Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join.
I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing AFAIK that can replicate this particular experience except for Teamspeak, which has other problems.
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old!
A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different.
I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:
1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting
2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy
3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people
Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.
All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.
Obviously discord is different than only mumble alone. Discord is not very different from mumble + IRC, which is what we are comparing to and what I said in my post. IRC of course does have history if you keep your client open which most people do.
Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course, there's embedded stuff which is just generally technical iteration (some IRC clients had it). Otherwise IRC always had channels and DMs and mentions and multiple servers. Only setting up your own server wasn't free -- you could easily hop on any network and create as many private channels for you and your friends as you wanted. Yes, older technology wasn't as accessible but at the core it's the same feature set.
I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.
And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.
Nearly everyone I know has a 24/7 irc bouncer that is connected and stores logs. It does indeed raise the complexity of using irc but you can bet for sure that some subcultures on irc behave this way
Hosting Mumble for coworkers since Teams feels sluggish and monitored. We could use both simultaneously but Teams takes exclusive control of the microphone... so they actively Extinguished that too.
On macOS, You can try to prevent this by going to midi audio setup, create an aggregate device, add the microphone to it, and then use the aggregate device in teams. This also has the benefit that Teams will not automatically adjust the gain for you.
okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom
My first modem was 1200 baud. I remember looking with a jealous eye at my friends USRobotics Courier HST, with its awesome looks and blazing 14.4k speeds. I believe it set him back around $1,200 1989 dollars, or about $2,600 in today's terms. He could download a compressed 1.44MB floppy disk image with the latest Leisure Suit Larry game from one of several exclusive pirate BBS'es in just around 15 minutes (as long as mom didn't pick up the phone). Good times.
I totally forgot about this issue with dial-up modems. The good ones would temporarily pause a connection when someone picked up the phone and the cheapos would instantly lose the connection. My family was too poor to afford to phone lines and it made me value time online (also made me have to use the Internet at odd hours when people were unlikely to call the house).
Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)
We stole an insanely long ethernet cord from school and hung it over our joined back fence. Lag? Ha! Broadband sort of existed then, just not in rural Australia, so we improvised.
When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!
At my high school, our CS lab had two Teletype terminals that were connected to a remote HP minicomputer over 110 baud (that's 10 chars/sec) acoustic couplers/modems. You had to dial the computer's number then put the handset into a foam-lined wooden box and close the lid. To upload a game, like Star Trek, we punched the game onto paper tape while not connected, then fed the paper tape back through once we got connected. Getting a connection could take 10-15 minutes of manually redialing after getting a busy signal because the service was so oversubscribed.
Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.
These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.
Ventrillo ended up being the defacto voice chat for years in the gaming community I was exposed to.
I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!
At first, students got to use what they were already use to, but when the pandemic got painful and everybody flooded to online, thing went crazy.
Discord is freaking enormous in that area rn. Servers for High school classes, university cohorts (ie. CS'24), university programs (ie. Electrical Engineering), There is even a course I am taking at uni where we have an official server with the teaching team, profs, auth with uni credentials, and a freaking ad-hoc ticketing system.
It is bonkers how much systematization is done through these bots.
Totally... If you enjoy the text/irc aspect, I welcome you to check out https://sqwok.im, a new realtime public discussion site very much inspired by growing up using aol chat/irc/icq/aim and others. I think we live at an amazing juncture of technology and ideas, where excellent communication software like irc that was always limited by it's own access requirements (install something, client, server, huh?), can now be made accessible to the masses, unlocking and hopefully creating entirely new experiences for people to enjoy!
I'll be doing a livestream on AWS Twitch on Thursday discussing Sqwok.im if you're interested check it out.
Certainly agree! but it's still limited in use by design.. with Sqwok I'm trying to build something that anyone can use without any technical knowledge at all - Just open the url.
One thing that would probably be welcome is some builtin support for threads.
On the Python discord for example, there is a system of help channels which get assigned to the first person talking in it and returned to the pool after 30min of inactivity or once the problem has been solved. A bot keeps a few channels in a "free" pool, marks some as "occupied", and moves the surplus to a "dormant" section for UX purposes. Newcomers often get confused and ask questions in already-occupied channels, etc.
Bots make this possible but it's never as good as the threading that exists in Slack or Zulip. I'm sure any sizeable organization (like a University) is running into this as well.
Personally I think threads ruin conversation flow. If you want to have an in-depth conversation about a topic limited to a few people, you should either open up another channel or do a DM. Just my opinion, but I hate Slack threads and love Discord's system.
The point is not to break a single conversation into multiple threads, it is to split a single conversation away from the other conversations happening simultaneously in your #help channel. Effectively creating a channel, without having to bug a mod to get a new channel for your 5min conversation.
Slack became a much worse experience when they added full threads IMO. Discord's new approach of allowing you to reply to a specific message, but not outright fork the channel, is a much better compromise.
this - Discord's approach of allowing you to reply, but having the message show up in the regular conversation flow keeps the feel of an actual conversation.
You are assuming that the traffic is low enough that "a single conversation flow" is happening, or (like in your example) that multiple people reply to a single post.
If you have enough people talking past each other, even with the reply feature, it becomes a huge mess. Having a way to only show the messages that are replying to you while you troubleshoot a specific issue is what a thread view enables.
Having just migrated from Zulip to Slack, I find Slack's threading model really bad. Discord is a little better, but still fragmented over time in a busy channel. Zulip has the best implementation I've seen for putting semi-related topics together without getting drowned out.
Surprisingly, Slack's sales seem unaware of Zulip from what I heard from some colleagues so I doubt Slack is going to steal Zulip's (much better) threading model any time soon.
As a 29 year old, similar (to a lesser extent) deal. I've used Discord a huge amount over the past year, mostly for gaming but sometimes while playing different games at the same time/just hanging out.
As a 43 year old, I’ve been using Discord to collaborate within a small developer community across Europe and the United States (I’m in Australia). Since the pandemic, we’ve done more than code — supporting one another in our various COVID circumstances.
Teamspeak and Ventrilo were used similarly back in the 00s. I was part of different gaming communities and people would hang out in channels and hop in and out. The only difference was we had to use forums for chatting and posting images.
The employees and their contractors and related at Discord corporate can see your IP address too and much more. Luckily it won't be Microsoft owning it as they could correlate against their software empire too.
But Discord does have significant profit motive to collect information about you. In fact, their entire proprietary protocol, client, and restriction of clients is based around ensuring this.
He wasn't talking about mass data collection used to sell advertising, he was talking about a the admin of a server with maybe a dozen users having access to his IP, which potentially could be used for DDOS or geolocation. The kind of 'data collection' which could have visible impacts upon his life.
And I am saying that there are human people working at companies too. The only difference is that if they cause you indirect harm their legal liability is abstracted enough you can't do anything.
They're not talking about Discord and their employees having your IP, they're talking about teamspeak server admins being able to see it and using it for nefarious means. On Discord, just because someone joins a server you created doesn't mean you get their IP. With teamspeak being decentralized, your IP is sent to admins which are much closer and interested in the same topics you are, so if you make them mad, they have the ability to retaliate by performing a DDOS or geolocating you to expose your location. With Discord, there's trust that Discord isn't going to suddenly make your IP address public for some reason - even if you make an employee mad, them accessing your IP just to leak it would be jeopardizing their cushy VC-backed job all just to 'expose' someone on the internet.
Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.
Discord also refuses to delete any data you give them. Deleting a Discord account sets a lockout flag, changes the nickname to "Deleted User" and resets the avatar to default. That's it. They don't even bother setting the user ID on your messages to something common, to a bot (and anyone who turns on developer mode) all your messages still contain your Discord ID.
I also learned from personal experience that they ignore any requests for deleting data coming in via GDPR. These people need to get slapped in a lawsuit.
> Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.
This is the first time I hear of this, can you please link a source?
The Discord subreddit has a few threads about this, but it has always been an open secret back when the Discord Developers guild still existed. I'm pretty sure it got axed because some staff members got too memey about abusing their database access.
So Discord has the same issue should be Discord had the same issue - I also can't find any mention of such abuse of power. The only thing is supposedly this Trust & Safety employee that revoked the vanity url /furry to give it to another server[0], and T&S needs full database access like that for obvious reasons (even if this employee did abuse it).
That's one incident. I'm talking about a pattern of behavior where staff members act unprofessionally. That includes telling your users "I can just change your ID lol" even if they don't end up doing it.
Discord didn't fire the person who was joking about database edits the most (or anyone to my knowledge). All they did was close the outlet for staff to show their badge off and brag about it. That doesn't fix anything, my assumption is that this is still going in.
It does, but that is not always an option. What if you shared personal information on a server you no longer have access to? Your only option is to wait a week for your data export and then wait another 2-3 weeks for a support ticket to get to the stage of threatening Discord into actually removing individual messages. What if you're being stalked? What if you said something incridebly dumb on a server you assumed was limited to very specific people? A month to removal is untenable. Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.
Discord considers all servers public, not because they actually are (many are for friend groups or even classes etc.), but because that'd mean your consent for keeping any message you send is in question whenever someone is invited to a guild you were not expecting there. Their argument against removal is always "following public conversations is in the public interest". Any European court would tell them to fuck off if someone finally sued them over ignoring GDPR requests, because in the end most Discord servers (absolute numbers, not by volume) can not be considered public.
Not only that, Discord communities are all invite-only, even the discoverable ones are technically invite-only (discoverability process of Discord requires a permanent invite).
> Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.
The thing is there is no user→message mappings stored in their database. The data structures are designed for message→user traversal. Nothing like Facebook's user activity log.
with the amount of automated systems out there port-scanning IP ranges for vulnerabilities, being on discord with one (a vulnerability), even if discord exposed IPs, is not much more dangerous than just sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for a bot to hit your IP.
