$120M in annual revenue from server boosts and nitro subscriptions? That seems crazy.
I'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
As someone who is not by any means a discord power user, and who doesn't generally pay for skins, even I have been tempted to buy boosts just so that I can use emojis from some servers on other servers, because I think they're funny. If discord can tempt even me to buy, I have no trouble believing they can close the deal with many others.
Yeah, cross-server emoji are shockingly valuable to me as well. Some servers just have terrible custom emojii, and having a choice of some non-terrible emoji is worth the price.
I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
What I find irritating is the absence of what Chinese/Korean/Japanese apps have: a curated sticker market where the platform takes a cut of money that goes to the IP holder (brand or artist).
Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.
Paying for cosmetic features has been, traditionally, one of the monetization models in gaming (which discord is inherently intertwined with) that ends up the least scummy.
Emoji are in the sweet spot where if you can’t use special emoji you don’t really care, but some people find them shiny enough to pay for. It’s not innovation, but it’s definitely a perfect target for monetization.
You're not paying for emoji, your paying for an incredible product that provides a lot of value. Emoji is just one feature they hold back to tempt you to pay for the amazing thing you have been given for free.
It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.
It is nothing compared to the money that flies around inside Twitch broadcast chats. Someone buys everyone a subscription to gain the favor of the host. Someone else donates $xxx to get their name on-screen. And it happens pretty far down the long-tail.
I would say its more organic than intentional, but many streamers encourage fans to join a Discord if they have one, as a higher level of engagement. A chat channel is 'sticky' whereas the chat linked only to a broadcast is ephemeral.
Discord has 300+ million users (based on the forbes article). Even if everyone were paying for the cheap $5/mo nitro classic (which is worst case scenario for revenue, but best case scenario for # of paying customers) subscription, that's 24 million paying subscribers, which is less than 10% of their user base. Seems pretty reasonable given that the free tier includes so much.
Discord does not sell user data. We've stated this many times, unequivocally. Our monetization puts the user as the customer, not say, the product to be sold to advertisers (read: other social networks.) We think that this alignment of incentives sets us up to do the best by our users. Our monetary success depends on how great an experience we can build for our users, such that they convert to a paid subscriber - while not gating everything behind a paywall. Hence why our premium subscription service generally includes cosmetic incentives, that are optional to the core experience of chat, and as well, and unlocks stuff like higher quality streaming (since it costs us more to run, we unlock higher quality once you pay us.)
As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy
> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.
> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.
> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.
The free service is really featureful, and people really like the "accoutrements"† that you get from Nitro as well as supporting the server(s) they like.
Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:
------------------------------------------------
† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡
‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.
Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.
The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".
It's common in gaming discords, mainly for hi-res streaming. For other communities I suspect the status of boosting and the feeling of "supporting the community" is popular, in a patreon-like way.
It’s centralized, closed source SaaS, it’s not an open, standardised internet protocol with a vast selection of clients (and servers, real servers!) to choose from.
10 years from now, Discord will be gone but IRC will remain.
These days I prefer Matrix, but I have no doubt IRC will stay around. Maybe even because of Matrix users like myself who just keep bridging it in.
"Remaining" is a pretty weak consolation. Is that all that matters? The biggest Freenode channel I'm a part of is #nodejs. It has maybe 10 regulars. All of us probably 30+ years old, only clinging to the corpse of IRC out of old habit. And in 10 years we will all be 40+, and in another 10, we will all be 50+.
On the other hand, in 10 years if Discord pulls the plug, you'll have a community of people that can migrate elsewhere. To any other solution that will pop up. Because it's the people that are the community, not the platform. Whether I have to use Discord or Slack or future solutions is merely incidental and entirely swappable.
One example that comes to mind is https://thedonald.win/. Reddit killed their subreddit (r/the_donald), so they just moved elsewhere.
Case in point.. I used to run game servers for maybe over 1000+ guilds over the years I was active. Even talking 10 years ago, people were still using Skype for connecting to games... just because it doesn't fit your use-case doesn't mean the market wasn't competing.
IRC was also in the space. Look at the dozens+ IRC servers which had communities built around them... they've mostly migrated to Discord.
I'd love to know your counter point to such an absolute-claim though... because I positively agree with the author.
I think we might have different definitions of competition. As of July 2020, Discord had over 100-million monthly users. At last count, netsplit.de reports 360k IRC "users". That's not even 1% of the Discord user base and it's shrinking every year. No new significant IRC communities have emerged in at least a decade because it's a dying protocol while Discord adds millions of users every month. Yes, IRC is an alternative to Discord but it's not a competitor (to Discord, or any other protocol) by any stretch of the imagination.
Why? In open source, many communities now have moved from IRC to discord, a very sad move if you ask me. I think it will also become increasingly relevant for professional networking in the CS world.
If the open source project is serious about building a compelling community that people would actually hang out at, they'd consider Discord/Slack.
Elm lang has an IRC channel. Like all IRC channels on Freenode, it's pretty much dead. One reason being that only a small fraction of people even are willing to use IRC, mostly because they're old enough to know wtf it is.
But then the Elm creator started a Slack server. ...And it's absolutely bustling. There's people getting help. There's people giving help. There's people golfing code or discussing design ideas. There's people sharing their projects and receiving feedback. There's different channels. There's people meeting people and making friends. There's people sending messages to offline users and offline users able to read them when they come back online. And there's even people posting multiline code snippets, something that tends to come in handy for a software project of all things.
There's people who want to grow an online community, they tend to discover Discord very quickly. No brainer. And then there's people who want to convince an increasingly empty room that the application layer protocol behind the community is what matters most.
Some still rely on Discord for the community, finding players etc., but use voice chats from elsewhere. For instance lots of CS players I know used to use IRC to plan games and then Teamspeak for voice chat during the match. Those I know still do the same, they have just moved from IRC to Discord, but TS remains.
Just when I thought I finally had a better understanding of what discord was you go and make this statement! Do you mean that it goes further than merely providing text based communication?
As I hyper-casual gamer now, I also like that I can drop into any of the servers I've joined and those communities still know who I am. I maybe play 10 games of Dota a year, and I'm still on first name terms with the people I play with. Disord is just hands down the unifying glue that brings together any type of gaming community, it attacked the problem by always offering a better experience to alternatives, and providing tight integration to the platforms that helped it grow. Every single game chat voice just sucks compared to Discord.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
>every single game voice chat just sucks compared to discord
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
Discord has "good enough" voice audio quality and infinitely easier on-boarding and usage compared to Mumble. Most users, especially gamers who often have higher-spec machines then normal users, don't care about RAM usage.
