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My friend group made the same jump. People forget just how abysmal VOIP was back then: your options were Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 can

My friend group made the same jump. People forget just how abysmal VOIP was back then: your options were Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge" and RAM usage that was simply insane for the time period, or Mumble, where the sound quality was fantastic and used next to no memory, but had an interface and new user on boarding process that left no-doubt of its FOSS status, and purely ephemeral text chat. Then along comes Discord. Easy to use, a master class in UI design, and sound quality that was at least in the ballpark of Mumble's. And persistent text chat! If you're going to be talking in Discord, it's only natural that some amount of conversation is going to spill over into the text channels. And if there's a lot of chat in those text channels, then it's going to suck conversation out of your other text mediums. That's how we ended up with Discord dominating the online community space.

ziml77 3y ago
Skype was also clearly not designed for the kinds of uses that fit with how larger groups operate. All your text chat was in one mega chat for the group and that group was also bound to a single call. Splitting up conversations, whether voice or text, required creating a new group.
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
> Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge" I actually had a friend who preferred Skype for that very reason. Due to the lack of noise filtering, she could more easily tell whether she disconnected due to her poor rural connection. It was a funny use-case that’s for sure. We were still rocking Skype up till 2018.

ziml77 3y ago

Skype was also clearly not designed for the kinds of uses that fit with how larger groups operate. All your text chat was in one mega chat for the group and that group was also bound to a single call. Splitting up conversations, whether voice or text, required creating a new group.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago

> Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge" I actually had a friend who preferred Skype for that very reason. Due to the lack of noise filtering, she could more easily tell whether she disconnected due to her poor rural connection. It was a funny use-case that’s for sure. We were still rocking Skype up till 2018.