The risk of personal identification due to IP I can buy into; the risk that your already public IP may be exposed to a do-bad-criminal who wants to exploit you via Discord.. feels no more dangerous than having a vulnerable computer connected, anyway.
There are some games that run peer to peer connections, and for those to work, they require inbound connections to work. As far as the security of the average game codebase is concerned, I'd say it's pretty terrible as nobody really audits these codebases for buffer overflows/RCEs.
Source Engine (CS:GO, Team Fortress 2, etc) has a bunch of RCE that were disclosed to Valve years ago and which they did nothing about, and which have been released to public at this point. Join a server and they can RCE on your machine. Another one can be triggered just from a Steam invite.
Too bad Valve makes money now and not games, they can't even get a fix out after it's been disclosed for years.
Titanfall (the original) is another one (also Source Engine underneath but rewritten by Respawn/EA), a salty hacker who was mad he was getting rekt has been taking down the multiplayer service off and on for years now.
Last I heard he was starting to hit Titanfall 2 xbox servers too (since nothing has been done after years attacking the first one, why wouldn't he escalate it further?) and Respawn just don't care, they're done with it, they make piles of money from Apex now and don't care about supporting their older stuff.
As frustrating as it is, not a whole lot of people in the video game industry really care about that, and for those that do, they can't really do that much about it.
Once a game is sold, there's not much of an incentive to keep it alive other than making sure it's moderately playable so that they manage to sell expansion packs or downloadable content. A hypothetical "someone might overflow a buffer and run arbitrary code" bug is going to be pretty low on the list compared to "all the graphics are broken on the latest nvidia driver because our code base is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking."
Even for the developers that do care about writing decent code (and a lot of them do care about making great games), after 60 hours or more a week of fixing random bugs on Barbie's Plastic Adventures, Call of Battlefield, or Mobile Lootbox Idle Clicker, there's not that much motivation left at the end of the day to work on these kinds of issues.
It’s pretty frustrating with games like TF2 that still generate significant amounts of revenue but can’t even get major security problems patched let alone basic bugs fixed. And I’m not talking about selling new copies, I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lootbox revenue.
Games like DotA 2 that still get attention from Valve have all kinds of broken things. Bots were endemic in certain MMR brackets for a while (might still be, no idea), and they were pretty straightforward to detect. Multiple kinds of griefing were pretty much ignored, reporting players didn't do anything for a while, and so on.
Even Rockstar had the issue about load times for GTA online, which had they even bothered to look into it, would've netted them dozens of millions of dollars.
Until there's something absolutely catastrophic like a worm that spreads through a popular online game and formats hard drives/mines bitcoin/transfers all the hats to third parties, the industry will keep on doing the same thing as usual with no care. I wish it was different, but it's not, unfortunately. I definitely understand your frustration though.
this is true, but also goes for every internet-connected service that i choose to use, as far as my IP address goes
i've been invited to random, huge discord servers to play just one game, and after the games over i usually leave the server unless i know everybody. i never have to worry about the server admin or one of his buddies deciding they didn't like me for whatever reason and DDOSing the shit out of me for weeks, forcing me to change my IP address because i didn't use a VPN.
that's just personal; it could even turn a profit if a professional gamer joined a server, several users recorded the IP address, bet against them in an upcoming game, then DDOS'd the shit out of them.
The game server admin also sees your IP address though?
So unless you are only hanging out on discord and not actually playing you are still exposing your IP address.
Also only the voice server admin sees the IP address and not every user on the server, so your scheme wouldn't really work either.
If you're in a situation where you do not feel safe by the administration team of a server, you probably shouldn't stick around. While I do understand the concern about something like this, if the admin team are people you know and trust, this data is not going to be used against you.
Trust is always important for these things, regardless of the platform. Discord didn't even have my email address for the four first four years I used it
I'm running my teamspeak instance within an LXC container on my physical host. So the only IP I do see is good old home (127.0.0.1). But admins better not use the IP-ban feature in this setup ...
I never understood what was wring people seeing my personal, private IP address...
I can call my ISP and get a new one in seconds, or turn my router off for 5 minutes to get a new one.
Not sure how using discord really solves the evil admin scenario though? Since the game server admin will still be able to see your IP Address.
I really have a hard time imagining a scenario where I can trust the game server admin, but not the admin hosting my voice server. Especially if it's some team-based game.
It is not P2P. The place where they most clearly state that as far as I can find is actually the documentation for their game SDK[1], but you can check that this is the case with netstat. In general it’s hard to get good voice or video chat with P2P connections because of the low upload of most residential internet connections, so few serious chat apps do it.
This looks really interesting. It solves a problem my Discord server has specifically. We do online improv and while most of the members don't have cameras we find the lack of a visual component is detrimental to the experience.
I notice that you have a support Discord, maybe a Discord integration would be good.
I’m near middle age and discord is how I still talk to my friends from high school, college, and past jobs. My high school friends are pretty close now with my work friends, despite only ever have interacted on discord.
It’s hands down the communication tool i use the most in my personal life
Same here. What used to be a private IRC channel evolved into a Skype group chat and finally several years ago evolved into a Discord server. We game together often and even have poker nights through it. It's been a huge boon to my social life during the pandemic.
I'm really glad MS is not buying Discord after seeing what they did to Skype.
- No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi
- Even if you have Jitsi the experience is not the same. Discord's experience is like a chat room, except with audio and video. In Element it's more like a standard call
> - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi
To be explicit, no group audio/video. I run my own Matrix server for my partner and I and it uses webRTC based audio out of the box for 1:1 calls which we use every day, and sometimes video. No Jitsi enabled in my config. (I only share this so other readers can gauge if Matrix can meet their needs.)
It is also worth noting that the WebRTC calls are E2E encrypted and look fantastic as they are often peer-to-peer so you can get an amazing connection if you have the bandwidth available.
I'm blown away by the audio and video quality of my Matrix calls. I always thought it was because, as I run my own server, there's no bandwidth limit, but I hadn't considered the whole peer-to-peer thing.
I'm using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and I can't recall off of the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure out of the box the coturn server will make webRTC "just work". I also explicitly made sure jitsi was disabled to make sure it wasn't using it, and yeah, this ansible playbook is game changing. I tried to run Matrix 3 different ways before giving up and using the playbook.
Not @fish45 but as someone in a similar situation, probably because "people our age" where already using it for gaming. Simple network effects. Nobody got out of their way to compare the best alternative from a technical and privacy related perspectives.
People just started using what they were used to, and now Discord is freaking emourms in that area. High school classes, university cohors (ie. CS'24), university program (ie. Electrical Engineering), specific sources...etc everybody around me is using discord.
hmm, so on public discord servers if someone copies my nickname and pretends to be me, someone might not easily notice?
Seems like a pretty readily used vulnerability. I remember back in high school on AIM someone made a username very similar to mine and said some nasty things to a girl I was talking to - she told me to stop talking to her and I didn't figure out why until years later. I imagine the same exploit could be done more easily if you can use the same username and discord actively tries to hide the hash.
Maybe I'm just overly sensitive since impersonation has hurt me, though.
I'd argue the opposite - it's harder to get away with impersonation.
In the AIM situation, users go in "knowing" that usernames are unique, so if you see a message from user abc123, you "know" it's that person. Which means user abcl23 ("el" instead of "one") can impersonate the real user.
In Discord situations, (1) the user is more likely to know that usernames can be reused, since they weren't required to make a unique one to start - so they can be more cautious of impersonation attempts, and more importantly (2) the Discord devs know names can be reused/abused, and can build better mitigations if they so choose to (like e.g. putting a disclaimer at the top of any message from a user you've never contacted before, etc.)
Many servers have different "roles" created, though often they're just nothing more than a title and a different color for your name when chatting on the server. If you don't have the default role on your server, then anybody would probably notice the fake person is a fake because they'd have the default role color.
Second, servers can require that your account have a verified phone number for you to join or chat on it, which raises the barrier a bit for creating fake accounts.
Finally, even if they join a mutual server and send you a private message, when you view the message, you won't see the private message history of the conversation with the real account, giving away that it's at the very least a new account.
Overall, it's harder to impersonate on Discord than it is on AIM, but still certainly not impossible.
Usernames don’t even matter that much thanks to nicks (display names) which are available in Matrix (and unlike Discord, they are available in DM’s), and furthermore, you can get an account with a smaller provider that federates if you really want a username taken on matrix.org.
Other Discord features like servers aren’t there yet, but “usernames” doesn’t seem like a real deficiency.
They were taken on one server. Matrix is a federated protocol so any account on any domain works anywhere. If @echelon:matrix.org is taken, you can have @e:chelon.org if you want.
Second this. Recently setup Mumble server and it's clearly meant for non-visual use because of its gaming roots. Which is good when you want TTS with chat but annoying to learn and navigate. I suspect it's primary use case is push to talk voice communicate in games.
A discord chat got me through one of my very difficult classes in university. I think without it I probably would have passed, but probably wouldn’t have understood the material half as well.
Personally, I wish the desktop client was a bit more lightweight. I understand why they went with Electron, and I don't think they could have afforded their speed of iterated development as a small company otherwise, but I still wish their app was a bit lighter on my laptop. I'm especially disappointed that cordless [1], a very usable third-party terminal-based client for Discord, was banned due to a ToS violation.
Secondly, I wish there was better support for E2E encryption, even just in direct messages. I wouldn't even mind it as a paid feature.