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
I'm not arguing that the features/ease of use is the reason why its doing well. All of those features are unmatched for average consumers that don't care about their privacy which is their customer/product base. I didn't say anything about the features you mentioned and was talking about voice chat only.
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage.
Source?
Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
That's fair, there is a distinction between the actual process of using voice chat versus the specifications of the voice chat. It seems that I took OP as referring to the former, while you're referring to the latter.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
250mb for a singleton app is not that big of a deal these days. Most browser tabs use more memory than that these days (which really does make me mad).
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
A key feature that I never see discord having is nested subchannels with whisper/shout. I play a game where we will have thousands of players in the same shard and need people to be able to communicate with each other in subchannels while still being able to hear and speak up to the entire channel. We did switch from Jabber to Discord for paging purposes though.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
That's a 'key feature' for a rather narrow niche of players. Which makes a lot of sense - voice chat itself was once a special thing for srscat gaming enthusiasts. The trouble is, the voice chat products themselves got stuck there, even as networking, median hardware and multiplayer gaming itself got a lot more popular. Discord is just a better product, not for 'the mass market' but generally and it's worth studying rather than dismissing its success especially if you want better voice chat tools that also meet your specialized needs.
I think in many ways discord hits it's peak when it can separate easily into multiple voice channels each with about 4-10 people each. I really like nested voice channels (like Mumbles linked channels) but really they don't show their benefits until you're deep into more complicated stuff (raids/etc) then the average person hits.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
Negative, if you get their triggered anti spam response for creating an account fresh, or even logging into an existing account, you literally cannot log into that account anymore without providing a nonvoip phone number. You have to attach a phone number to continue.
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
Discords voice quality is definitely better then you would expect, but going between a properly set up Mumble server and normal discord voice always shows a bit of a difference to me.
For me and my friends the audio quality is fine, but the latency just kills it. There's like 150-200ms of delay (just guessing based on how it feels, haven't timed it properly). It's as bad as Skype in our testing.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
There is a part of me that agrees, wholeheartedly, but then there is the other part of me that opted for 64GB of RAM in my gaming desktop because it was trivial in the overall cost of the system.
I play league and CSGO on my 8gb laptop, but the Discord desktop client was superb glitchy for me. I don’t know if it was ram or what, but it was unusable.
> Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
It's a winner for the early investors. A winner for later stage investors including the IPO ones? Who knows. People love moving from one social platform to another. Discord might just disappear in a few years just like ICQ disappeared.
I don't know about everyone else, but I also seem to be moving to different chat ecosystems every two or three years. From Campfire to Hangouts to Slack to Discord.
A user would have a difficult time leaving the platform, even if they preferred an alternative, unless all of their friends and communicates also left, similar to why leaving a platform like Facebook or Reddit can be so difficult.
Discord is mostly small groups, which aren't strongly coupled to each other. It's pretty easy to move a small group. I am part of a couple of small groups which have migrated between platforms several times. I don't think Discord has a network effect anything like Facebook's.
Honestly, I think you would be surprised. Talk to some males aged 14-18 that play video games, and you may find that almost their entire social life and graph is on Discord.
Discord is what social media should have been - a nice place to hang out online without the vanity.
Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
Discord really is a high quality service. I remember a friend of mine in either late 2015 or early 2016 told us to give it a shot instead of Skype. This is the same friend that tried to get us to use Mumble and Teamspeak in the past, but we were dissatisfied with the audio quality. We gave it a shot and never went back.
Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord.
If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
I have literally zero of those issues, so I'm curious why our experiences are so far apart...
From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
I've enjoyed using discord, but I also have all of these issues. You'd have to ask the software why it's nicer to you than us, and why it didn't by default exfiltrate the names of unrelated programs you had open.
I don't know if Skype got better but back when the universal switch to discord began, skype was very bad. It also crashed, it also had bugs, and its VOIP quality was poor (better than Adobe Connect or the stuff you'd see shipping with a AAA game, but still poor.)
Man, I kept seeing the phrase 10x better and expected some quantification. It could be 2x better and get 10x the audience because it was sufficiently compelling.
I’ve analyzed the interfaces of Discord and all other chat/community apps as part of research for the UI/UX work we do for clients [1] and from my perspective, the Interface seems to be a big part of the winning factor. It may be just one of the many reasons why Discord does so well, but it’s often overlooked.
Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software.
Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure).
Discord has so many features that make it feel like it was made by and for gamers. Like the "currently playing" statuses, or "streamer mode" that hides identifying info when you have OBS open. It also works better than anything else for large communities with its roles/notifications system. It has a good design but I don't see it as particularly playful, just really well executed
There are random joke-lines when you open the program. Also the logo is funny. That's about it for fun, but I think the joke-lines are there just to deviate attention from the fact that discord updates every 2 or 3 days which is annooying.
Yeah, Discord still impresses me with how clean the interface _feels_ to put it simply. I remember only being on the Discord web client for a long time and remarking how much I enjoyed the interactions despite not being a native app. Then I loaded up the console and was pleasantly surprised to see it was all built in React. I suddenly felt very insecure about my own skill with React :p
Not at all. Slack is noticably sluggish and has notable delay whenever I click a channel. In Discord those things are instant for me. Slack has a silly Markdown parser, while in Discord is simply works. The list goes on.
The playfulness is endearing, but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me, even after having used it for years now. It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.
It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.
Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
Calling workspaces for servers is actually a bit of an “aha”-moment for me.
I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)
The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
Oh man, I HATE that discord ties everything to the same email. I have personal discords, work discords, side project-based discords, and community discords.
I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.
The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.
The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.
> FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.
Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.
I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
> I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.
I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.
Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.
You can use PTB(public test branch) as an alt, or Franz or Web for more than 3 accounts, though it’s a workaround than a solution, and neural noise suppression also don’t work for non-official clients.
I agree. Discord has one of the most confusing UIs I've used for a while. My first exposure to Discord was when somebody told me to join their Discord server - I was like "where do I put in the address?". Slack calls them "workspaces" which is less confusing. The channel interface is also quite confusing, as you say - joining a voice channel is really weird.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
Yeah that's another thing: in "direct" (non-server) group conversations, the text chat and any voice/video chat for that same group of people belong to a single "conversation" entity. But when it comes to channels on a server, "text channels" and "voice channels" are disjoint categories. There are just lots of little inconsistencies like this that muddy one's mental model.
yes it is. must be something else about it that confuses them. I guess having joining a voice channel be one click could be considered odd if you are not used to initiating a "call" that allows people to hear you immediately like that.
You get used to it quickly, but it is odd. Putting an explicit "Join" button with some relevant icon next to the channel name would be much more intuitive. It would also clarify, for example, how you leave the channel. Once you're in one, a separate "Leave" button appears at a totally different location in the footer of the UI, but I can't honestly be sure whether or not clicking the channel name would also do the job of backing you out.
