On the developer side they call them "guilds," fortunately. Interestingly it's somewhat common for failures like this to only affect a few guilds at a time (though there are of course catastrophic failures from time to time).
> Interestingly it's somewhat common for failures like this to only affect a few guilds at a time (though there are of course catastrophic failures from time to time).
In fairness, if I was running a service like this, guilds or whatever would map to actual servers striped across multiple failure domains (albeit not 1:1).
Yeah, it’s just disappointingly common for services like this to fully fail out during events like this, maybe not even due to the servers being down but because the client doesn’t have failure resistance built in or something similar.
They definitely aren’t channels. They’re more like a namespace. You can have multiple actual channels within a server namespace.
And this design, despite technical SPOF risks, provides a massively better UI/UX than Slack for communities. Honestly discord is the best thing since IRC for non critical communication.
This is probably the biggest discord outage I've experienced in over a year, and I'm definitely not a casual user. Even in this outage it's not been too bad for me, and I can still access most of my chats and servers. I don't deny that it's a SPOF, but Discord is generally reliable and I'm happy with it.
Is it really a SPOF if much of discord was still available? Only my smaller community servers went down, every large server (>1000 people) that I'm in stayed up. Direct calls/chats also still worked.
Wow I noticed a visual indicator in the app just now that a server was unreachable due to issues with discord. It’s not every day the actual app ui directly and in real time communicates issues with the core service. Kudos? Discord is also incredibly annoying with their nitro upsells, but I guess I’m using it for free, so a little advertising is fine :)
Anecdotally I play games with a lot of "kids", and most of them pay for nitro. Obviously subcultural bias but it seems like it's pretty common to me, and I can imagine their costs might be below average since they're not super growth obsessed?
Discord are definitely growth obsessed. They've tried to glom onto trends before like stages to copy clubhouse, they've tried to get into game retail to chase the epic store and shut that down, and now they're going after the WhatsApp/signal userbase by replacing usernames and the latest update opted people in to being searchable by their contact lists.
Discord is a VC funded company, so it's not enough to rule a niche. Their VCs are going to push them to chasing a larger userbase, even when that's at the expense of their current userbase. I think we're definitely on the start of the enshittification curve with Discord by now.
Nitro is one of extremely few SaaS things I actually pay for, it's seems very worthwhile given how generally not fucked the discord experience is in terms of trying to extract value from their users.
I’d pay for it if I felt the need to at this point. So far, all of the features offered are things I don’t need. I’d pay a base $2/month (or similar) fee at this point to avoid changing shoot-the-shit-with-friends providers every few years.
Isn't the base tier of discord $3/mo? If you pay that you are 100% paying exactly a "avoid changing shoot-the-shit-with-friends providers every few years" fee. You paying that fee makes them sustainable and helps create incentives for them to continue providing you with value.
Yep, they've had that feature for quite a while, too.
I've always had the impression that - although obviously there is pressure within the company to monetize - they seem to have a lot of developer focus on 'just doing the obvious things that clients want'. Almost every major complaint or feature request I can think of from the last decade or so of using Discord has been addressed in some way, which is really cool to see from software... even if they do somewhat irritating things sometimes.
I still think their interface is kinda ass (I hate buttons that only appear on mouse over), and I still run into bugs from time to time.
Still, considering their only initial draw was insane ease of sign-up, they’ve really catapulted the program into something genuinely decent. It’s definitely the best “””free software””” improvements I’ve seen.
> Almost every major complaint or feature request I can think of from the last decade or so of using Discord has been addressed in some way,
A feature request I've seen from many people over years, which Discord haven't implemented, is the option to make public channels readable and searchable on the web, or make the data easily exportable for projects to put it on the web themselves.
These days many open source projects and companies use Discord as their meeting place for public discussion, development discussion, support queries etc, instead of the web forums and mailing lists they used to use. The inability to find the content of those discussions from search engines is a major pain point, though not enough to switch to something else because Discord is so good in other respects.
That's not exactly what I'm talking about, though I do use that feature frequently.
Can you mute every single channel in a server at once? So that you can then unmute one or two? To avoid notifications dot not just pings.
It's a workflow I've used for almost every single server I join, but you have to manually mute each channel. I've seen it requested since 2015 and still no way to do it. Maybe using their api? I'll have to check on that.
That's not the experience I've had. An example: it's been over 6 years and they still haven't made it possible for me to set the clock display to a 24 hour clock. The only solution is to change the language to UK English. They can't even bother to use my locale settings.
I used to keep up on the thread tracking this issue. They don't care enough to fix it.
What's the term for when a failing service causes the users of said service to use it more to complain about it failing? Because it sure seems like that's happening to some extent.
Not exactly what I was thinking of, because that's more on a local system than at web scale. Something else, I'm sure it's related though, kinda like a crowd crush?
thundering herd really only happens at 'web scale', whatever that means. There was an article on HN recently showing how even a distributed/replicated system can fall to the thundering herd.
Because a significant portion of the time the service has some developers or senior staff who are HN members and they show up here while triage is happening to provide real time insight.