Similiar issue with the browser client. I observed it eating away 40% cpu doing...nothing? I can't do anything else with my laptop If I want to be heard or understood by others
As someone who uses discord as chat only (if even), their CPU (and partly RAM usage) is simply not excusable. And Audio & Video are not argument for such a bloated client either, well done WebRTC is everything but bloated.
and with this lightweightness the ability to customize the client more, maybe even create popouts to monitor multiple chats simultaneously or do one server per window.
Unfortunately software companies now view customisability as a bad thing, as their priority is profit, and that often involves making the client less usable. Discord wouldn't be able to periodically shift around the UI to make you accidentally click on the "Gift Nitro" button if they had to respect the layout you customised.
I'm just as confused as you are as to why anyone on the planet would click where the "attach image" button used to be, see a popup for gifting Nitro, and go "sure, let's do that instead", but evidently Discord thinks that at least some people are going to do that, or else they wouldn't have made such an absurdly hostile change in the first place.
Presumably they're banking on people who would have gifted Nitro in the first place but were just unaware of the feature.
Not making the useage of third party clients a ToS violation.
Sometimes it feels like technology from the past was so bad that, given no alternatives, it interferes with the thing you're wanting to do (Skype/Internet Explorer). Those products can easily be subsumed by a competitor that is a superior product (Discord/Chrome).
But now it feels that because the options for those niches have been completely filled by those services, everyone becomes beholden to them, and in many cases there are undesirable aspects of the services that are not mutually exclusive with them being the most competent product on the market (inability to use Discord 3rd-party clients, Chrome's user tracking, Plex still showing you advertisements after buying a yearly subscription).
It feels like those products became too polished and attractive to users, if there exists a good reason to convince them to use something else, and even if we want to move off them, the network effect inevitably draws some of the holdouts back in (Messenger as a compromise for not using Facebook, sites that are incompatible with non-Chrome browsers). These products now have millions of active users whose behavior can be controlled or manipulated on a whim, for better or worse, if the company decides one day to make changes.
Now I'm starting to get the impression that succeeding in being the best solution in a given market is not necessarily a universal good. So many people were loathing how terrible Skype was for the longest time, and so Discord was founded. Yet, while the experience of participating a chat community is so much easier than in the past, I can't help but thing that so many people are now beholden to a new technological dependency.
What I have to wonder is: if money was not a factor in driving developer decisions, would Discord have allowed third party clients to be used? Preventing automated spam is not a problem unique to Discord.
Spam is not a good reason anyway. I would argue browser based spam automations are more easy to setup than modified clients. And Discord can do shit against those.
Day to day the thing I dislike most about discord is that I can't have multiple instances of it open, or pop-out a channel to its own window. I'm in a bunch of servers but there are 3 channels and a DM in particular that I would love to just park on the second monitor forever and always have visible.
I know it's been a few hours, but if you see this, look at the Discord PTB and Canary builds. I run all three (std) so I can keep a number of prime channels open. Hope that helps.
The only thing I would change is small and weird: I wish you could make the window smaller on desktop. The min-width is almost half the size of my screen; it shouldn't be hard to gracefully collapse things further as you resize
For me: per server avatars and/or usernames. Or even some sort of straight-up multi-account support. Being able to choose a display name upon joining a server, rather than after, would be a great start.
I am also a little miffed that someone can right click my profile in one server and then see that I'm the same guy in another. Just a little annoyed, not much, but it'd be nice to turn it off. Unless I missed an option?
Yes if you're on two servers with someone and you right click their name it will show that it's the same person on the other server. It's not really private information if user IDs are public, I just prefer to keep things a bit more private if I can.
Their treatment of Linux is pretty terrible, where they block you from even launching the app after a minor update until you go download and install the new .deb file. I've had many times where I went to jump onto a quick Discord chat only to have to stop and jump through those hoops.
Did i miss any recent innovations in the Windows space? Because no automated updates for your software is literally one of those things that make Windows so bad as an everyday desktop.
Mobile website. Back in the old day it was possible to join without registration. Just visit the project invite link and start typing. Then it required registration but still worked on mobile. Now it no longer works on mobile, you just get "install app or GTFO". I've stopped using discord then.
It does not work on mobile. When you visit invite (as new user would), e.g. here https://discord.com/invite/trbteNj it will automatically open play store with discord app. It cannot be disabled.
Additionally, when you visit discord.com shortly there is login button visible but then it disappears and only install app button is visible, login is no longer possible.
(It is possible that old users have some cookie settings that allows them to use mobile website but new users can't)
Tracking multiple threads of conversation in text. I'm not saying it needs Slack, HN or Reddit style threading, but some way to separate multiple topics of conversation that form within a channel.
Organization of multiple channels across multiple servers. Currently, I have 4 different servers, each with a different group of friends. But not every channel in each server is something that interests me. So I'd like to be able to reorganize them into channels to check whenever there are updates, channels to read occasionally, and channels to ignore entirely. But the channel organization is owned by the servers, and is therefore not something that I can re-organize on my side.
Honestly, in terms of features, not much. The biggest issue personally is that screen sharing on Linux with multiple monitors doesn't work well, but AFAIK that's a chromium thing. Another thing I'd really like is for twitch streams to be integrated with Discord streams. Otherwise, the main thing I'd want out of an alternative is privacy.
Just Googling it, I haven't seen what makes it better than Discord. It reads like an alternative for the sake of competing. Not a bad idea, but I think it'll always be lagging behind like the wake of Facebook/YouTube/Reddit clones we've seen over the years.
Guilded eng here... in general, our marketing focuses heavily on chat because that's the first feature people switching from Discord will evaluate as table stakes, but our thesis is that team communication shouldn't be limited to just 1 format. To that end, we have lots of different channel types (calendar, forums, docs, media, etc). Admittedly our primary focus is esports teams, so a lot of our features are geared towards that (like inter-server tournament brackets). In terms of product roadmap though, you can think of it like how Basecamp is to Slack. We think one really well-built and integrated tool is better than having to juggle dozens of separate tools when managing a team/project/whatever. Hope that helps!
It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable.
Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
I've met the creator of Vent. Cool dude, moderately wealthy and I believe very happy to sit on his "fuck you" money and give back to the community upon occasion (Quakecon giveaways, for example). Vent 4 was DOA.
Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism.
Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming, though.
I think that the biggest differentiator between Discord and the others (mumble, TS, Vent, etc) was that Discord has very mature text chatting as a first class citizen, rather than an afterthought. This is what I have anecdotally seen as the primary thing that has made even people who casually voice chat join public discord servers. The model is much more friendly to casual users than either TS or Mumble are.
When I was using Vent and Teamspeak you had to actually host the server, as I recall... so someone had to set it up and manage it, or you could pay a third party to do it, but that was always too expensive for my friends and I.... discord is a lot easier to set up your own server and find and discover other servers
Yep. This is the major differentiator to me and it's obvious why it caught on after that. When I heard about Discord I was like, "Weird, so many people are hosting their own servers or paying to host a server now? Why did it catch on now? More affordable?" Once I learned it was all free... kinda obvious.
I agree - text chatting is the first foot in the door. It's non-committal, but gets you the ability to voice chat when you feel up to it.
Things like TS and Vent is voice-chat-first and thus, you will only join _after_ you've made friends to voice chat with online in some other platform (like irc or a game). There's no TS community, since it's purely utilitarian, unlike discord.
Funny enough, my story is not quite so bad but still sad. I got bored of the events that evening and went back to gaming. The event stage and the BYOC were at least 1/4 mile apart - I get back to my desk and all my friends are texting me that my name was called to play a "RAGE" 4player deathmatch to win a raffle ticket for the Raptor F-150.
Seriously! It's a shame that Xfire became a thing of the past. I feel like Steam baked in enough of the "community" features to steal their lunch, without ever delivering on the full community element that Discord is thriving on!
Speaking of Steam, it's also a shame they snoozed on it until way after Discord picked up steam. They were also very well situated to replicate it, but to date they STILL don't have message history in chat conversations...
I agree, though discord recently has put out updates to improve audio quality in those instances.
That being said, I would argue that any voice chat with more than 10, maybe 20, active people talking is going to be nearly unusable. Not due to audio quality.
One of the really underrated features of ACRE is that it lets you force audio to only play on left/right ear. In Arma, if I'm talking to a character directly in front of me while while listening to 2 radio channels that have people shouting in mono, it all turns into a muddled mess of sound. If I have someone directly in front of me, one radio only going into my left ear, and one radio only going into my right ear, my brain can handle conversations without feeling too overloaded.
They are desktop clients -- iterating from there to a fully self hosted thing, when IRC already exists, isn't really an obvious path for them. I am shocked it took so long for someone to add voice to Slack though.
Why does everything have to grow into an abomination that does everything? Teamspeak and Vent were for talking to your team in game. This was their purpose and they did it very well.
It's not really that surprising. At some point the established players ossify and are unable to innovate when the playing field changes.
A new thing comes along without this problem and dominates the new playing field. For Teamspeak and Ventrilo the field changed in that it became possible to host the voice servers themselves, rather than the 'customers' hosting.
Discord does not give users a choice to opt-out of their wildly invasive data collection methods including logging executables running on your system while the desktop client is open, not just games. This data alone is very valuable.
Comment from a 2019 support thread "I am pretty flabbergasted that people aren't making a bigger deal of this than they are. Discord actively monitors your executables, but the larger concern for people now seems to be its inaccuracy in identifying them as games. As if to say "make it better at identifying games" instead of "stop scanning my programs"."
This is false - your list of running executables is never exported. Instead, it works by downloading a list of games to scan for[0,1] and runs a local scan that only compares them against this in-memory list of programs, never making a XHR with info from the scan.
