4 ms·

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamsp

by pxue 3y ago

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

hardware2win 3y ago
Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link instead of ip port
- TheFreim 3y ago
  > have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Maybe support for rich media types
  - Laremere 3y ago
    I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.
  - zeku 3y ago
    Generally the "replace reddit" combo is: Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.
  - ssnistfajen 3y ago
    I think Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Discord was first to provide: > Also: identity per "server" But Discord doesn't provide identity per server. You get one identity, and if you want a different one you need to sign up for a new account using a new email address.
  - unsignedint 3y ago
    Perhaps the GP is referring to the display name. You get one user name but you can change how you are displayed per server. Nitro users can change the icon, too.
- esafak 3y ago
  > Also: identity per "server" Further up the thread, another user said the value in discord was the community -- the users -- rather than the messages. Wouldn't you want to be able to maintain these ties across servers?
mdrzn 3y ago
Why is a single app with a single login and multiple communities inside better than having multiple forums with multiple logins and a separate app to do VOIP? Hmm..
dncornholio 3y ago
It's not better, it's an alternative that's easy to use and a lot of people jumped on. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You get easy chat and voice for free.
bjord 3y ago
Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free. The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Why you folks act in this thread as if sharing and making everything googlable should be "by default"? I dont want you to be able to read messages of my mmorpg team, privacy is desired.
  - bjord 3y ago
    I think it's important to highlight the difference between private group chats (e.g. the discord I have with my high school friends) and community hubs. For example, some discord servers serve as the entire knowledge base for some open source projects. I'm only advocating for preservation of the latter.
    - Jcowell 3y ago
      does it ? I sounds like it’s less for knowledge basing and more so for if you have a question this is where we’re at you can come ask.
      - esafak 3y ago
        If you have a question, you have a knowledge problem. That's why asked the question in the first place! If knowledge was more accessible, you would ask fewer questions.
- pleb_nz 3y ago
  It ain't nice looking IMO, it reminds me if a kids toy, one for 2 year olds with bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space etc etc.
bakugo 3y ago
It's free, easy and convenient. That's it, these 3 aspects overpower all else in the eyes of modern audiences, they are willing to give up basically everything else in favor of them.
Ekaros 3y ago
It's much simpler than old alternatives. And comes in one package, instantly supporting multiple communities at one time. IRC isn't very nice to use, then again it is years when I last used voice-chat softwares but those were bit pain too. And it is not really a forum. It is online chat room, entirely different thing.
wincy 3y ago
So I used to be in a top 100 World of Warcraft guild back in the day, so I remember the days of Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Discord is much easier to administrate than all that. I used Discord to create a “server” for my Eve Echoes corporation which went from ten people to 200 people then down to 40 or so people. I didn’t have to pay to scale the server up and down from whatever hosting solution I was using to accommodate this huge increase then slow decrease of member. Heck, I didn’t actually create the server, someone else did then handed me owner access. Super convenient. Like, I was astonished that’s how it works. Everything was integrated so I could ping 50 people and a good number would jump into voice chat and help me defend against the Russians or the Chinese invasions. It was a bustling community created ex nihilo. I played for a few months, had a good time, but once the pandemic started to wane I wanted to go “back to the real world”. Being a leader of space miners is hard work! So I handed over ownership to someone in the “Corp” who, in true EVE fashion is a real life accountant and loves their space ships and spreadsheets. It was incredibly easy to set up and then give the discord server away (twice!) over the course of a few months. Easier than giving someone my house keys. The process would have been an absolute nightmare for anything using DNS, or even worse pinned to an actual IP address. Good luck getting 50-00 semi active people to switch to a new server.
dboreham 3y ago
> traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak I really dislike using Discord (visually confusing, spammy), but they've clearly hit the ball out the park in terms of adoption. The fact that you could provide similar functionality by combining two other products isn't really relevant is it?
JamesLeonis 3y ago
> Maybe I'm dating myself I'm almost 40, so I think I can explain this. Discord is turn-key community infrastructure for users and moderators. Bespoke solutions have more incidental complexities compared to Discord with regard to hanging out with others and playing games. This initial gravity is what is pulling in the rest of the Internet communities. VoIP is not easy to set up and use in the best circumstances, and Discord makes it painless. I cannot stress this enough! Usually it took That Guy who spent days pouring over how-tos and several aborted attempts at setting it up. Discord is similar to what GameSpy brought to game server hosting compared to hosting a game yourself. If that sounds like foreshadowing, I agree! Discord also is replacing the whole communication/coordination stack. Forums are a casualty for the same reason Reddit took over; setting up a public internet service is hard. But Discord steps beyond that. It is taking over the chat communications gamers use to coordinate, including text messages and AIM/IRQ/IRC/etc. This meshes very well with guilds and amateur competitive gaming, as well as the hangout vibe of sitting in a chat room. Throw in built-in video streaming and you have Twitch.tv functionality all in the same app. Combine the above with a single unified moderation, and you have a critical nexus of features for community management without all the fuss of hosting the infrastructure yourself. Individuals have a single login that can access hundreds of communities, while moderators have similar management controls as forums over their own. Are there downsides? Oh my yes, but those will manifest later as Discord matures into its own blow-up stage of venture capital social networks.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Reminder, look to what's happening on Reddit and elsewhere now for what will happen when any service has cornered the market. Even if the current owners say things will never happen, eventually deep enough pockets in search of profit will buy them out and seek that profit.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Who cares though? It’s not like I’m signing a 30 year contract with Discord. Skype already enshittified and everyone just jumped ship as soon as a better alternative was built. When someone builds a better reddit, I’m sure people would move over too. I’ll take free stuff being handed out for as long as it’s being handed out.
zeku 3y ago
My entire online social life(which got really big due to friends moving and covid) is 100% on discord. Many of my friends also don't have social media and we all exist within a discord server and share our lives and game together very often. Discord has this buy in like a social media platform for a lot of people. It's what I've described above--plus communities moving to discord and away from reddit. If you do an online game now you will end up on discord if you're even halfway serious about the game. One of the big things discord has allowed for my friend group is it's the first platform like this that has brought in the "normies". People who would never visit a forum and didn't even know teamspeak or ventrilo ever existed. It's a smooth experience at almost all times on desktop and mobile. If you go to college nowadays most of the majors have discords--and study groups have discords. My friends don't even text me anymore, they DM me on discord and have for years at this point.
stiltzkin 3y ago
Gaming community made Discord on their liking, a better response to old VoIP software or Skype.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
It's primary selling point, at least initially, was being much, much better at its job than teamspeak and its ilk. It ate forums because once people had access to adequate (not necessarily good, or even better) text communications built into their VoIP solution, people just used that instead. Network effects then killed the forum.
unsignedint 3y ago
Discord has gained immense popularity among Vtubers. In fact, many sign-up forms for Vtuber-related events assume that participants have a Discord account, at least within the Japanese Vtuber community (although its prevalence elsewhere is unclear). Additionally, Discord has seen widespread adoption within the VR community, such as in VRChat. This popularity can be attributed to several key characteristics: 1. Vtubers are frequently involved in numerous events, commissions, and livestream collaborations, each with different stakeholders and often temporary in nature. Discord makes it incredibly easy to set up dedicated servers for each of these endeavors. 2. Discord's voice chat functionality is highly robust, making it a common choice for managing voice communication during livestreams that involve multiple participants. 3. Discord provides a centralized platform for coordination and infrastructure. This eliminates the need to set up additional systems with different user IDs and other complexities.