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
It's completely natural now but I remember not realizing it and forgetting how to join the first few times. Also accidentally joining voice channels etc.
I do wonder if they'll rename servers to 'communities' at some point. A recent blogpost[1] referenced Discord as being made up of communities. As someone with a tech background who game to discord through gaming, servers did make sense (in the sense of old multiplayer servers (pre-matchmaking) rather than IRC server hosts).
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
Discord's "server" language is a throwback to non-centralized voice chats like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, where each group of users really would run their own chat server. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop that language eventually, especially since most of the users who would have recognized it have probably already migrated.
Interestingly, Discord's developer documentation and API still consistently calls them "Guilds", which I find a much better name, personally, but of course is even more of a term with gaming baggage, and "Server" was the eventually official neutral choice after that.
That's part of what I mean by gaming baggage, it's generally not a common word in contemporary English parlance unless you are a gamer or a history buff (and obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram; part of why games use the term so often is how much medieval-inspired fantasy infuses the history of videogaming).
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
My favorite is shift + alt + up/down arrow to move to the next unread channel. Works between servers too. Super easy way to knock out hundreds of unread messages at once.
Ctrl+K just searches for channel. I was looking more for something where I could switch between 2 different channels quickly. Like I'm messaging someone but then have to quickly switch to a different channel to address some issue and then quickly switch back without having to click on or search for the previous channel.
Couldn't you argue that being in the state of constant learning but never the feeling of being utterly lost keeps you on discord. Like it keeps making things feel fresh and when you want to change mappings or what ever you can move your servers around and what not. I don't know maybe not but I get where you are coming from. I find DM especially can get really mixed but than again I don't hate that. I think the threading idea that something like slack or teams(worst) is to much. I'm just trying to talk to people I don't need a thread the channel already classified what's going on there if need to look something up I can search the channel.
The channel UI is still confusing to me. When I'm watching a stream, I haven't been able to figure out how to stop watching without leaving the voice channel entirely
> It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.
You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!
After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."
When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)
Yup - Slack is geared for teams, and Discord is geared for groups. Discord has much better moderation tools - permissions, roles, etc; Discord makes it easy to run a server strangers can join. Slack has virtually no moderation tools at all, and even at the paid tiers, it's weak. Slack is a very poor choice for anything but a tight-knit top-down administrated group, where moderation can happen outside the app itself.
I think a lot of enterprise is going to end up on Teams simply because it’s part of your Office365 package. It’s kind of hard to justify paying for something that you already have, and it integrating so well with the rest of the 365 package makes it a lot easier to roll out in a non-tech savvy enterprise.
Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.
The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.
I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
I seriously considered trying to move my software team onto Discord (the majority use it anyway in their personal life). The concept of always on voice channels that you can pop in and out of and see who is in is great. I'm actually a fan of Teams (which is what we're using), but that lowering of the barrier of a team member popping in to ask a question or join a chat would have been great.
A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins and see no more account data than everyone else on the server. This means people can freely join "hostile" servers and servers with untrusted admins, which is important for gaming, considering the toxicity of many communities.
> A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins
That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.
“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.
Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
We called them servers because our early adopters were coming from Ventrillo and Teamspeak (eg: Vent server, Teamspeak server, etc) and we wanted to use familiar terminology.
I don't think it's intentionally misleading. Its roots are in gaming in which "server" is often the term used for an instance and no one misconstrues ownership in that context. Some games let you self-host a server, but it's increasingly rare. More commonly, you reserve/join an instance on the developer's servers and you tell your friend(s), "Come join my server". Whether that be a Minecraft Realm or a WoW shard.
Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
On the flip side, it makes it difficult to spot dupe accounts or ban evasion attempts. I run a moderate-sized server and I have a suspicion that one of our members has weird conversations with himself across multiple accounts, but I have absolutely no way to verify that since I can't see any IPs or hostnames.
One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.
This is true, but having a phone number requirement lowers accessibility to the server for users who either don't have a phone or aren't comfortable providing their number.
Catering to people who don't own a phone (Richard stallman and kids in Africa) is a lower priority to most mods than stopping waves of trolls and spammers.
I dunno how much of a difference it makes... most people don't know that the admins of a slack can see everything, including the histories on unpaid slacks.
Compliance exports (inc. private channel and/or DM conversations in which the exporter was not participating) have never been a part of free plans, and that hasn't changed in the last year.
Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.
You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.
Kind of. Admins can see all channels, and can forcibly insert themselves into any voice channel (even if it's full). But you're right in that their domain only extends to the _server_ and not your user account which is not tied to the server and they have no ownership over.
geese I can't stand the UI. The worst part is dealing with muting servers/channels because most admins don't seem to set up reasonable settings (ex: have the main channel always send notifications to everyone on every message.)
I don't think it's possible for community admins to have any control over notifications; Those are entirely under your control. That said, I agree with you; those settings can get messy and difficult to manage.
They're referring to the default notification settings that admins can set. Annoyingly, the Discord default (when you create a new server) is "All Messages" and not "Only @mentions". Sometimes I find another server still on "all messages" for some reason.
Sure it's possible to change, but it's not good. It's really a regression from previous group chat applications. The post I was replying to was arguing that discord is popular because it had a good UI.
To me it is good UI at least for that, because "Where do you set the volume for a single user?" Well just right click exactly on that user! Where else? It cannot be in global options and it would be too much info for always displaying it under each user name. It belong in that context menu. Solid UI for me.
Now that Discord has taken such a strong foothold I wish they would offer an "enterprise" skin or something like that because I would love to replace my work's Slack chat with Discord. Discord is miles ahead of Slack in terms of stability.
I keep hearing this but slack always works for me? never crashes, audio always works, I get notification when I should. Am I doing something wrong? I've never used discord, full disclosure.
Really? As someone who's been using Discord since 2015 the interface is by far the worst aspect of it in my opinion. The desktop client has a minimum width, the channel list is not resizable, Ctrl+K for some reason doesn't prioritize channels in the current server, no tabs, you now need 2 clicks to reach your mentions instead of 1, if you don't have access / don't want to use a scrollwheel the server list is literally unusable (and even then, it feel awful reaching for the last servers), the client lags insanely hard if you're in a voice chat (Linux 5.8.14 with RX 5700 XT), virtually no accessibility features (besides TTS, which admittedly was there from the start)...
These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.
Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
Threads in Slack suck so hard though (no recursive threads, no way to answer one specific message in a thread making it a subthread) and Slack itself is approximately one fifth as performance as Discord. On a modern machine I have 4 cores 100% usage for 20 after starting plus lots of CPU usage when switching channels or opening threads.