Why would you install the desktop app? Isn't it Electron anyways, so aren't you basically running the same thing as you would in the browser, except now you've replaced the exceptionally well sandboxed, trusted browser with an outdated, unsandboxed browser and have given an app that doesn't need this access to your entire system?
Easier separation of ideas.
I want to be able to close my browser while still keeping VoIP running.
Alt-Tab-ing is far superior UX compared to trying to find the VoIP tab in browser.
Over all UX is way nicer with separate application even if it is just another browser running.
Not sure why this is downvoted (if that's what the light gray represents). I wouldn't install any Electron app when an app works equally well within a browser like Firefox, doubly so in my case considering my Firefox is running in firejail already.
People like you and the OP are rather rare among users. Most people just do not care about the data collection or the Electron-ness. They just want to use Discord.
Not sure if this is still the case but the browser version didn't have the same noise suppression features as the desktop client.
Another minor thing for me was that the desktop client doesn't stack with the browser window in the taskbar (i.e. I can still 1 click both if I only have 1 browser window open which I usually do) and it can be minimized into the system tray.
It sends a list of running programs, including the command line arguments to the server. It's worrying because although it's bad practice some programs get passed credentials like this.
With regards to Discord's invasion of privacy as a whole, I'm not sure if it's malice or incompetence.
For one thing, command-line arguments are public information about processes in every OS since forever. Putting security-sensitive information there is a fault of its developers, not Discord.
For another, Discord spies on the system to report what games you're playing, including which mods. It's a cool feature for some, but indeed requires a set of abilities that are indistinguishable from malware.
it doesn't send anything like that anywhere. it matches a list of executables it downloads with what it sees running, to determine if you are running a game.
One of my GDPR data downloads contained a list of programs I had ran along with the command line arguments. Not sure how you can explain that if it's not sent to the server.
It's almost like no one using the app chose it for the privacy implications. Sort of silly of them considering all the harm they've suffered because of it.
I think you misunderstood what's sent to their servers in that case - see my other reply[0]. Now you might still consider this spyware (the EFF did classify this sort of scanning as spyware in 2005 [1]) but it looks like this is the status quo for anything that's not a game store to do running game detection.
Higher ed instructor here. I've been teaching online for well over a decade, frequently subjected to the Blackboards and the Canvases and lately Zoom. I can name no tool that has improved what I do from when I started except Discord.
I'm old-ish, so it was a bit hard to get to at first, but after some time with it, I'd replace everything with it if I could. (And this is coming from a big time free/open source guy! I'm not thrilled with how centralized it is, but I'll take it for now)
Most of the comment was intended to say, I would replace everything if I could.
But the biggest benefit by far has been groupwork. As far as I see, pretty much all of the big synchronous players (Zoom, Collaborate, etc) and asynchronous (all the LMS's) work atrociously if you're dealing with anyone who isn't a toddler -- which is to say, they are all too centralized and top-down.
E.g. - In real-life groupwork, I would tell them with words to go to their rooms or to sit in groups, and they would take themselves there.
In most of these goofy systems, I am personally responsible to "physically" place people in rooms, even if they disconnect or whatever. It's ridiculous.
Now, I do all my group work in Discord. I make however many text and voice rooms, and tell them to go there. I don't even worry about the "roles" part, because, again, my students aren't toddlers.
Bonus, of course -- these sub rooms plus a main room, available at all hours, facilitates interaction between students as well as with me. Contrast to most of the LMS which are both clunky AND frequently have policies against non-school chatter (which, in the age of online teaching is asinine.)
They'd make a fortune by providing Discord as an in-game communications solution/integration for commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard.
Make it free up to 1000 concurrent users, then $x/MAU at plateaus /w reduced rates + $ for extras such as white labeling.
The current in-game Discord overlay is an end-user 'hack' by comparison. Games/applications are notorious for limited/locked-in communication systems and are non-trivial to implement internally. See Star Citizen's 'Spectrum' developed by Turbulent as an example of complex in-house solution.
> commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard
This is just such a bizarre statement. To exclude Unity while including Lumberyard in the condition of "commonly used game engines" makes zero sense. Unity is well known to be one of the most used game engines. Lumberyard in contrast has (according to wikipedia) has a single released game.
Seeing as Unity has a competing product with enormous resources devoted to it for some pretty major titles... I could see why Unity wouldn't be the biggest champion of it anyways
Eh, maybe they do have some existing integration with a big customer, but they already tried this with https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/discord-voice and it doesn't seem to get any new features or updates, plus you can't submit new games to the store to use it.
When I joined the Elm community I thought it was weird they use a Slack for real time discussion and not a Discord. When I asked why I found out that Discord's features are most certainly not a superset of Slack's.
* Slack threads are an amazing feature and frequently used on the Elm slack. One discussion or one person's question can become a thread and then the channel won't be continuously pinged by the ongoing discussion, plus multiple discussions can happen in tandem. I remember when Slack added this feature lots of people including me were a bit disdainful. It feels like an awfully hard new UI pattern to get used to after so many years of single-threaded conversation on e.g. IRC. But now I would strongly oppose moving to Discord only because of this issue.
* Slack also has a different model for channels on a server. There are probably caveats to these statements, but roughly speaking the default assumption on Slack is you don't belong to any channels in a server but can join what you want or what is configured for you, and on Discord the assumption is that you belong to everything and sometimes a Discord server will configure it so certain things are hidden. For a big organization like a programming language or a company the Slack model is preferable.
Wait, are we thinking about the same very limited concept of one additional layer down? It feels like they must have intentionally developed it badly, so that you cannot create a thread to reply to a message that is inside a thread. While Discord does not have threads, I would not at all call the Slack solution amazing. It's actually quite a poor solution and an artificial limitation.
We also don't even need to get started on performance. The comparison Slack vs Discord in terms of performance is like comparing 2 completely different things. Switch a channel in Slack? Merely takes a few seconds :D
> For a big organization like a programming language or a company the Slack model is preferable.
And yet communities decide otherwise (examples: Pharo community, general progamming community servers and probably many more). Slack does not handle Markdown well at all, while in Discord it almost always does what you expect, including escaping of special characters and highlighting code blocks properly, which is a must have for programming languages. Basically I would never choose Slack over Discord, because of how crappy they implemented these things. It really shows no attention to the details. In almost any programming language, one can find a markdown parser, that works better than what Slack cobbled together.
Now those are very basic things to get right in any messenger like application, but it is indicative, how bad these things work in Slack.
A thread going down a single layer makes total sense to me. Not the engineer in me, maybe, but the human. The human who is well trained to, in a large gathering like a party or an office, pull one or two people aside to have a semi-private conversation. Others will drift in or out as they like, but would you usually join one of those mini-conversations then pull one of the participants aside for an even mini-er conversation within that small group? No and I don't ever feel the need in slack either... If you and someone realize that you want to talk about something just move to PMs or make another thread at the top level and ping the person.
Slack provides all sorts of feature for businesses that Discord does not. Integrations, APIs, plug-ins, workflows, etc. at a high level they seem similar but I have investigated replacing Slack a number of times and can never find anything that checks all the boxes and makes it easy to do business with. Slack also has critical mass now where many of our customers work with us on Slack. Good luck getting Discord on corporate desktops :)
Funny enough, I hate Slack threads. Discord has added a reply feature already that better captures the IRC feeling, and rumor is real threads are coming, we'll see :)
(If you like threads, be sure to check out Zulip.)
Threading in group IM's seems to be one of the more polarizing UX discussions that I've come across. A while back I was reading some of the discussions the Matrix people were having about implementing a threading model, where it became clear that there were three very distinct ideas of "good threading" floating around:
1. Infinitely-nestable threading, a la Reddit and HN (and probably other sites first, but those are the ones I've used it the most)
2. Single-level nested threading, a la Slack (and maybe Facebook? I forget how much nesting they allow)
3. Discord/IRC-style replies (like you mentioned) where the responding message just quotes the original, possibly with a slight UI indication to make it easier to parse.
I guess you could argue that Zulip-style threading is a fourth option, but IMO that's closer to a bulletin board than a group IM, because you can't have a message that isn't in a thread, so almost no discussion happens at the top level of a given channel.
What's interesting to me is that the split between who prefers which style of threading is pretty close to even.
I suspect, although I'm not sure, that it comes down to two things: the size of the groups in which you normally participate, and how closely-knit they are. A small, closely-knit group would likely prefer Discord/IRC-style threading, because sub-discussions are more likely to be of interest to those not participating, and the added noise isn't too big of a deal if the group is small.
A larger, but still closely-knit group would probably prefer Slack-style threading, because even though sub-discussions might still be interesting to more than the immediate participants, but a single message space starts to become unusable with more than a couple of sub-discussions going on.
A large and loosely-knit group is is likely to prefer Reddit/HN style discussions (and in fact those are two examples of large and loosely-knit communities) because a sub-discussion is less likely to be of interest to a significant portion of the main discussion's participants.
Maybe, at least. It would be interesting to do a poll and see how those factors correlate.
Dealing with the difference in default channel permissions requires an extra minute or two of work. Adding user-controlled joins means grabbing a bot and spending a few more minutes. For a big organization it's absolutely negligible.
For a big organization, this now means two more audit sessions with IT security, which means about 5-7 hours of meetings spent with them, only for them to then decide that the bot does not adhere to the obscure, 1990s-era document ITSEC-37893/378B section A.epsilon subsection D7 ("Auditability of automatic functionality by certified public accountants") which was written by some legalese zombie who last saw a computer in the 1960s and which reasonable people agree is not something that's relevant to the use-case - but ITSecurity won't budge and has veto powers.
