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The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. There are servers for libraries/frameworks, languages, ai/ml, math, whatever you can think o

• yownie 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more
• INTPenis 2y ago
  I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community. Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix. Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.
  • internetter 2y ago
    > they took They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)
  • Dracophoenix 2y ago
    > The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook. In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.
    • Zambyte 2y ago
      Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from. These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.
      • curtisblaine 2y ago
        What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.
        • Zambyte 2y ago
          I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.
    • mportela 2y ago
      Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.
      • Nullabillity 2y ago
        TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche. Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.
    • fullstop 2y ago
      They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity. It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot. The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.
    • hirako2000 2y ago
      Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it. Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit. At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users. Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp. But also LinkedIn. GitHub. Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.
      • windward 2y ago
        Skype is ending this year. Some founders and investors won but only thanks to greater fools. (notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)
        • hirako2000 2y ago
          May not be clear, even to finops at Microsoft. Skype tech ended up in Lync subsequent versions, aka Skype for enterprise. The user base also became a free ad target (to buy the entire consumers tool suite) I remember being constantly nudged to sign up for the free 30 days One Drive to backup Skype pictures and the jazz. So creative these heads of sales at MS.
• agumonkey 2y ago
  I thought the main value of discord was quick and solid voice / game stream integration. I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.
  • dan_can_code 2y ago
    For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.
    • agumonkey 2y ago
      oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)
    • nativeit 2y ago
      I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.
      • 9283409232 2y ago
        Users are worryingly hostile to developers.
        • thoughtpalette 2y ago
          If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.
          • squigz 2y ago
            Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.
• alwayslikethis 2y ago
  > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server. The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.
  • ksp-atlas 2y ago
    Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel
    • foresto 2y ago
      > Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-native-matrix-group-voip-video-matrixrtc https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...
      • Arathorn 2y ago
        fwiw, Matrix has had video rooms since 2022: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-rooms-and-a-new-search-experience https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro... - and VoIP calling since day one in 2014.
      • TulliusCicero 2y ago
        Does it have persistent voice channels with simple app/game streaming for free?
    • alwayslikethis 2y ago
      I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord. The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.
• bsenftner 2y ago
  I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.
  • Mashimo 2y ago
    > it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. What does that mean?
    • bsenftner 2y ago
      Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and then bullies everyone else.
      • bo0tzz 2y ago
        Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong people.
      • Mashimo 2y ago
        But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have? I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.
        • dingnuts 2y ago
          happens on irc constantly too chat rooms are cliques, almost always choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react
          • agelas 2y ago
            [dead]
          • ghostpepper 2y ago
• Mashimo 2y ago
  > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)
  • timeon 2y ago
    Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.
  • 1oooqooq 2y ago
    that's like selling email with gpg as easy to use compared with newgroup. anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons. discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.
    • surajrmal 2y ago
      Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.
      • immibis 2y ago
        Do you though? Do you drop everything to answer notifications as they pop up, or do you answer them at your convenience?
      • 1oooqooq 2y ago
        discord as opensource support forums compete with irc (the ultimate underdog) and discourse et al (all which require a domain) the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.
    • Mashimo 2y ago
      I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.
  • 2y ago
• smittywerben 2y ago
  The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.
• JeremyNT 2y ago
  I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier. I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.
  • PokestarFan 2y ago
    Slack's UI sucks for multiple different "server"s. Good for work, but no gamer wants to juggle around the Slack UI for 2/3 different game servers, not to mention DMs being isolated. Imagine DMing the same person with 2 or 3 completely separate chat histories, depending on the source server. Many people have multiple servers that share a subset of people, and talking to them would be absolutely insane, not to mention the amount of people that primarily use Discord for DMs that don't care about any server at all.
• qwery 2y ago
  Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place. This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.
  • CharlesW 2y ago
    It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.
    • starkparker 2y ago
      While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything in this context.
• elif 2y ago
  The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc. It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord) It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all. If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord. Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.
  • dmonitor 2y ago
    discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users
    • jacobgkau 2y ago
      I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."
    • kibwen 2y ago
      It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine. That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.
• Y_Y 2y ago
  "Weary" or "wary"? Or both?
• mikewarot 2y ago
  The deceptive nature of Discord's "servers" has always made me wary. You're trusting one service with everything, it's Reddit all over again.
  • TulliusCicero 2y ago
    The nature of Discord "servers" is exactly why they won.
    • DaSHacka 2y ago
      For now, until they inevitably enshittify their service to increase profits, and a competitor swoops up most of their market.
• immibis 2y ago
  I noticed that, but I also noticed the quality in those "servers" (really groups) is kind of shit? There's way more random off-topic discussion than about the thing you're looking for, and you still have to search through it. And when there isn't, there's nothing (due to fragmentation) and you stop checking.
• bsder 2y ago
  > The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects. The biggest selling points of Discord are 1) unified login and 2) phone access. I, personally, consider these to be negatives. However, the majority of people do not.