I find playfulness great but it can backfire when a serious problem crops up. Then it starts looking like unprofessionalism.
This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).
I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
> Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.
They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
+1 it's all about the UX. It's just an incremental improvement against any competitor of the times (infinite logs, efficient search, multi-server, easy bots, audio chat rooms that work better...). It's pretty clear Discord has talented _designers_.
And better UX has made Discord increasingly useful to conduct business on.
Is Discord profitable? An estimated $120M sounds like a hefty chunk of change, but I wonder what their expenses look like, especially if they're relied heavily on VC money in the past to subsidize having the servers be free.
Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
My child uses discord to coordinate play across multiple platforms, Xbox, mobile, and switch.
Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness.
As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for.
Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
Are there different servers for her games? Is it with friends she made in person in the past or are these friends she made via these online communities?
I see the same thing with my kids, in some way it is the new basic, they do their first steps in setting up servers, bots and decorating which is very appealing for girls. Inadvertently I feel like discord is doing much more to attract girls to the field than a lot of other well meaning initiatives.
Discord is indeed the shit. Slack is too business oriented, it assumes that I'm a member of one workspace (my place of employment) as opposed to a member of a shit ton interest oriented channels.
I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly.
I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.
LLVM uses Discord as an alternative to IRC. Discord has a modern pleasant interface. Discord is to IRC as Uber/Lyft are to a taxi company phone number. It however has a weird copyright agreement for user’s content.
Discord has the best chat UI and experience of any similar tool. Slack is a close second, and Teams a distant third. If Slack can figure out their infrastructure issues, and undo many of the poor UX decisions from the past 12-18 months, they can beat teams. However, if Discord decides to move into the business world and offer a competitively priced product, I could see that doing very well. I honestly don't know why they'd do that, but a business version of Discord is very attractive to me at least.
I think there's a lot that could be done in regards to navigation around. Like it works, and it's clear it's inspired from the more mainline chatting interface that's been around for what feels like centuries. But any time I'm using the default client, if I'm not using hotkeys or ctrl+k to navigate across channels, there's just way too much clicking and scrolling. Not to mention you can only have one active chat buffer on display.
There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
I really feel the author could have used the term "10x" a little bit more.
And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
There's a lot to be said for low/nonexistent barrier to entry. But like any large platform, such success comes at a price. Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff.
Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience.
Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes.
Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Sorry, I've altered my edit to remove the explicit insinuation of astroturfing. I was just a little shocked when I finished my submission and saw the sameness of all the other comments.
Arguably on IRC you can use OTR (you need a secure medium to exchange a secret or fingerprints). Its usability is awful so barely anyone uses it, but at least you can.
There was actually a plugin for BetterDiscord that did that that I used (probably 2 years ago now). Can't find it anymore, but it did exist and worked pretty well.
I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
IRC users certainly experience arbitrary censorship by petty tyrants. Of course they can move to a different IRC server (or start their own), but that's not really any easier than moving from Discord to IRC or vice versa.
It’s trivial to connect to multiple IRC servers with any of the popular clients. I don’t think it makes sense to compare that to switching to an entirely different protocol/software stack.
I want to like IRC. Discord is great for gaming or chatting with friends and random people casually, but certain IRC channels tend to have extremely knowledgeable, helpful people you can't find much elsewhere. But IRC clients are just so frustrating. Just today I open the IRC client on my phone and the IP I'm currently assigned is banned from one server? I also tend to have random connection issues to certain servers and trying to Google errors messages shows me forum posts 15 years old that are vague and not helpful in diagnosing the issue.
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
This is the great irony, isn't it? You want to escape Discord, because it's centralized, so you jump to a decentralized service, whose user experience sucks, so you sign up for another centralized service, just so you can use the decentralized service that was supposed to get you away from centralization in the first place.
If IRC had an objectively better user experience, objective usage numbers would show that. It has a better user experience /for you/ because it caters to the things that /you/ care about.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
Using a centralized IRC service like IRCCloud is an option, but not one I would opt for personally. There are also other options, ZNC and The Lounge both come to mind. You can self-host these or find an instance hosted by somebody else.
Self-hosted Matrix works fine and great. You can host either just a server, Riot (Element now), or both. You can then use any client you want with your server or any other.
That is why I literally said in my second paragraph that "hosting [...] your own server would probably be the best choice". Also, I was replying to somebody who complained about connection issues on his phone. He probably doesn't want to have a random timeouts when he travels from one place to another and potentionally miss important messages...
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
>It is not a viable option for secure communication
Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services.
I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff.
Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common.
All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord.
Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization.
Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself.
Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it's my number-one most hated software program in my life. Exceeding even the sins of Adobe and Microsoft.
It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC.
And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude).
That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc.
---
The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology.
Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days).
That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
> Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible.
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
> Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff.
Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.
If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
The censorship angle is likely how discord shuts down servers used to organise gatherings that are borderline terrorism and servers used to share anime under age content.
Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.
I've been trying to figure out if Discord is actually a competitor to Slack as I've never seen anyone use discord for anything but gaming.
That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out.
The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom.
I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
I can’t comment on Teams vs Slack, or on its other productivity features but I’ve been using Teams on a daily basis for some fairly large meetings and it’s never faltered - way more reliable than Skype was at least.
My issue is more with how information is presented and data is stored. I think Teams just has too many ways to do things and obfuscates too much at times... finding old docs or old conversations can be tedious and sending messages to wrong "teams" mistakingly is an easy thing to do.
I can't even go fullscreen in a Teams meeting anymore after a "recent" (read: months and months ago) update. My small laptop has 1/4 of the screen taken by UI and taskbar, even in "focus" mode.
I use Discord for mostly non-gaming interests. I'm part of a bunch of music specific discords for example. Lots of specific genre subreddits (/r/rnbheads, /r/popheads, /r/hiphopheads, etc) use Discord.
As-is I don't consider Discord a competitor to Slack without massive fundamental changes. Chat and content is heavily censored, you risk permanent bans, incredibly privacy invading, unencrypted, all that.
It is pretty much fluff chat en masse the way it is now without huge contractual and infrastructure modifications.
I'm an academic mathematician who has used Discord professionally, in at least two contexts:
1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebraic Geometry Syndicate" and "Modern Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry".
The activity includes: technical math chat; people giving each other advice (e.g. on the job market or online teaching); advertisements of online conferences; some other stuff.
2. I've also been on Discord forums attached to weekend online conferences. These were sort of similar, but short-lived -- and we also encouraged everyone to introduce themselves. We had a "math memes contest" and organized a board games night for all who were interested. Basically, it was an attempt to replicate some of the social aspects of conferences.
It seems like Slack is designed for groups of people who all work at the same company. Discord worked well for us -- where participants work/study all over, and where it's super easy to join.