Large organizations are far more likely to buy a solution that works for 80% of the use-cases out of the box, and then live with not fulfilling the other 20% by training their users around it (and constantly complain about the users) - especially if that means you can move accountability to the supplier in the contract. WHICH 80% of functionality is important is decided by what you best can sell to top management.
The sweet spot for quick decisions and technological adaptions are SMBs up to about 500 employees.
From what I understand Slack's model is based on selling plans to teams and companies. Within that framework users are actually representing a real monthly recurring dollar value. I don't think Discord is anywhere close to this.
I'd be curious to hear some numbers on the percentage of active users with Nitro subscriptions. Slack's business model makes it easier for them to make monthly revenue off passive users (by encouraging teams/companies to over-provision and also double-dipping in the user overlaps between teams/companies), so in some respects it incentivizes them to optimize for passive users. The Nitro/Server Boost business model is likely to have fewer passive users paying the subscription costs recurring monthly and doesn't as easily double/triple dip users (unless they intentionally and optionally overpay for server boosts), but it incentivizes the company to keep active users happy.
Slack is also thin, supports third party clients and is super easy to code for (Discord is too, but more hoops). And provides actual enterprise worthy support. From a professional POV deciding between both is a no brainer IMO
There are many work conversations I have that rely heavily on threads and make the channel useless to scroll if sent directly. I think most of the discussions I read are in threads as often one engineer will encounter a bug, ask for help, and then there will be a back and forth discussion over a thread figuring the issue out. Keeping that in the channel makes reading the channel later fairly useless as most of that detailed discussion is too specific to care about. But being able to skim the main messages and see if anyone had similar issues and then enter that thread is great. On call alerts have a channel and then resolving the alert is often a thread discussion.
It makes a hard ceiling as to how much volume one channel can tolerate. It also forces the conversations to be more sync instead of async, which has a high cost in terms of being able to ignore it for a while.
If they can parley this into solid trust over the coming mid-term, without any major security breaches, then they are set.
(plus the other feature options that were mentioned E2E, stickers etc... they have room to grow. There is already some payment duct-tape setup. I am sure that, barring a complete fuckup, discord is going to do very well.)
Can confirm. A client of mine just moved ~50 devs from Slack to Discord. I'm in the process of helping them move/port their infrastructure slack bots to discord and it has been super smooth.
> The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.
Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware).
Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it
Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies.
Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse
This is the reason that I much prefer to keep apps in my web browser. Sandboxing is a valuable feature. (And the desktop client is just a web browser anyways)
It's quite something else to monitor the processes that have been launched from the application itself than to monitor all processes that run on the host system.
I am not a heavy Discord user (so there might be options around this?), but when I have used it, it seems like every person on the server is in every channel. I feel like that would be absolute chaos at a workplace. Not to mention the unless notification customization that would have to take place.
That's the default - if you can see a channel you can read it and be pinged by it. Roles can restrict this, and you can configurably ping roles and remove the ability of regular users to do things like @here and @everyone.
Discord's permission system is one of its killer features, IMO.
Thats only partially helpful. What if you get mentioned in channels you have no role for? What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles?
Discords roles are really well done and make totally sense in a hirarchical chat system. However i don't see this being sensical in a professional (flatter) environment.
> What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone?
There are certainly bots that automate that on Discord. A bot can open the private channel, add the temporary role, assign the temporary role, then close all that stuff when the chat is done. If it's a voice chat you don't even need a temporary role, the bot can "drag" users to/from other voice chats, so you can have a "public" lobby for the private voice rooms that only the bot can fill. (I've been in game servers built that way.)
> What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles?
Discord just released a much more comprehensive slash-command system. It will be a while before more bots migrate to it (and away from Reaction "buttons" and weird individual choices for command prefixes), but it supports now some powerful auto-complete/help prompts and argument schema validation.
Absolutely, I have considered when moderating servers that if they placed more advanced moderation features, the kind you'd see in forum software, behind a paywall, it'd be the only thing I'd consider paying for.
Discord has started giving me popups and adding sparkles around UI elements that I need to pay for. I thought the premium "Nitro" was a nice option but I guess it isn't popular enough? Either way it seems that now they are nagging hard to get you to pay.
More and more games are providing cross platform play. I suspect this is one reason Microsoft was interested so PC / Xbox players could play with each other and communication.
Maybe Discord could monetize in game integration for its voice network, especially on console games.
In addition to other comments : advertising. Imagine having to watch, or listen to an ad before you can join a channel. Imagine contextual ads in-between text messages.
Teams is utter garbage in my opinion, but I don't think acquiring Discord would solve that. Skype seems like a similar acquisition, and look how that turned out.
Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
IF you want a really ridicilous example of Microsoft's inability to deal with UX, try changing literally anything that has to do with sound in Windows, and tell me how many separate sound-related configuration applications there are, and what are the paths to opening them.
Then, ask someone who never used Windows XP to explain to you what each of those configuration applications is responsible for. (So they won't be able to lean on the crutch of "Oh, this one is the exact same thing as the sound application in Windows 98...")
Or just use Outlook. I don't know what they did but it's like all the various panes are coded independently and don't talk to each other.
Multiple times a day I'll see a number next to 'unread' which won't go away, because I've read all my emails but it hasn't realised yet. And my calendar sometimes takes 5-10 seconds to load over VPN, it doesn't seem to be cached anymore. Made a mistake of going to lunch with an 'empty' calendar once! I miss 2016.
One of the reasons of course is that every driver feels the need to add their great pane to the control panel applet, so now Microsoft can’t change anything to the applet or all the drivers break.
3 of those settings panes are baked directly into Windows 10 and have nothing to do with any 3rd-party drivers.
If the sound isn't enough, the power management is even worse. I count at least 5 different panes to configure different subsets of screen saver, sleep, hibernate and power on/off behavior, all from Windows itself with no 3rd-party software involved.
I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes.
But yes, your point still stands. There's no good reason for this mess, and Microsoft needs to put someone who cares in charge of Windows UX.
> I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes.
That would be an improvement on the current status quo, where each third-party device adds its own new settings pane.
Its not only the sound thing. Its so weird to me how i still am able to find most options on a modern Windows computer even thought i stopped back with XP. And not because its so intuitive, but because it never really changed at all, just added more layers over layers.
The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment.
While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design""" is just plain text, some of which is clickable and will reveal "Properties" button. It's up to you to find the hidden clickspots.
I can't believe they are releasing such garbage. Sometimes I wonder: does Satya Nadella use Windows? How is he not raging every time he opens the Settings app?
The part I like is how it integrates with outlook. My workflow is pretty email oriented so being able to send an email meeting request and have that meeting seamlessly show up in teams app is really nice.
Same thing when you receive an email from someone you can click their name and dial them via teams (you could do this with skype to but it was dodgy).
Group calls, screen sharing etc. is miles better than Skype.
Decision makers are pretty forgiving of an application that comes bundled with something else they had to buy anyway. And it is "good enough", despite being worse than competitors, for things like hosting video meetings.
Sometimes you need to be a "power user" to encounter all a product's flaws. I've been using it professionally for 3.5 years, and I touch pretty much every feature. I had high hopes because I loved a lot of the decisions they were making, so I started maintaining a list of issues/bugs. I reported them when I had time to describe them well. After a year, it got into the hundreds, with some that were pretty dramatic, and I stopped caring enough to continue, because it was clearly not going to be the product I was hoping it could be. Since then, the most obvious problem that has happened is slowdown. It takes full seconds to do most navigation/loading in our (large) team. The whole affair made me truly sad, frustrated, and angry.
I think my biggest pet peive is the existence of Files/Wikis per/channel... when most of the time, you kind of one one set per team. Or the proliferation of Team groups themselves.
Goes from pretty simple/useful to crazy bloated.
Another irksome thing is you can tether the wiki along with files to onedrive via the sharepoint backend links... but the format of the wiki is in a proprietary format, and even if you did get it, it doesn't sync the other way, read only local.
Those per channel features are useful for others. Sometimes people don't get to run their own team, but at least they still get all the benefit in their little fiefdom.
6 to 1..
And using the wiki is pointless if you're using OneNote right.
Being asked to log into another Teams instance, for example, results in baffling issues; I had to switch to the web version and that only works sometimes.
Turn off a VPN? Be prepared to suddenly, without warning, have a 10-15 minute period where people are messaging you and you don't get any of them. (I am talking about Teams instances that do not depend on you being behind a VPN, more on THOSE after)
Video conferences are terrible. I keep getting invites without the Teams URL attached because of UI issues, and worse, there are situations where I can't even access the URL I am given.
Low quality Enterprise security teams often ruin Teams installs. For some customers I work with, I am not even able to upload an image to a group chat. (Not a meme mind you; screen shots). "Sure that's the price of a locked down / professional service" you may say, but for some obscene reason, I am able to use Giphy in these chats.
And many other miscellaneous issues (degraded experience on Firefox, authentication headaches w/ AD Azure, etc..)
As far as I am concerned, this is MSFT's fault since they sold a product that can be configured into complete uselessness for its purpose (sharing information).
(Disclaimer: I own MSFT stock and generally like their direction but the execution for this and Azure DevOps is seriously lacking)
My workplace switched from Slack to Teams a year ago and it was a complete disaster. In addition to numerous flaws that would be repeated by others, some users including me couldn't sign in with cooperate accounts at all---every time I put the email address it skips passwords and always ends up with a clueless generic error message with a non-functional "retry" button.
I have since found a workaround which requires reinstallation per each launch, because the installer installs an older version that will soon be automatically updated to a newer version, and that older version can retry on the failure with an alternative login prompt that actually works. So Microsoft has at least two login prompts, only one of which is working for me but unsupported by some versions of Teams so that I can barely work around. Brilliant.
