ago
  Can you share a link to information on this? I can't find anything.
  - xattt 3y ago
    I’m wrong. My friend group has a Discord server, which I assumed my buddy was self-hosting (like Mastadon). I hadn’t used Discord in the past and was really surprised to keep seeing promos for Boosts and stuff.
    - RadiozRadioz 3y ago
      I don't blame you for the confusion. Their usage of the term "server" is extremely misleading. Should have called them "guilds" or something like they do in their API.
      - anticensor 3y ago
        If you actually want to self-host Discord, Spacebar Chat is a third party reimplementation of the Discord protocol for self-hosting https://github.com/spacebarchat/server https://github.com/spacebarchat/server

KronisLV 3y ago

> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately. It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried. But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.

ajwilson 3y ago
There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this. It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-Go-Live-and-Screen-Share https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Discord captures audio at the application level by inserting a DLL with a hook on the relevant system calls. This works remarkably well, all things considered, but it does have a couple side effects, notably the fact that if you're not streaming at the application level, audio doesn't work (they could probably work around this if they wanted to, but it's basically a natural consequence), and the fact that some applications will become unstable or crash when being streamed. It also requires every anticheat ever to whitelist Discord's DLL.
worble 3y ago
If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop. There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio. 0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

jabroni_salad 3y ago

It pretty much replaced my WoW guild's forum overnight when we started using it for voice. The guy who was paying for the Mumble rental asked us to try it and we really liked it immediately. Pings that raiders will actually see, amazing. One click to join instead of having to dial thru a wizard with an IP and port (I know mumble had support for that but nobody knew how to use it, and WoW ingame chat does not let you copy text out easily while discord made sure their codes were easy to type). Sending gifs and videos to the team while waiting for an AFK was a nice new development too. That said, it doesn't make sense for me for huge communities. I definitely think it's the best for small/medium groups but once chat starts moving a too fast to follow, what is the point? Trying to follow older discussions is also super hard compared to a forum. It's also not a good knowledge repository. One thing that we used our forum for reliably was storing our personal tactics, common assignments, what addons we require etc in a central place. Trying to do it in a chat channel was like pulling teeth and we couldn't assign multiple people to edit the content.

jorvi 3y ago
Discord recently added a forum channel function for that. Its locked to the community server toggle though (god knows why with how much that is complained about), and it doesn’t solve the walled garden problem.
pndy 3y ago
All my GW2 guilds at some point created discord servers and all life moved there and in time in-game chat channels become ghost towns. When we moved from TS to discord the first noticeable change was audio quality and the fact that we "owned" the space - it no longer was a single audio channel on some community-run server. The links and media previews were also a nice novelty; nothing new anymore around social media at that point but it felt like this should be a standard feature. And years later this indeed become a standard feature around the Internet.
imtringued 3y ago
That is actually it. Discord was the first app that could hold a candle to Mumble and it did everything in the browser without having to install a client or run a server. I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition. When it was coming out it had basically no competitors. It was obvious as early as 2016 how popular discord will become. It is only now after the pandemic that the competition has established itself. Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord. Now people complain and argue against discord, because they have options.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions. Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable. It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

lezojeda 3y ago
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avian 3y ago
You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up. If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  It might not make a difference when looking at a noisy straw man #general channel with strangers, but it certainly matters when you look at everything else like PM convos, PMs you received while offline, notifications while offline, and slower or more critical channels like #staff or a group of irl friends or announcement channels or almost every other channel type I can think of outside of noisy #offtopic channels.
- xp84 3y ago
  To be super fair too, if you compare Discord to forums, (the thing lots of communities were using before Reddit) in terms of whether it’s good at managing a large discussion, remember when there would be a thread with 19 pages? People would be challenged to find the actually useful post on page 5 when there were dozens of pages on an active thread. So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the difference is Google would index those, so you could be landed right on the interesting page. With discord, an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost for everyone but whoever was looking at the chat when it happened :( so I guess my point is… it’s not so bad, but actually it’s pretty bad.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

Discord’s exceedingly low friction and general smoothness is a huge factor. Competitors, commercial or otherwise, should take note if they want to pull in users.

this_user 3y ago

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

didntcheck 3y ago
What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps
- paulmd 3y ago
  yeah people arbitrarily throw content federation and identity federation into the same bin. you can get a lot of the squeeze of a centralized reddit-style service (in terms of low-friction user signup) without needing actual content federation. One ID can still let you post on multiple boards without needing to sign up in 27 places, and that doesn't need content federation. It also significantly reduces the moderation problem because now you are letting {Google,Facebook,Apple} solve (or at least gate/significantly reduce) the spammers problem for you. That said, custom IDPs are inherently at odds with this value in spam filtering. If a spammer just needs to set up a custom domain, you don't get any signal as to user quality.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Yeah this is how I feel about Lemmy. The only federation I care about is being able to use one account to post on many subreddit-equivalents, but beyond that the only link between communities on Reddit was plain old hyperlinks. No need for the backends to talk to each other at all. Assembling the feeds from all subs into a single timeline should be something the client does
- dcow 3y ago

paulmd 3y ago

Yeah. Does anyone actually remember Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, lol? Discord is an incredibly better UX. Those programs feel like they're from 2000, they're clunky to set up, and the reality is they're still way better than what came before (eg Roger Wilco). (for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.) Also, they need a hosted server (which most people see as a disadvantage, HN is not the norm here). Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason. I think that's what they're fishing for with the transition to unique global usernames tho. Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board. When your users keep trying to shove your product into another niche it doesn't fit... you listen.