I don't play video games at all, and I'm on a dozen or so Discord servers for various open-source projects, meetup groups, private projects, Reddit subs, groups of friends, etc.
we swapped from slack to discord at work. It's been good. It pretty much is the same as slack, the UI, if you compare side by side is very similar ( but look different ). Discords easy voice channels was a deciding factor. The downsides, without paying, is screen sharing is 720p, which Slack doesn't have, and file uploads are small ish, where in slack you can upload relatively big files
Anecdata, but I find Discord great if you're dealing with a big group of people that need to be moderated; it's got great tooling for that. There's multiple access levels, permissions, etc. exactly geared for that. When you're dealing with a trusted, invite-only group, you don't need many (if any) moderation features. Then, Slack shines for its ability to have organized, opt-in discussion. I really hate that you can't leave text channels on Discord.
I've been trying to move friend groups more towards Slack and it's been a huge improvement over group texts / Facebook chat / etc.
(of course, for our gaming group, discord voice chat is still superb. But, we only use it once a week and all the rest of our chatter/discussion happens in our new Slack team)
My main nit with Discord over Slack is lack of threading. After that, the voice/video did not feel suitable for a business setting - the PTT format works for coop play but it's annoying to have it on constantly at work. I prefer explicitly scheduled video calls there.
Beyond that, there is a somewhat long tail of little features like integrations, LDAP, etc.
> the PTT format works for coop play but it's annoying to have it on constantly at work
You can switch to "open mic" with a mic threshold (with an "auto" option), which would probably work well in a meeting situation where keyboard noise isn't an issue.
There is slight overlap but for personal use Discord is far better (family, friends, gaming). It's fun to have a Discord family room where people can drop comments and share stuff as opposed to Facebook using that data for their evil machinations.
I'm a founder of a company making Jira/Trello competitor [0] and we actually just released a Discord integration this week (we've had a Slack one for ages) because we had a number of customers and potential customers ask for it. So a small N, but it does seem to be gaining in popularity inside companies, at least smaller ones.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I do have a few nitpicks:
> Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process.
> Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow.
To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server.
> Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching.
> Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly).
How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
> Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated,
This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.
The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.
For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
I've had a lot of success telling people "just click next" for every button in the Mumble setup, but Mumble doesn't make things simple for the non-enthusiastic end user.
The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.
IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
That's my thought too, Mumble's text chat is terribad, the UI looks like crap. The onboarding is typical of non-hipster F/OSS. The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".
Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.
But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).
TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.
I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
> The setup guide for servers isn't "run murmur.exe", it's "run openssl commands to generate a private key and generate a CSR" and the setup guide for clients is "if you lose your client certificates, you potentially lose all ability to connect, and permissions/rights, hope there's another admin".
Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.
Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.
Point taken, although I did say "based on my experiences inviting folks to our server." :) I do think it is quite different than infamous Dropbox thread, however, where the top comment mentions mounting an FTP server with curlftpfs on Linux.
Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.
I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.
Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.
This will all be entirely anecdotal, but Discord has provided great value to my group.
> Setup
How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link.
> Paid hosting
While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it.
> Unclear benefits
Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho).
> Weird ideological reasons
It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
How many other chat apps have support for custom emojis that can be used cross-server. Thats half the fun of nitro.
On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
One thing I don't see mentioned is marketing. All of that investment allowed discord to purchase an obscene amount of advertisement. Heavy advertisement of a 'free' product targeted toward children seems like a prerequisite for adoption, but I'll admit that this take is as light on actual analysis as the parent blog post.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
> currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number
I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
Try it out, I don't think there's any way now. And it's really easy to get completely locked out of your account if you connect from a low-reputation/datacenter IP, like through VPNs or Tor.
Discord also has great communities that aren't just for gaming. Personally, I'm part of several discords that are for music, specific technology (thinkpads), etc.
To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
Discord won because they found a unique purpose and focused all of their efforts on it while, making sure that all secondary features were also well crafted.
What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.
Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.
Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.
However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
I agree. The core reason to switch for me (and I assume many others) was because the core features were better than competitors and it was free.
On exposure outside main demographic: servers that are gaming adjacent like anime, content creators, and programming already see large numbers of members. A promising sign.
Funny thing is, I've seen a lot of people complain about Mumble's audio quality.
But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years.
As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
Mumble maxes out at 96kbps + overhead (which brings it close to 128kbps total) (enforced client-side, though the server can set a lower bandwidth), and I find it's a noticeable difference over Discords 64/kbps.
Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency, which again is a noticeable difference (the average person can detect latency over 50ms, for example, audio and video can be out of sync by 30ms and it's pretty much undetectable during playback).
> Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency,
The USA is around 2,500 miles wide (+/- 200 miles depending on latitude), which is around 4000 km. If you live on the west coast and connect to a server on the east coast, you're looking at 50 ms minimum based on laws of physics alone. Real world latency is usually 60-70 ms.
Of course, that's a worst case scenario of connecting between the coasts. Honestly I don't know what Discord's voice latency is. I suppose I could measure it, but it's already low enough to be good.
Besides, it's a voice chat service. Even if latency was a ridiculous 200 ms, how would you even notice, other than when you hear your own voice coming from someone else's microphone?
Should note that discord defaults to 64kb/s but goes up to 96kb/s for free, it is just a slider in the voice channel settings. and then depending on the "Boost" level of the server you can go up to 128/256/384 kb/s.
With the impending sunset of Google Hangouts, I've been using discord for family communication. It is nice that the barrier of entry is low enough that you can actually get people to use it, and that you can use it on desktop (otherwise you'd just use SMS)
Pretty much every single subreddit out there has a discord server at this point. Still very tech-related but much more broad than just gaming at this point.
I really like how the WYSIWYG editor in discord is implemented. For example, if you try to write a block using backticks, that block will be highlighted and the backticks will not disappear.
Meanwhile, I am still unable to how understand how slack's WYSIWYG works.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadI'm in a couple of mid-sized servers and nobody pays for that. Granted, they aren't gaming related, and we may not be the target demographic for buying status.
I blame Slack for my custom-emoji-response addiction; Discord just weaponized it.
I'm not blaming you. I get it. I'm blaming the world we live in.
Emoji are not innovation.
Obviously random emoji is not the Mona Lisa, but having pictures of your friends making funny poses or faces etc. certainly increases the value of a conversation. It's also completely optional; not being able to use such emoji won't negatively impact your experience. It will however make you really jealous of all your friends that can use those emoji, and FOMO sets in until you too join the club just so you can be the first to react with a funny emote for the situation at hand.
I also like having GIF profile icons.
It sounds greedy when you word it "paying for emoji" when in reality they are incredibly generous for holding back no core functionality from free users.