by pxue 3y ago

I'm so confused by the love of discord. Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

hardware2win 3y ago

Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years Discord was first to provide: Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk Also: identity per "server" Easy to invite: link instead of ip port

TheFreim 3y ago
> have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG? Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.
yomlica8 3y ago
Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums. The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Maybe support for rich media types
- Laremere 3y ago
  I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it. Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise. I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product. Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.
- zeku 3y ago
  Generally the "replace reddit" combo is: Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  I think Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Discord was first to provide: > Also: identity per "server" But Discord doesn't provide identity per server. You get one identity, and if you want a different one you need to sign up for a new account using a new email address.
- unsignedint 3y ago
  Perhaps the GP is referring to the display name. You get one user name but you can change how you are displayed per server. Nitro users can change the icon, too.
esafak 3y ago
> Also: identity per "server" Further up the thread, another user said the value in discord was the community -- the users -- rather than the messages. Wouldn't you want to be able to maintain these ties across servers?

mdrzn 3y ago

Why is a single app with a single login and multiple communities inside better than having multiple forums with multiple logins and a separate app to do VOIP? Hmm..

dncornholio 3y ago

It's not better, it's an alternative that's easy to use and a lot of people jumped on. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You get easy chat and voice for free.

bjord 3y ago

Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free. The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.

hardware2win 3y ago
Why you folks act in this thread as if sharing and making everything googlable should be "by default"? I dont want you to be able to read messages of my mmorpg team, privacy is desired.
- bjord 3y ago
  I think it's important to highlight the difference between private group chats (e.g. the discord I have with my high school friends) and community hubs. For example, some discord servers serve as the entire knowledge base for some open source projects. I'm only advocating for preservation of the latter.
  - Jcowell 3y ago
    does it ? I sounds like it’s less for knowledge basing and more so for if you have a question this is where we’re at you can come ask.
    - esafak 3y ago
      If you have a question, you have a knowledge problem. That's why asked the question in the first place! If knowledge was more accessible, you would ask fewer questions.
pleb_nz 3y ago
It ain't nice looking IMO, it reminds me if a kids toy, one for 2 year olds with bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space etc etc.

bakugo 3y ago

It's free, easy and convenient. That's it, these 3 aspects overpower all else in the eyes of modern audiences, they are willing to give up basically everything else in favor of them.