JD557 3y ago
I'll always be surprised on how badly teamspeak dropped the ball (although it seems that they finally have an open beta for teamspeak 5!). Discord would probably win at the end anyway, especially because of the need for self-hosting (even though I don't think it was that bad... there were quite a few open servers), But they had such a dominant position and, while Discord kept evolving, TeamSpeak just stayed the same... With the network effect that they had, I think with just some small improvements (mostly on the text chat support) they could stay relevant for a long time.
nicce 3y ago
To be fair , Teamspeak UX is superior for voice only. At least on my opinion. Chat is another thing, but it was not meant for that.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board. What? Why? Names are never unique. That's not how names work. Why would usernames be different?

vhcr 3y ago

Discord's UX is on another level compared to the other apps, here's two examples: * If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G. * When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.

eitally 3y ago
On the flip side, literally the only app I've ever had BT earbud issues with is Discord (on Android). With two different earbuds that both support multi-point, neither one would reliably work with Discord.

dgellow 3y ago

I cannot stand discord. Everything in the screen is trying to grab your attention all the time, unless you explicitly disable all sorts of notifications. It’s also really hard to follow discussions if you’re off for some time or want to understand what people are talking about when you join a channel. The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.

Sharlin 3y ago
I mean, IRC was great for communities, and Discord is just a modernized, centralized IRC, for better or worse. And one of the "worse" parts is the incredibly cluttered, in-your-face, ADHD interface.
- dgellow 3y ago
  It’s anti-ADHD. I have an ADHD diagnostic, using discord is a constant fight. You’re trying to follow fragmented discussions, while receiving notifications everywhere that more things are happening at the same time.
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    I am also diagnosed and I have an alright time. Here are my reccs: 1. Set your own notification preferences to @mentions only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever. 2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform. 3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.
    - tinus_hn 3y ago
      You can just change the ‘suppress @everyone’ setting for a server to avoid getting notified.

ouid 3y ago

[dead]

Conscat 3y ago

No, their app is buggy and has been for almost a year. I've confirmed this with fellow Android users. Discord will spontaneously stop displaying the last 20ish channels across all servers and it will spontaneously start cropping image previews wrong. You have to close and reopen it whenever this happens.

nsajko 3y ago

> Their app isn't buggy The Android app often has issues that make using it infuriating.

vicktour 3y ago
The sole reason I have the android app installed is for the QR sign in for my desktop.

Springtime 3y ago

> you don't even need to create an account immediately Maybe some users have found it different recently but while this used to be the case years back when I joined (it was IRC style where you just picked a nickname and began chatting) I tried this twice again recently for someone—both with and without an invite—and it required creating an account (ie: verifying email and in another case it required a phone, inexplicably). The prior onboarding experience was far superior and I have to think an important part of their earlier growth.

Filligree 3y ago
I believe it depends on the invite. I haven't done it recently, but on the server I manage there's a checkbox for amount of verification required; the middle level is 'require a telephone number', though low is the default.
- Springtime 3y ago
  In this case the phone number was immediately required without an invite (and without joining any server yet), just using the regular sign up page as the only site interaction. While ironically no phone was required for a separate user with an invite.

SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago

This seems to be an issue that only affects me, but I have no idea why: the discord mobile app more often than not takes multiple minutes to connect to their servers and load new content.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> you don't even need to create an account immediately Huh? It's extremely aggressive about accounts. This thing literally requires a phone number. Can't even create pseudonymous accounts.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
The worst part is that they have some sort of FAQ that asks "what if I don't have a phone/don't want to use my phone number" and Discord's official answer is use someone else's. And although I've never been burned by this, I've seen plenty of anecdotes where changing the phone number in account settings can mess up access to the account, or someone can't make their own account with their own phone number because a friend used that number previously. To me, that's proof that they want phone numbers for mining purposes more than verification ones.

babypuncher 3y ago

And most importantly, Discord provides free hosting. This is a huge deal, especially for people who aren't tech savvy. Setting up a Discord server and providing 24/7 availability to all your friends is as easy as sharing a photo on Instagram. No need to find a computer that you can leave on 24/7 or messing with your router.

wmeredith 3y ago

I've been building and designing software interfaces for two decades, and I think Discord's app has a shitty UX. Saying it is easy to use is a statement I find laughable at first, but it makes me wonder: compared to what? CLI apps?

mthoms 3y ago
As someone with ADHD, their interface gives me actual real-life anxiety.
LightMachine 3y ago
Well, then perhaps you need to reflect where your research failed, because it clearly did. Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. So, if all these clueless kids are there, perhaps it is time for you to realize the interface perhaps is actually easy and you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX.
- vicktour 3y ago
  >Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. >you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX Just because people are using a app without any real competitors doesn't mean that the UX is great. There is a lot of software that does its job well enough that people deal with the bad UI/UX. Discord's UX is basically a slot machine from Vegas. Its obnoxious.

thefz 3y ago

And it's the primary way I reach a group of 20 people. Let's not fool ourselves, those not so much tech inclined find Discord way easier to set up and understand than Matrix.