Discord's customers are those Twitch broadcasters, who give "flairs" and other digital goods to their customers ("subscribers").
0: https://discord.com/company#app-mount:~:text=Monthly%20activ...
24M users * $5 / month / user * 12 months / year = $1440M / year
Are you sure that's not also including the data they are selling of its users?
As for where it's stated that we don't sell user data, it's in our privacy policy: https://discord.com/privacy
> The Company is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you.
> No Sale of Personal Information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell personal information. We do not sell the personal information of our users.
> Because Discord does not sell the personal information of our users to third parties, this is not applicable.
And also in our safety center: https://discord.com/safety
> We do not sell your data, nor do we share it with third parties for advertising purposes.
Generally, any highly polished service with glowing media reviews that’s also free is something I regard with great suspicion.
Linguistic tangent below if you are interested:
------------------------------------------------
† I know that "accoutrements" isn't the right word to mean "add-ons", and "accompaniments" would technically be the word you'd use to metaphorically describe the benefits that the user gets from Discord Nitro as being similar to add-ons to dishes of food. But, words change in meaning over time, and I have only ever heard "accoutrements" being used metaphorically in this way, and so "accompaniments" didn't seem to match the linguistic milieu present today.‡
‡ I don't know if there is a term that means what I am intending by "linguistic milieu present today", and that's the best guess I came up with that sounded good and somewhat conveyed the concept. To precisely describe what term I'm thinking of, I need to lay a baseline.
Language change is something that has happened, will happen, and is happening now. [0] Given that that is the case, there exists a relationship between time and language change, and thus, specific languages and time. The language as being used ("sending" and "understanding" both happening), not the language as described by teachers/books on that language.
The concept I mean above, that I tried to describe as "linguistic milieu present today" is, "the current state of The English Language As Actually Used By Speakers/Writers, and Not Necessarily The English Language As Taught/Described In Books/Schools".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_change
10 years from now, Discord will be gone but IRC will remain.
These days I prefer Matrix, but I have no doubt IRC will stay around. Maybe even because of Matrix users like myself who just keep bridging it in.
On the other hand, in 10 years if Discord pulls the plug, you'll have a community of people that can migrate elsewhere. To any other solution that will pop up. Because it's the people that are the community, not the platform. Whether I have to use Discord or Slack or future solutions is merely incidental and entirely swappable.
One example that comes to mind is https://thedonald.win/. Reddit killed their subreddit (r/the_donald), so they just moved elsewhere.
Case in point.. I used to run game servers for maybe over 1000+ guilds over the years I was active. Even talking 10 years ago, people were still using Skype for connecting to games... just because it doesn't fit your use-case doesn't mean the market wasn't competing.
IRC was also in the space. Look at the dozens+ IRC servers which had communities built around them... they've mostly migrated to Discord.
I'd love to know your counter point to such an absolute-claim though... because I positively agree with the author.
Elm lang has an IRC channel. Like all IRC channels on Freenode, it's pretty much dead. One reason being that only a small fraction of people even are willing to use IRC, mostly because they're old enough to know wtf it is.
But then the Elm creator started a Slack server. ...And it's absolutely bustling. There's people getting help. There's people giving help. There's people golfing code or discussing design ideas. There's people sharing their projects and receiving feedback. There's different channels. There's people meeting people and making friends. There's people sending messages to offline users and offline users able to read them when they come back online. And there's even people posting multiline code snippets, something that tends to come in handy for a software project of all things.
There's people who want to grow an online community, they tend to discover Discord very quickly. No brainer. And then there's people who want to convince an increasingly empty room that the application layer protocol behind the community is what matters most.
Back in 2006, I used to run a game server hosting company, approximately 400~ game servers at the peak excluding voice (battlefield, css, gmod). I hosted Teamspeak and Ventrillo, and they were nice 0.25 "per slot" servers per month, but the process was so cumbersome.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Discord uses 250mb+ minimum in RAM to handle simple voice chat, whereas alternatives like mumble in this example use 20mb. The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
Plus there's an underappreciated aspect of having really good text channels tied in with the servers, meaning people have a reason to be looking at the server and who's on voice outside of active calls/voice channels.
(EDIT: Forgot to add, server downtime seems to be a regional thing. I'm unfortunately on Discord almost every night; there's occasional degraded periods but otherwise I can normally assume it just works.)
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system. None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers. I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
I've always been surprised when anyone complains about Discord's audio quality.
Discord sounds beautiful to me. Everyone sounds crystal clear. If you're experiencing poor quality, then it's almost 100% on the speaker's end. They either need a better microphone or a less noisy environment.
It's probably fine if that's what you got used to, but going from low latency to higher latency is so jarring that I can't see us ever moving from mumble as long as it's still supported.
250mb is irrelevant on any system you'd want to game on.
> The voice codec and quality is arguably better and with less down time. Discord servers often go down and I've found myself having to switch to central or whatever to get it to work.
My real-world experience is that mumble servers go down more often and for longer - you're usually at the mercy of an individual hobby sysadmin. In theory Discord's uptime is pretty bad, but in practice it actually does beat the alternatives.
I miss IRC.
unless it stays private: at some point it'll be loaded full of ads and then their fickle audience will move onto the next thing
Unfortunately the post/like system of social media tends to become politicized; leading to toxic one-upmanship. Discord has none of that, it's a refreshing place where people can just be people online again without a system built around the need for approval from one another.
Now, however, I've been very interested in open source alternatives. Not to make them take over, but as a backup option to have around. I think Matrix with Jitsi Bridge for video and audio is the current leading self-hosted alternative, but nothing beats the convenience of Discord.
If there comes a time where Discord gets hit with some anti-privacy/serious censorship issues, then I'll really dive into the alternatives, but for now, they really do a great job (not to mention their medium blog is very interesting).
0: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
-Lots of server downtime -Obnoxious amount of system resource use -Crashing -Bugs -Forced updates -Privacy concerns. (Scans your open processes, etc)
Some of us can agree to disagree.
From my perspective, it's the best run communication platform on the Internet, bar none. If that's my view, then why do you have such trouble with it? What's pulling our experiences into such different directions?
Discord stayed miles away from looking or feeling like enterprise software.
Their playful approach makes it fun to be there.
Features are often brought forward as the reason why apps succeed or fail. But humans are emotional beings and how a product looks or feels contributes a lot to the company’s success (or failure).
[1] http://fairpixels.pro
It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.
Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?
I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)
The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.
I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.
The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.
Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.
[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
That gave me a chuckle
The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.
Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.
I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.
I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.
I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.
Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.
There isn't one.
Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.
Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?
I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.
Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.
[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...
Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.
I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)
For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.