What is your IdP? Do you integrate with Azure AD? Bringing your own provider? Using Microsoft accounts? Does your org use M365 at all? Or are you just using teams out of the suite?
I don't know the exact provider. I think it's Azure AD with a hybrid identity (since login forms doesn't leave Microsoft at all), but it's a mere guess.
Try using Teams for school and work with different user accounts - and contrast that with the experience on e.g. Slack where different places managed by different organizations just work.
This is where some of the alternative electron wrappers become useful. I agree that it's pretty bad. Not fun at all when you accidentally join an external chat under your work account.
As an M365 admin for a district with 65,000 students and 11,000 staff: thank you for saying as much. Teams gets a lot of hate here, but honestly.. it does a lot right. I do admit the Teams client is a bit of a pig.
I really wished this deal could have been reached, but then again, competing products will do each other well.
Teams is basically Discord for business. It's as if the development team were big fans of Discord. It shows!
That is absolutely not "the main problem" with Teams. It's UI is not very well thought out at all and notifications work with the reliability of a rooster on ketamine.
The only three value propositions Teams has over Discord are:
* Support for threads - albeit again very inelegantly.
* The ability to embed web apps as tabs in a Teams page - this is my favourite feature
MS already owned Skype for over half a decade before they made Teams and Teams voice/video chat is still vastly inferior than Skype. How would owning a bunch more IP that they‘re ignoring help?
Not just that, but you can no longer sign up for a Skype (even "for business") account if your organization has Teams through Office 365, but Teams doesn't interoperate well with Skype so if you, for business reasons, need to communicate with a Skype user without using a personal Skype account, you're SOL.
Teams definitely feels like it was rushed to market to take advantage of the pandemic. I'm really sad our company moved us from Slack to Teams. It's so much worse, especially on Linux
And it was still better than the dumpster fire that was Skype for Business. I loved how it would push a message to the device that it thought you were active on, but that there wasn't a centralized storage of messages. Messages sent to Device 1 didn't exist on Device 2.
That was so bad... you'd reply to a message at lunch on your way back, get to your desktop, and couldn't get messages at all... even if you sent one out.
I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.
It's not that they didn't do it well or anything, and they've clearly scaled up to this insane load but they aren't afaik using crazy algorithms or something special like that. They just did the obvious "we'll have a hosted app that does this AND this"
As a 30 something, I have been using Discord for a few years now. Like many long-term users, I started out being a member of gaming-affiliated servers and now, I am a member of numerous technology and cryptocurrency/blockchain related servers as well as gaming (but not primarily). Many of the big Twitch streamers have Discord servers and special roles for paid subscribers as do many content creators on Youtube (especially those who create reaction videos and cannot monetise it on Youtube itself). Pretty much every large blockchain/cryptocurrency project has a Discord server, many open source projects have Discord servers too.
The most impressive thing of all is Discord seemingly worked out stable audio/video years ago. I've had numerous calls on Discord which were more stable than calls through Slack, Zoom and even Facebook Messenger. The obvious choice for Discord is a professional offering, seeing as their core market is growing up with the product and largely probably in its late 20's, early 30's. I can see why Microsoft would have been interested, calls via Teams are like pulling teeth. Forget the terrible UI, the call quality (for me at least) through Teams has been atrocious and surprising given Microsoft have the resources to invest in making this component at least comparable to other products around.
Discord really needs to address the lack of server-specific avatars, though. Why can I change my username per-server, but I am stuck using the same avatar image for every server? Now that I use Discord for a wide variety of uses, I have needed this ability for a while now. Many of us have been crying out for this for years now.
Teams is one of those "Good Enough" at most things suites from MS... It's not the best at anything it does, but in aggregate does more than most of the others. It's also already paid for by Office365 subs in many businesses, so kind of a no brainer to use it.
Yeah I hated Webex till they forced my company to switch to Teams. I can’t get video on my phone, can’t dial surprisingly often, and have to exit the application after every meeting.
I wish there was anything comparably easy to use and of the same quality or even in the vicinity in foss communication platforms.
Mumble isnt easy to use but has great voice and terrible text, matrix and irc are both -- for most non techy people -- hard to use and esentially text only, jitsi is video conferencing, xmpp is mainly not about voice and suffers the same issues as matrix.
I really hate the state of things as I would love to contribute and join some oss communities but they only exist on matrix and I hate using it. Its one of those things i wish i had the know how to start building my self, but webrtc alone seems impenetrable for mumble/discord style audio.
Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are very few other platforms that encourage you to use a single account to join servers for work and gaming and anime and music? And users trust that Discord will allow them to keep their membership in spaces a secret unless someone is already a member of both spaces. That's a feat that's almost impossible to fathom. The interest graph alone is staggeringly valuable, and it's no doubt monetizable in subtle and trust-maintaining ways.
And... some of it may be toxic to a company like Microsoft. The moment Discord needs to start censoring across platforms (not just blocking iOS access to certain content as they've needed to do to play in Apple's garden) is the moment it starts to feel unsafe for content creation. I'm not surprised they walked away.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. If anyone from Discord is reading this:
- not letting people opt-in to be prompted to set a username before entering a server and having a bot announce our membership, and
- not letting people set unique profile pictures for each server
creates situations where one could either leak a real-world identity to a server on which they desire anonymity, or leak a pseudonymous online identity to coworkers.
And this gets REALLY bad for people using Discord to explore their gender identity, where this could cause a profile picture or name that indicates identity to leak between spaces when that's not desired. I've met people who need to be incredibly careful to create multiple Discord accounts to avoid being outed, and Discord makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to do this, with its deep browser integrations that forward to the native app. It is no joke that Discord's UX choices could hurt people, here.
But it speaks to the strength of the platform that Discord is still an incredibly vibrant place for communities like gender-questioning communities that rely on pseudonymous identities. Because it puts natural conversations at people's fingertips. It was Clubhouse before Clubhouse, just divided into communities of like-minded people. In certain ways it's the superposition of Clubhouse and Slack. And the UX problems are solvable problems. I think Discord is really going places.
>I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life.
These suggestions wouldn't really help. Every Discord account has a permanent public user ID attached to it that stays the same regardless of if the username changes. Someone wishing to track an account across multiple servers is always going to be able to.
Using multiple accounts is the only real option, and I think that's what Discord should recommend to people. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to use multiple accounts simultaneously. (Desktop app + any number of browsers.)
I agree they could improve the multi-account UX. If you have only your browser tab open and not the desktop app, joining a server will start the desktop app as well, but it doesn't actually join the server in the desktop app, from my experience. So it's initially concerning, but I don't think unsafe. I'm not sure if other people have observed it joining a server with an unintended account, though.
Certainly this is possible, but only if you are a member of both communities. Due to the confusing UX you mention, the threat model of "accidentally accept a Alabama or Saudi government job's Discord invite, or the Discord invite for your now-potentially-required-to-out-you-by-law-thanks-Alabama cousin's D&D group, in the desktop app while logged into an alt account with a LGBT or trans flag profile picture, or nonbinary pronouns in your username" is significantly more likely and probabilistically dangerous than "Alabama or Saudi state actors are lurking LGBT communities and extracting user IDs at scale to correlate with Discord users on other accounts." And yeah, that last one's problematic too, but Discord can still start somewhere. I'd argue that Discord has a moral obligation to start somewhere.
So what is Discord's path to profitability? They tried selling video games and closed the store not too long after launching it. Nitro/Server Boosts definitely don't come close to the cost of operation.
That's not surprising to me. Discord offers free hosting for a feature-rich IRC and group voice service. Nobody else did that.
A gaming clan no longer needs to maintain their own Teamspeak/Ventrilo server + their own website and forum. The convenience of having it all in one centralized program wins out over Discord's UX oddities, privacy concerns and more recent bloat. This ease of use also lowered the barrier to create a clan, so it captures a larger audience than its predecessors ever did. And yet it still provides powerful tools for moderation and user permissions, an API for chat bots, video streaming...
To be fair, I think everyone always thinks about that regarding the incumbent(s). Xfire / Ventrilo / TeamSpeak all likely seemed like a daunting adversary at their peaks.
I would imagine it's something similar to Gmail where they'd want to monetize the great deal of information they have about people who use the platform.
Possibly expand into enterprise or education and tread on the toes of slack or teams. I suspect server boosts actually could cover a large percentage of costs, especially if they either feature gate things like file uploads or chat history.
IRC is cheap because the servers don't keep any history. The only cost is you might get ddosed and have to keep some mods happy. Discord and Slack have to host a lot more.
For starters, storage costs. Free users can upload files, images, and videos up to 8MB (25MB for Nitro members). Storing and serving those in perpetuity adds up, plus bandwidth for voice and video chat and 800+ employees.
They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage.
In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir.
https://discord.com/jobs/4959585002 mentions 'Rust or Elixir'. Frustratingly, for the longest time, they were 'San Fran or bust' in their hiring, which seemed like an odd thing for a company supposedly enabling communication. Guess the pandemic finally forced them to start looking for remote workers.
Have you ever tried to disable notifications on Discord? I have tried to do it 500 times and still get those annoying red dots with numbers, red dots without numbers, and just a few weeks ago I started getting random notification sounds (after I had disabled them before) without any clue where they were coming from.
My only option is trying to disable all notifications and all notification sounds everywhere, but still I get those dots even when I'm not mentioned.
edit:
I think the root of the problem is that Discord is trying to game the user attention/retention/time spent in app by flooding the user with notifications. In IRC, you had to explicitly enable every notification, otherwise you'd never get notified of anything. "Disable everything by default unless I turn it on" seems to be made as difficult as possible on Discord.