I haven't used Discord in maybe 3 years now (I think longer?) I was one of the early, early adopters, with my own first name as my username. But I found it to be a rather suffocating, rather than liberatory, place, which simply reproduced the very social structures I experienced in the rest of the world; often, if it was the nexus of a certain social life, the extreme power which moderators weld to totally socially exclude someone was sickening, and the kinds of sexual exploitation that happens on the platform is merely a symptom of that, a symptom of a much wider social ill which birthed the platform as a whole--an overriding resentment for real-world sociality for being based in exclusionary institutions, transformed into an exclusionary architecture infinitely grander and more severe the further the users were separated by regular social institutions and geographic location, thus increasing the power of both the moderators, but, also and more essentially the owners of Discord, who, by establishing such an architecture sought for nothing but Absolute power--this, all, now just for profit of the VCs.
However, such a severe system of domination has, at its core, just one single problem, the problem which we are seeing today: a mass outage, like this, must, by its nature, affect every user of the service. Mastadon, to note, does not have this problem--but even Mastadon, like Discord, relies on the electric grid and the system of production from which such a service is produced, which at all levels seeks to continuously generate and regenerate itself in all its social functions.
>I don't know what kind of weirdass servers you hung out in...
Not to be overly critical, but its the very use of the word "hang out" that really highlights what I was discussing. The spaces are designed to be totalizing, in the "real world" you could hang out at a friends house or the park or something, the latter is free and open, and you can come and go as you please. Discord servers, by their very design, are antithetical to that ethos. Like a bad parody of 19th century secret societies, first you must be admitted; then, once in, you are subjected to an immediate system of hierarchy, and potentially higher "inner circle" social spaces. The total control and hierarchization of social life, with widespread tools for monitoring and expulsion, where everything you do or say can be recorded and tracked, is part and parcel of the architecture of Discord. This isn't a private server you or your friends own, its a space designed to extract profit for a mass corporation by keeping you on it as long as possible and subtily encouraging microtransactions with via social pressure: Reddit has the same model. And the longer you stay on Discord, the more of your social life is exclusively on Discord, and the more opportunities arise for Discord to exploit you for profit.
It is highly insidious, it is no different in form or structure from any other social media website: even HN suffers in this regard, since it has small incentives to keep you returning and commenting and replying, and passively exposes you to advertisements for various services offered by YC startups. At least here there is something more than just that, but only 4chan achieves an absolutely democratizing end as a place of almost pure excess. But the latter isn't very good for actual discussions, so I come here.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadIn fairness, if I was running a service like this, guilds or whatever would map to actual servers striped across multiple failure domains (albeit not 1:1).
And this design, despite technical SPOF risks, provides a massively better UI/UX than Slack for communities. Honestly discord is the best thing since IRC for non critical communication.
I've always had the impression that - although obviously there is pressure within the company to monetize - they seem to have a lot of developer focus on 'just doing the obvious things that clients want'. Almost every major complaint or feature request I can think of from the last decade or so of using Discord has been addressed in some way, which is really cool to see from software... even if they do somewhat irritating things sometimes.
Still, considering their only initial draw was insane ease of sign-up, they’ve really catapulted the program into something genuinely decent. It’s definitely the best “””free software””” improvements I’ve seen.
A feature request I've seen from many people over years, which Discord haven't implemented, is the option to make public channels readable and searchable on the web, or make the data easily exportable for projects to put it on the web themselves.
These days many open source projects and companies use Discord as their meeting place for public discussion, development discussion, support queries etc, instead of the web forums and mailing lists they used to use. The inability to find the content of those discussions from search engines is a major pain point, though not enough to switch to something else because Discord is so good in other respects.
Can you mute every single channel in a server at once? So that you can then unmute one or two? To avoid notifications dot not just pings.
It's a workflow I've used for almost every single server I join, but you have to manually mute each channel. I've seen it requested since 2015 and still no way to do it. Maybe using their api? I'll have to check on that.
What you can do is mute channel categories and then collapse them, which I do for some servers.
I used to keep up on the thread tracking this issue. They don't care enough to fix it.
now nothing loads anymore, at all :D
how long till they fix it?
However, such a severe system of domination has, at its core, just one single problem, the problem which we are seeing today: a mass outage, like this, must, by its nature, affect every user of the service. Mastadon, to note, does not have this problem--but even Mastadon, like Discord, relies on the electric grid and the system of production from which such a service is produced, which at all levels seeks to continuously generate and regenerate itself in all its social functions.
My experience has been nothing been 100% positive.
Not to be overly critical, but its the very use of the word "hang out" that really highlights what I was discussing. The spaces are designed to be totalizing, in the "real world" you could hang out at a friends house or the park or something, the latter is free and open, and you can come and go as you please. Discord servers, by their very design, are antithetical to that ethos. Like a bad parody of 19th century secret societies, first you must be admitted; then, once in, you are subjected to an immediate system of hierarchy, and potentially higher "inner circle" social spaces. The total control and hierarchization of social life, with widespread tools for monitoring and expulsion, where everything you do or say can be recorded and tracked, is part and parcel of the architecture of Discord. This isn't a private server you or your friends own, its a space designed to extract profit for a mass corporation by keeping you on it as long as possible and subtily encouraging microtransactions with via social pressure: Reddit has the same model. And the longer you stay on Discord, the more of your social life is exclusively on Discord, and the more opportunities arise for Discord to exploit you for profit.
It is highly insidious, it is no different in form or structure from any other social media website: even HN suffers in this regard, since it has small incentives to keep you returning and commenting and replying, and passively exposes you to advertisements for various services offered by YC startups. At least here there is something more than just that, but only 4chan achieves an absolutely democratizing end as a place of almost pure excess. But the latter isn't very good for actual discussions, so I come here.