Ekaros 3y ago

It's much simpler than old alternatives. And comes in one package, instantly supporting multiple communities at one time. IRC isn't very nice to use, then again it is years when I last used voice-chat softwares but those were bit pain too. And it is not really a forum. It is online chat room, entirely different thing.

wincy 3y ago

So I used to be in a top 100 World of Warcraft guild back in the day, so I remember the days of Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Discord is much easier to administrate than all that. I used Discord to create a “server” for my Eve Echoes corporation which went from ten people to 200 people then down to 40 or so people. I didn’t have to pay to scale the server up and down from whatever hosting solution I was using to accommodate this huge increase then slow decrease of member. Heck, I didn’t actually create the server, someone else did then handed me owner access. Super convenient. Like, I was astonished that’s how it works. Everything was integrated so I could ping 50 people and a good number would jump into voice chat and help me defend against the Russians or the Chinese invasions. It was a bustling community created ex nihilo. I played for a few months, had a good time, but once the pandemic started to wane I wanted to go “back to the real world”. Being a leader of space miners is hard work! So I handed over ownership to someone in the “Corp” who, in true EVE fashion is a real life accountant and loves their space ships and spreadsheets. It was incredibly easy to set up and then give the discord server away (twice!) over the course of a few months. Easier than giving someone my house keys. The process would have been an absolute nightmare for anything using DNS, or even worse pinned to an actual IP address. Good luck getting 50-00 semi active people to switch to a new server.

dboreham 3y ago

> traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak I really dislike using Discord (visually confusing, spammy), but they've clearly hit the ball out the park in terms of adoption. The fact that you could provide similar functionality by combining two other products isn't really relevant is it?

JamesLeonis 3y ago

> Maybe I'm dating myself I'm almost 40, so I think I can explain this. Discord is turn-key community infrastructure for users and moderators. Bespoke solutions have more incidental complexities compared to Discord with regard to hanging out with others and playing games. This initial gravity is what is pulling in the rest of the Internet communities. VoIP is not easy to set up and use in the best circumstances, and Discord makes it painless. I cannot stress this enough! Usually it took That Guy who spent days pouring over how-tos and several aborted attempts at setting it up. Discord is similar to what GameSpy brought to game server hosting compared to hosting a game yourself. If that sounds like foreshadowing, I agree! Discord also is replacing the whole communication/coordination stack. Forums are a casualty for the same reason Reddit took over; setting up a public internet service is hard. But Discord steps beyond that. It is taking over the chat communications gamers use to coordinate, including text messages and AIM/IRQ/IRC/etc. This meshes very well with guilds and amateur competitive gaming, as well as the hangout vibe of sitting in a chat room. Throw in built-in video streaming and you have Twitch.tv functionality all in the same app. Combine the above with a single unified moderation, and you have a critical nexus of features for community management without all the fuss of hosting the infrastructure yourself. Individuals have a single login that can access hundreds of communities, while moderators have similar management controls as forums over their own. Are there downsides? Oh my yes, but those will manifest later as Discord matures into its own blow-up stage of venture capital social networks.

mjevans 3y ago
Reminder, look to what's happening on Reddit and elsewhere now for what will happen when any service has cornered the market. Even if the current owners say things will never happen, eventually deep enough pockets in search of profit will buy them out and seek that profit.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Who cares though? It’s not like I’m signing a 30 year contract with Discord. Skype already enshittified and everyone just jumped ship as soon as a better alternative was built. When someone builds a better reddit, I’m sure people would move over too. I’ll take free stuff being handed out for as long as it’s being handed out.

zeku 3y ago

My entire online social life(which got really big due to friends moving and covid) is 100% on discord. Many of my friends also don't have social media and we all exist within a discord server and share our lives and game together very often. Discord has this buy in like a social media platform for a lot of people. It's what I've described above--plus communities moving to discord and away from reddit. If you do an online game now you will end up on discord if you're even halfway serious about the game. One of the big things discord has allowed for my friend group is it's the first platform like this that has brought in the "normies". People who would never visit a forum and didn't even know teamspeak or ventrilo ever existed. It's a smooth experience at almost all times on desktop and mobile. If you go to college nowadays most of the majors have discords--and study groups have discords. My friends don't even text me anymore, they DM me on discord and have for years at this point.

stiltzkin 3y ago

Gaming community made Discord on their liking, a better response to old VoIP software or Skype.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

It's primary selling point, at least initially, was being much, much better at its job than teamspeak and its ilk. It ate forums because once people had access to adequate (not necessarily good, or even better) text communications built into their VoIP solution, people just used that instead. Network effects then killed the forum.

unsignedint 3y ago

Discord has gained immense popularity among Vtubers. In fact, many sign-up forms for Vtuber-related events assume that participants have a Discord account, at least within the Japanese Vtuber community (although its prevalence elsewhere is unclear). Additionally, Discord has seen widespread adoption within the VR community, such as in VRChat. This popularity can be attributed to several key characteristics: 1. Vtubers are frequently involved in numerous events, commissions, and livestream collaborations, each with different stakeholders and often temporary in nature. Discord makes it incredibly easy to set up dedicated servers for each of these endeavors. 2. Discord's voice chat functionality is highly robust, making it a common choice for managing voice communication during livestreams that involve multiple participants. 3. Discord provides a centralized platform for coordination and infrastructure. This eliminates the need to set up additional systems with different user IDs and other complexities.