(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)
You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!
After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."
When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)
https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png
https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b
https://discord.com
Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.
The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.
I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.
That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.
“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.
Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.
Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.
"Hey hop on my mumble server"
"Hey hop on my vent server"
"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"
"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"
One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.
Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.
You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.
I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.
No idea why they made Discord audibly ping whenever someone say anything in any channel on new servers you join.
I think sensible defaults are valuable, and I don't think Discord's approach here is sensible.
I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional.
Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.
These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.
Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.
This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).
I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.
This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.
They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah
Same way Telegram is increasing its market share. If your service is better than the competitors , provide more features, make it easy and you enter the market earlier than the competitors (this is objectable) , you can win among competitors.
Her friends are spread all over the country and they are constant on discord chatting, sharing memes, and messing around with bots. It’s a pretty wild thing to witness.
As a life long techie that got started on BBSes, AOL punters, diablo over dialup I’ve always thought of myself at the cutting edge. Now I watch as kids adopt tech en-mass that I’m not the target for.
Discord hasn’t “won” but they’ve built an extremely strong and sticky offering.
I hate that slack only let's you message other people in the context of the workspace as opposed to messaging them directly.
I legit think that discord will be a really dominant social networking platform.
There's room for improvement in modern chat apps that the previous generation didn't shy away from. But it's hard to please anyone with change, but it still think that there should be experiments into some big changes
And I think discord has a strong base now, but I don't think they've done anything that if something better came along they wouldn't be replaced. And they are still feeding off of VC so measuring success again other competitors is I think difficult at best.
Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same).
They have done a great job, certainly, and have accomplished what they set out to do. But I have my personal reservations. I don't like using closed, proprietary communication protocols and would rather stick to IRC or Matrix. Granted, I am not the target audience.
Also the author claims Discord is a "multi-billion dollar business" in the introductory paragraphs but the only figure I see is the 70/120 million dollar estimate from Forbes.
Edit: this link/thread (and lots of the hyper-positive replies that appeared as I was typing my comment) strike me as possibly dishonest, especially since there was a post just this morning about the RCE vulnerability[0] in Discord's desktop application.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24822755
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
IRC, the famously secure communications platform? [sorry, I couldn't help it: I loved IRC growing up, but something something glass houses?]
I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.
If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
I'm not sure what pretending your preferences are objective standards is supposed to add to the conversation.
Furthermore, IRCCloud is not centralized in the same way as Discord is because you are not forced to use it. IRC is still an open protocol. For example Matrix has a big chunk of people using the official "centralized" Matrix server and the same is true for Mastodon with mastodon.social. Some prefer to self-host, others do not. I don't see the problem here. Gmail wasn't the downfall of email either.
Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services.
I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff.
Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common.
All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord.
Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization.
Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself.
Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC.
And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude).
That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc.
---
The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology.
Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days).
That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS).
I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client.
Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
We ... did try that. Of course. :(
A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild.
An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole.
And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks.
> I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime.
Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all.
To explain this for your benefit:
Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it.
It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar.
But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade.
And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?
Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic.
If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.
That said, the experience is pretty fantastic for what I've needed it for. Slack is fantastic as well, especially the paid version. If Discord can pivot into the "professional" space, I would certainly try it out.
The problem I have is that all of my work situations are tied to MS Teams and that's likely to never change within the ORG I'm contracting for. Teams is absolute trash compared to Slack. Between downtime, the way channels are organized, the way files are organized, the way discussions are organized, the way notifications are presented, I just can't get any comfort level with it. No one at my company even uses Teams for voice/video conferencing because it's so poorly performing (I've not experienced this tho), we all have to use Zoom.
I never thought Discord was going to do more than what something like Teamspeak did, but they have really done an incredible job. They have pretty much single handedly made native game voice chat irrelevant.
It is pretty much fluff chat en masse the way it is now without huge contractual and infrastructure modifications.
1. Once the pandemic set in, some Discord groups popped up, associated to branches of math. For example I'm a member of "The Algebraic Geometry Syndicate" and "Modern Number Theory and Algebraic Geometry".
The activity includes: technical math chat; people giving each other advice (e.g. on the job market or online teaching); advertisements of online conferences; some other stuff.
2. I've also been on Discord forums attached to weekend online conferences. These were sort of similar, but short-lived -- and we also encouraged everyone to introduce themselves. We had a "math memes contest" and organized a board games night for all who were interested. Basically, it was an attempt to replicate some of the social aspects of conferences.
It seems like Slack is designed for groups of people who all work at the same company. Discord worked well for us -- where participants work/study all over, and where it's super easy to join.
I've been trying to move friend groups more towards Slack and it's been a huge improvement over group texts / Facebook chat / etc.
(of course, for our gaming group, discord voice chat is still superb. But, we only use it once a week and all the rest of our chatter/discussion happens in our new Slack team)
Beyond that, there is a somewhat long tail of little features like integrations, LDAP, etc.
You can switch to "open mic" with a mic threshold (with an "auto" option), which would probably work well in a meeting situation where keyboard noise isn't an issue.
0: https://kitemaker.co
> Complicated setup process. Any new member must also go through a setup process.
> Paid hosting. No one wanted to pay when there were free options. Especially true as servers grow.
To my group at least, the ability to self-host is a major bonus and provides peace of mind. For the record, I do use Discord for text channels. My group primarily uses and prefers Mumble for VOIP, and it is plenty cheap to host. Setting up a Mumble client as a user is not complicated, based on my experiences inviting folks to our server.
> Unclear benefits. Convincing one person was not enough, you needed to convince your whole group of the benefits of switching.
> Weird ideological reasons. Your platform was your tribal affiliation, switching means abandoning your tribe. Everyone looked down on people who didn’t use the same platform as them (even if it was jokingly).
How is Discord any different on these points? I'm really not seeing it.
This reads like the Show HN: Dropbox thread; UI/UX for Mumble is typical of engineer-design. Setting up a client as a user and being told to set up client certificates for mTLS and export your certificates with a strong passphrase to not lose access to your server is an insanely high bar for casual gamers, though a lot more secure.
The mumble wiki literally has the sentence "For more information about certificates, see the Wikipedia entries on Public key Certificates."; PKI is barely well understood by many engineers. The last time I used it, setup also suggested that instead of a self-signed cert, you got an email-verified mail signing certificate from an actual CA.
For comparison, Ventrilo and Teamspeak are heavily DRM encumbered, your servers go offline randomly when the licencing servers go down due to frequent attacks as they phone home and get no response, have utterly insane ToS that near totally shuts down community servers [you aren't permitted to run your own, Ventrilo will not even sell you a personal licence, TeamSpeak shut down their non profit licence thing and revoked all of them], forbid you from self hosting on your own infrastructure and tell you to buy from their 'hosting partners paying per slot', but you just get an admin password at first start of the daemon.