Right-click the server icon, select "notifications settings", press "Mute <server name>". When it asks how long, select "until I turn it back on". This will kill the white dot unless you're mentioned (or @everyone'd). Its a little tricky to find but that will solve your issue
You can also turn off @everyone/@here/@username in right-click -> notification settings -> 'Suppress @everyone and @here'. Like the sibling said, doing this for every channel is tedious.
I want to change my global settings, not server settings. I'm on dozens of Discords and join/leave them and change their order on the sidebar all the time. Going through each of them (and remembering to do it every time I join a new one) sounds like a nightmare. Every time I hear/see a notification that I don't want, I'd have to go through all those dialogs for all of my servers? Nope, not gonna happen.
From your original comment I assumed you actually would want to know how to do it, I see now it was simply whining.
edit: sorry, this came off more aggressive than I intended. I just meant that I thought you were looking for a solution, but you were actually critiquing, so I felt like I'd wasted the time trying to help. Sorry to be an ass.
I was replying to a post that praised Discords UX. I agree, it's mostly excellent, but there are points that deserve critique, which prompted this response.
If you feel like that's whining, well, as an UX designer I'd welcome feedback on what could be improved.
Well that seemed to erase the "red dot without number" problem, but it still seems I get "red dot with number" that I have to go manually clear even when it's obvious that nobody has mentioned me.
For @ mentions, there is currently no way to fully (@everyone only per server, @name or @role not at all) disable them (I don’t mind that, I do want to read those). The red dot you can disable them in Settings -> Notifications -> Enable Unread Message Badge
My company is chugging the team’s koolaid, and there are tons of problems, but its integration with Sharepoint and onedrive will be hard to match. We’re not even supposed to keep any file locally anymore, everything in onedrive or Sharepoint, since Microsoft gives unlimited storage in our plan. All outlook meetings automatically have a teams link. Discord is better across the board in what it can do, but MS has a stranglehold on business because of excel and outlook. Teams is a throw in for MS and it’s hard to beat free.
I used to prefer trello to what ms offers for project management, but then you’re leaking your data and documents outside of the ms system which weakens security. This didn’t used to be a problem because MS was equally as suspicious.
However, most companies no longer want their own in house IT solutions and will just take everything that ms offers, and hand all data to ms.
There are elements I like about most of the above that I've used. Portions of Discord are really bad, especially on a phone. Teams is worse in ways, better than others. With Teams, I kind of want to disable half the features for all channels other than General.
It's arguably the best software in the "modern IRC" space.
Sure, anyone else could catch up, but Discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effortless voice channels and good UX, while Discord's competition seems to move in the opposite direction.
> discord has a core audience that cares about latency, low resource use, reliable effordless voice channels and good UX
Are we using the same program? Discord has easily the highest latency when compared to mumble and even teamspeak. It's chromium instance hogs resources like crazy, both ram and cpu time. The reliability is okayish at best, when using it with friends we had issues on multiple occasions where one user couldn't hear another one until he rejoined the voice channel. The ux is absolute garbage, unclear notifications everywhere, a horrible space-to-content ratio and """ funny""" gaming references in the loading screens. On top of that, they purposefully cripple the functionality regarding desktop recording from the browser, trying to bully more people into their app that records your running processes for further analysis.
I don't know if you consider this a technological advantage, but compared to Slack, Discord puts a relatively heavy emphasis on its live voice channel functionality. You can join and leave them at a whim, mute and control the volume of individual users, etc.
I personally also appreciate the fact that channels and servers can be grouped, and that the markup syntax supported in text chat is more compliant with markdown expectations than the markup supported by Slack.
It's hard to pitch discord in the workplace, especially against an incumbent like Slack or Teams. It comes across as very "casual" and unprofessional, which is a shame, because it really is a top-quality product.
It's never seemed to be a focus of Discord, it's just the niche they've chosen. Even their own homepage description doesn't mention work:
> Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often.
A business version would need 1st-party integrations with GSuite/LDAP/OAuth (you can work around this with a bot but that's already a negative). It needs audit log features, retention rules (for ATIP requests and the like), less gaming icons, a disabled game shop, strip out mentions of nitro. Lots of things really.
I’ve used Discord only for gaming and I would prefer all the non-voice stuff to be able to be hidden. If it wasn’t the most reliable audio for group voice chat that we’ve tried (Steam voice is still an echo-y mess for us three, Signal wouldn’t connect us, and then I conceded and went back to Discord), we’d use something else. I don’t like that it tracks what we’re playing, that it tries to be friendly with its treacly messages (it’s a tool; my shovel doesn’t say “welcome back, I missed you!”...), and that it keeps deleted accounts around. I can see that others may want all these and other Facebook-esque features. I like that Discord uses .opus codec, and that the audio is dependable and clear. Maybe Mumble to try next? What open-source options might work for enterprise?
For gaming, you might enjoy Teamspeak. It's closed-source, but you can run own your server, it's very much focused on voice comms, uses Opus and (IMO) has better audio filters.
They do support things like twitch subscriber-exclusive channels, so I think there's something there. And I don't use discord enough to know the ins-and-outs of how restrictive you can be with auth.
But I imagine you'd want to have SSO and some kind of managed directory, security groups, and all that. I don't know if discord supports that today.
They have users. If they wanted to they could become the next Steam tomorrow by simply selling games and giving deals. The engaged userbase of discord far surpasses steam, epic, and all other gaming clients. Valve doesn't care about competing or innovating, theyll simply roll over and let it happen.
But like any startup discord is created with monopoly money and therefore they don't have any actual knowledge, expertise, or good way of gaining revenue. They're designed to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get users and sell to a megacorp. They have no ability to manage a business that requires money outside of their investors monopoly money.
They already did try that, and they also then tried pivoting to subscription model (a la Gamepass), both failed and eventually they closed their game store entirely.
You could argue that maybe they tried it too soon, but I don't think so. The competition is kinda big with Microsoft, Steam and Epic. I don't think people want to own games on their chat app.
They already tried, it flopped and they killed off the feature. PC gamers already own games through Steam, no one wants to have to split their library if they can avoid it.
Data from a lot of users? I mean, they inspect all audio/video communications in real-time[1] and save all your messages, pictures etc. It also helps a lot that basically no one cares about privacy anymore, so further growth seems secured.
Does anyone in this space? At least, that has any user facing affect (i.e., 99.9% uptime vs 99.99% uptime is not something users will be comparing). It's all network effect and business model.
Isn't that true of virtually all internet companies BEFORE their IPO?
After the IPO, the new owners (aka: the stock market investors) demand profits. And those profit demands result in the slowly, but surely, fleecing of customers.
Be it Geocities, Tumblr, Slack, or whatever really. If you start with a "growth-oriented" service with a free product for clicks/subscribers, the community always grows disappointed when the money starts to flow. (Geocities / Tumblr were acquired, but same idea really. The new owners demanded $$$$ be made and the community suffered)
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In contrast, companies that seem to charge early (ie: Amazon: AWS or the storefront) seem to be more sustainable. Customers get used to paying for the service, and don't mind paying a fair price to stay a customer.
Alternatively: being a digital nomad: moving from service to service during their "free periods" seems moderately sustainable. It seems like new companies can offer free services... until they can't. At which point, you pick up your community and move to the next free service. Especially for communities built up around entertainment (video games), having a digital nomad lifestyle is fine since the community actually has tons of freetime.
It’s one of the most popular destinations for gaming/tech discussion rooms and teamtalk (during games) what they do, they do really well, that’s their advantage.
I assumed they wanted to buy the userbase. And use it to promote XBox and Game Pass.
I can see why Discord backed off if their vision is to have a broader audience of non-gamers. Joining Microsoft would have meant they'd be stuck in their pigeonhole.
The network effect is what makes it desirable. Anyone can push bits these days. Web technology is completely commoditized. But a strong brand and a great product team is priceless (or at least worth more than $10bn).
Brand; the days of “technological advantage” as a differentiator are over. Technology progress has plateaued in a great many industries over the last decade so it’s all about the product experience these days.
Honestly tho, Google could instantly leapfrog its competitors in the space by acquiring Discord. The Google ecosystem is desperately in need of a decent collaboration tool and everything Google tried to build in that space is shit.
Honestly teams “just works” for a lot of companies. My company had a 100% in-office culture and transitioned to using Teams extensively within a week of the pandemic starting. The fact that it’s built off of Active Directory and integrates with existing Sharepoint and Exchange systems is a huge plus for business users.
Totally agree it’s shit for developers though. But for business teams, MS Teams works great. Teams does “just work” — if you’ve already made a large investment into the Microsoft ecosystem (which, to be fair, 90% of corporate America has).
I find this "Teams is garbage" vs the experience at our company quite interesting.
We've been relying on Teams since the pandemic broke out. Us devs had been using it before just for chat and such, so was obvious fit.
Teams voice, video and screen sharing just works for us. Heck, today I helped my coworker with an urgent issue via a Teams call while I was hiking in the mountains. He shared his screen and I viewed it on my mobile phone, so I could talk him through a workaround. Worked smooth as ever.
There are some points where it's not as smooth, especially search is a pain. But basic functionality like chat, voice and video just works for us.
I can’t believe any of the people complaining here about low quality of the VoIP of Teams have used the VoIP of Discord, because they simply can’t compare. Teams have anti-coupling features and you can use it with speakers out of the box.
Discord does not have a good anti-coupling algorithms and it’s almost impossible to use it without headphones. Perfect for gamers, but not for business.
Discord is amazing to create communities, that’s what Microsoft wanted.
Let's hope that Discord doesn't end up going the way of Slack. Since Slack got overconfident over Microsoft Teams and lost and got acquired by Salesforce.
I wish I could "lose" by cashing out with $30 billion.
The truth is there is no room for a standalone service in an area as competitive as enterprise communication. Microsoft would be able to undercut them in price no matter what. Bundling is the only way forward, and hopefully Salesforce can put in the resources to keep it competitive.
Personally, I'm finding the transition from Slack to Teams absolutely maddening. Do people actually prefer Teams or is it that many large enterprises already had Office 365 licenses?
They are both garbage. Neither of them gets webrtc right in 2021, while Discord has had it working for years now. It is a rare thing, that I cannot hear someone on Discord and I can use it with any browser, while Teams and Slack still give me the middle finger for trying to do a call when using Firefox.
So whatever makes people use Teams, it's not Teams working well, that much is for sure.
Teams voice/video is better than Slack, worse than Zoom. In basically every other respect it's inferior to either Discord, Slack, or Zoom. The fact that I can't move the video thumbnails from their default location at the bottom of a call boggles my mind every day.
But Office is the standard, so bundling it Microsoft won the enterprise by default.
I don't think they got overconfident at all - I think that slack was relatively well built but lacking too much of a value proposition to differentiate themselves. Then they got acquired before anyone realized how much of their usage was marketing driven and how little was driven by the quality of their application.
I'm not saying it's bad by any means - in fact the search functionality is pretty sweet... but there is very little there that couldn't be out competed.
Agree. They came out of the gates with a really well put together chat app, that made a massive impact. Then, basically, didn’t advance it beyond that. It is still great for chat, but Teams is sooo much more useful for the virtual office, and discord waaay better for social. Slack is in an ever decreasing middle zone.
And I think they're starting to regret that acquisition, as their last Q started to show signs of a turnaround. If they had waited and didn't cave in to Wall St pressure, I bet they would've figured things out eventually.
Discord is more like a ventrilo replacement for gamers. It was primarily voice chat in its early days. They've done a lot of work to make the chatroom space on par with any other chat application you'd use otherwise. They also now allow for direct screenshare and game streaming.
I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least.
Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had:
- No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience.
- No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better.
- Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack.
One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs.
Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.
Slack has a million enterprise focused features. If your company's Discord server has to go through eDiscovery for a lawsuit, for example, you are going to have a bad time.
And if Teams is any indication as to the resulting quality of the end product, it won't be very good. It amazes me a company as rich and big as Microsoft struggles to build good software when it comes to copying competitors.
Let's be fair! Slack copied Yammer in large parts, which was acquired by Microsoft. And Teams is actually better than Slack in many ways. I don't think they will just add features to Teams that compete with Discord. It probably would "fix" Skype.
Here's an interesting blog post from 3 years ago titled "How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users using WebRTC" [1]. I guess the number of connections has increased in the meanwhile.
Amazon (Twitch), Epic, and Valve are all targeting gaming verticals. Each of them are integrating the other's features as also-rans: streaming, marketplace, reviews, community, platform. Most people would probably be surprized to know that you can buy games on Twitch and stream on Steam.
What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world.
Discord will always have a market as long as competing marketplaces / ecosystems exist on PC. Discord's platform agnosticism makes it a safer bet than the three companies you mentioned, all of which are incentivized to build closed content ecosystems that antagonize each other in order to move more product. There is simply no other solution that allows me to see what my friends are playing, jump into their channel, and see the gameplay broadcast live from multiple perspectives in a private environment.
The Netflix analogy is not particularly apt here either, as where Netflix produces the content, here the content is user generated. So its about technological executions, platform agnosticism, and features sets. Valve's Steam app on iOS didnt even support iPhone X screen resolutions until a year and a half ago so I wouldnt hold my breath for them to compete well in this space at all. Maybe Epic's acquisition of houseparty could cause some competition for them? But I doubt it.
In theory could Microsoft just wait for them to go public then buy up a huge number of shares and give themselves a stronger voice inside the company for acquisition?
I think Microsoft is smarter than that, look at Github for example, people have largely forgotten it's owned by MSFT. They would have left Discord as a gaming platform and used it's tech in Teams instead. Teams is so behind Discord in all areas except video quality.
Very poorly polished stuff, to be honest. Before, they always seemed to take great care in making their core product (and the API for it) great. The only thing I can think of that was similarly unpolished was GitHub Enterprise.
I don't think GitHub staff has forgotten. Actions are straight up Azure Pipelines. The code is a huge mess. If I didn't know better I'd say it's obscured by design. Check out the actions/runner repo if you don't believe me. They polished them very well for the hosted version, but the cracks show if you try to use the self-hosted version.
I can't believe anyone at GitHub is particularly thrilled about having a Microsoft technology that broken imposed on them.
Can I just say, while I believe Discord will die anyway if it IPOs (as with anything that believes in infinite scaling), I would have loved to see Microsoft enact the special fucked up kind of integration that only they can manage
This is how tech startups work, isn't it? Use investors to build a product with no business model, then the founders cash out via purchase or IPO, and soon after the fact that you have no business model comes to light and the product falls apart trying to find a business model, while users move on to the next shiny thing with no business model.
Glad I'm not the only one thinking this. Seems obvious, but I always felt like I was missing something. How is it that most of the tech/SV world is just the same con being run over and over again, yet it keeps working? Does it operate on the same psychological glitch as a lottery? Do the giant corps buying these startups all think "I know how it's been in the past, but surely THIS startup WON'T turn to shit the moment I buy it because it was never a real business to begin with! This time for sure!"
Or are the real suckers the investors, and the corps are just doing these purchases in a performative capacity to keep razzle-dazzling them?
A lot of actual profits have been made by mature tech companies. Valuations seem too high right now, but I don’t think it’s a giant fraud. More like there’s nothing better to invest in.
Yes, the model is entirely built on acquisitions, where discord itself can't be profitable, but part of Microsoft it can deliver value by deepening the mote around everything else.
Many things are only valuable as a public good or part of monopoly. Such is funny relationship between monopolization and socialism.
Discord has a business model: Get people engaged in a community, sell them Nitro so they can boost their communities [1][2]. The "buy benefits for you community" scheme is wildly successful in mobile games, so I wouldn't be surprised if it works well for Discord.
The fact that they are trying to sell/IPO is pretty strong evidence that they are not profitable, I think. But regardless, I will give them massive props for not just doing the ad thing, which is the last gasp of this style of startup before they finish circling the drain. Lookin' at you, Imgur.
I would in all honesty give them even bigger props, as someone who used to be but isn't a fan anymore. They tried to add a game store a la steam into it but realized it didn't get the engagement they'd hoped for so they stopped putting time and effort into it and shut it down.
My first impression when they first added it was that they'd just shove it down people's throats and keep trying to make it work.
I hope I'm not wrong about them getting rid of it again and I've just gotten used to tuning all that out when using discord.
This is what flailing around trying to find a business model looks like. If Imgur was profitable without those ads, they wouldn't be abusing their users like this.
The second they try to monetize discord like a mobile game is the second all of my friends stop using it and hop to the next silicon Valley chat app that pops up
I’d slightly revise your description of the scheme from no business model to a intentional no revenue business model allowing for the valuation speculation to run rampant (i.e. at anytime we could stop investing in our growth, then it’s all profits). Of course by the time they go public like say Uber and set multiple records on quarterly losses and the investors drop the bag on the public it becomes obvious they can’t stop spending or the business will go under so instead they will continue accumulating billion dollar plus losses every quarter so by the time the shit hits the fan original founders and investors are on to the next thing and can always say they took a xx billion dollar startup public and that’s when the company lost its culture and the corporate greed ruined it.
Corporate greed is for sure a problem, but... does Discord even make money? I'm guessing their S-1 will reveal that they are ludicrously unprofitable, and they will actually have to fix that if they go public, corporate greed or no.
In general, I try not to fall in love with free products that seem too good to be true, because the party has to come to an end at some point.
At least on my hardware Skype and Teams are much more responsive than Discord though. And the laptop's coolers get the workout of their lifetime whenever Discord spins up.
They'd probably turn this IM into family friendly safe bay with strictly moderated content - because let's be honest, nowadays anything goes in. Discord accounts at first would be offered an optional merge with MSA and in long time, you'd have to log into using MSA credentials only. Microsoft Discord branding would arrive. There would be a business oriented version created and MS would abandon Teams; basic Discord would have ads related to your activity - you could avoid that (along with telemetry) by purchasing a subscription as the current monetization options would be removed. A special version with github/git related features would be created - for free, but only for those who are really using it in code related tasks.
Yes, but Microsoft would probably prefer to offer such subscription among own plans - like 356, and that would also happen after Discord would get Microsoft branding. It's a pure guess of course but I think it could happen.
Deeper Xbox integration, probably. Microsoft knows the writing is on the wall that Xbox Party Chat usage is way down and a lot of it has been replaced by gamers with Discord.
They know it so well the new Xbox Wireless Headset essentially has a "Discord feature" though obviously not named or marketed directly as that. (It supports dual pairing with a bluetooth phone for "phone calls over game audio", but everyone I know got the message between lines that it supports Discord chat, and were talking about the headset precisely because of that feature.)
Microsoft would have bought Discord for the gaming community and pursued tight integration with the XBox ecosystem. Which could have boosted the platform, but probably not in a way that resulted in a lot of direct revenue.
The S-1 will reveal all, a tight integration with Xbox and not a lot of direct revenue may still ultimately result in a sustainable and viable product, once you go public indefinite quarterly losses don’t get saved by the next funding round at higher valuations.
I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing AFAIK that can replicate this particular experience except for Teamspeak, which has other problems.