The harder part for most users is figuring out how to connect. Mumble has a URI Protocol but that's only a temporary fix as it can't add a favorite to someone's list.
IMO the only reason Mumble can't compete with Discord is that they serve different niches. Mumble doesn't offer much for users who want a permanent text suite or multiple server connections at a time, but for friends/gamers hanging in voice it works fine (and Mumble beats Discord at VOIP). (and all of Mumble's competitors like Teamspeak also fall to Discord for the same reasons).
Also, the access tokens option seems absurd from a UX perspective. Instead of just asking for a password with a remember box, you go to Server > Access Tokens and paste a string in and it'll attempt it the next time you're prompted for a passworded channel or server. Small things like that.
But it has the absolute lowest latency I've ever seen for VOIP, beats Discord significantly in quality, latency, and security (mTLS auth, client certs, pin your own CA for server, you control TLS on both ends). From a strictly engineering POV it's excellent. It also has some pretty amazing features for voice control, passing audio downstream/upstream into parent/child channels (eve players might get what I mean for fleet ops).
TeamSpeak tries to do too much, with chat, filesharing, and now no one really wants to host TS3 other than it being concentrated on a specific few like OVH because half of TS's server services can be misused for reflection spoofed DDoS attacks.
I'm not sure what Ventrilo is these days. They would not sell you a personal use licence at all - you had to sign up to "resell" a minimum of several thousand slots, and increase your purchase every contract period, or they would terminate all of your licences. You aren't permitted to run a community, nonprofit server for yourself, and at $1-2/slot/month a large community server would never happen for cost reasons.
Fair, but in my experience - Mumble/Murmur being very common in my favorite game's competitive space - either A) someone is just going to rent their Mumble server for 5 bucks a month and not worry about setup, if they lose their personal cert they can use SuperUser - or B) They're an enthusiast who rents a VPS and actually hosts their own server for a large userbase, they will have the knowhow to setup. Generally anyone in these spaces granted admin powers will be smart enough to keep their cert around.
Losing client certs is less of a problem for this space because nobody requires users register to connect. If their group is private, they keep the IP to themselves and don't even bother adding a password. if its public, then its public and anyone can connect. Registration only necessary for mods or stopping hooligans from changing their names.
Our server (like many) is public, and allows anyone to enter without need for exporting your certificate or even creating a passphrase. The setup process is Enter Server Address + Port -> Enter username -> Connect, and you're done. For someone who has ever used an installation wizard before, it is not difficult. For very casual users -- I agree, it probably can be overwhelming.
I don't argue that Mumble is somehow as easy or easier than Discord. Discord has everything else beat when it comes to ease-of-use.
Also, in my opinion, Mumble's UI looks fine, and I appreciate that it looks native on whatever platform you run it on (as opposed to Electron apps like Discord). I also appreciate the lower RAM usage and system requirements in general.
> Setup
How so? New account setup is extremely simple. Are you thinking of how some servers require some advanced setup for your account? Adding a new member to a server is also just sharing a link.
> Paid hosting
While I do wish a self-hosted option were available, I can't see it being a draw for the platform, especially as it would mean releasing a server application to end-users who might not have a good understanding of how to correctly run it. At this point, I'd gladly pay for Discord Nitro if there were any benefit I could get from it.
> Unclear benefits
Most of these are going to be situational based on where your group is coming from, but Discord was the only competitor that really worked for my group. Cross platform, message reactions, reliable, intuitive. Personally, we switched from Facebook Messenger, which despite facebook's atrocious policies, is the most usable/convenient chat application in the world (imho).
> Weird ideological reasons
It was upsetting to lose the functional benefits of being on a facebook platform (real names, communicating with nearly anybody I know on the fly), but we all disliked facebook on an ideological level. That made the switch easier, in the end. Other than that, competitors like Skype and Teams are software dumpster fires, while Slack, Signal, and Telegram are extremely restrictive to users who don't care too much about their particular features.
On the other hand voice calls get me extremely frustrated thanks to random disconnects and dropping audio streams while telling me. I have a good connection. Nothing like repeating myself 3 times before my friend pings me to tell me he can't hear me and having to disconnect and reconnect a couple times before it works.
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it seems like the more toxic (to borrow the phrase) IRC users have moved over to discord, however it also breaks my heart when I find a FOSS development community that uses discord exclusively, as it's not currently possible to use it without giving them a phone number.
I haven't created a discord account in a long time, so I'm not sure what the flow is, but my recollection is that phone numbers are required iff the specific server (community) turns that on as a security feature
Also regularly I can't log into discord without first filing out a captcha and receiving an E-Mail from them even though my password is valid.
To me it just seems like lots of online communities would rather have a Discord than Slack, IRC, etc. so I just used Discord instead.
What sets them apart is their voice quality and chatroom voice features. This is something that lends itself naturally to gaming but their real success was getting the quality so high that it feels like you are carrying on a conversation in real life.
Everything else was secondary, but essential, it's like getting the toppings right on the pizza. Essential, but secondary.
Because gaming has this unique use case and the fact that there are millions of gamers, created a fantastic beachhead which continues to expand.
However, outside of the core demographic of gaming it certainly hasn't gained much exposure.
But I think the reason Mumble has a reputation for poor audio quality is a lot of cheap Mumble server providers. With Mumble, the maximum audio bitrate is set by the server, and many servers set it low to save money on bandwidth, which sometimes ends up being as low as telephone quality. I used to run a Mumble server and had the bitrate set to maximum (I think 128 kbit/sec?), which is absolute overkill for simple voice communications, but it's not like a single server uses much bandwidth. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi for a couple years.
As for latency, not sure how low you expect latency to be. I haven't measured Discord's latency, but I can't imagine it being much more than 100 ms.
Hosting on a cheap VPS in the same country as me, I get 20ms latency, which again is a noticeable difference (the average person can detect latency over 50ms, for example, audio and video can be out of sync by 30ms and it's pretty much undetectable during playback).
The USA is around 2,500 miles wide (+/- 200 miles depending on latitude), which is around 4000 km. If you live on the west coast and connect to a server on the east coast, you're looking at 50 ms minimum based on laws of physics alone. Real world latency is usually 60-70 ms.
Of course, that's a worst case scenario of connecting between the coasts. Honestly I don't know what Discord's voice latency is. I suppose I could measure it, but it's already low enough to be good.
Besides, it's a voice chat service. Even if latency was a ridiculous 200 ms, how would you even notice, other than when you hear your own voice coming from someone else's microphone?
Meanwhile, I am still unable to how understand how slack's WYSIWYG works.