I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it makes Teams and Slack look primitive.
The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots.
You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...
Discord cannot be used anonymously via Tor without providing a telephone number to tie it to your real-world identity, and it does not even pretend to support end to end cryptography, even for DMs.
No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result. They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full chat content, including all DMs.
I have stopped using it for these reasons.
I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.
Wasn't there post on here just a few days ago about how Discord exactly does that? pretend to support end to end encryption? Someone created their own discord client and found that VOIP packets were being decrypted by discord in between clients
I wasn't able to reply at the time but this also might be to show that "this person is talking indicator". It would make more sense if the client itself lit up the user's avatar to indicate they're talking, but for some reason the gateway sends a websocket to let you know when they start/stop talking, and if the gateway goes down while in a VC you'll lose talking indicators until it can reconnect.
I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy.
They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.
I use slack for work and discord for friends. One feels like a labor of love and the other is a chore to use that I'd discard immediately if I could.
Becoming an enterprise product would cause discord to grow its organization a certain way, hire certain kinds of people, cause their product to be built by certain kinds of processes. And the qualities that make me enjoy using it would absolutely go away. It would become Slack. I think it's impossible to firewall the enterprise-ness from the rest of the org/product. When you have a great culture you have to fiercely protect it because it's fragile.
Of course that's my selfish reason for it not to go enterprise. Not a business reason.
They could be dominant for lightly regulated businesses as-is and more so with a good add-on strategy (ie task managers / workflow as the author emphasized). I generally agree going the enterprise route, as it exists today, would be a bad move for the product.
I just hate the "fun" jokes in Discord at start-up. I'm in 4 servers and none of them are about video gaming. It is a great chat application fit for many more purposes. Discord is great for business!
Most of the people using discord love it's playfulness.
Be mindful that it's ethos may not be for you. For every silly feature or targeting you've appreciated that has disappeared, there are comments like yours that are the reason.
> They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices
IME Discord voice quality has been awful, and that's just direct voice between two people; multiple times every session the call disintegrates, sometimes falling out entirely. 'Robotic sounding' is a description often used. I think region (mine's Europe) and server capacity in that region, might be an important factor in the perceived quality of Discord voice. Several times it's been so bad we have fallen back to other options, e.g., Teams.
Perhaps, but it's still better than a lot of the other options (especially for the price). It's particularly better the first party voice "solutions" in games that are utter crap.
My friends and I were looking for a free solution. We tried WhatsApp for a bit but eventually stuck with Discord despite the quality because it allows us to just hop on and off arbitrarily. Nobody has to set up calls with the exact participants and do that all over again if someone else joins.
I'm not convinced that there's a significant market there when Microsoft is giving away Teams. Teams sucks bogwater, generally, but A/V and screen-sharing is the one thing that it does better than average.
For the most part, enterprises are already using Office 365 for their email, or if not that then at least for the Office suite, and Teams is bundled in for free.
> I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy.
Probably because they make more money on scraping the data of consumers than they would on (1) building e2e encryption into the platform and (2) hiring support to give white glove treatment to enterprise accounts.
"Aside from being a freeware VoIP application, the company is firm with their stand on not using advertisements on the chat platform (similar to Whatsapp).
Discord is also strongly against selling its users’ data because this would mean breaching the relationship between the two parties involved (sigh, Facebook). With that said, you’re probably wondering how this company stays afloat."
https://alejandrorioja.com/blog/how-does-discord-make-money/
On the other hand they claim copyright on everything you send through it.
>By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service.
It protects them from technicalities, but it is very broad sweeping. This section of ToS is basically what keeps me away from it.
I am pretty sure that's the standard legalese for most platforms. Reddit and YouTube also effectively have the same wording.
I would struggle to find a major platform without it.
Reddit [0]
> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed.
YouTube [1]
> By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and Affiliates’) business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service.
They don't claim copyright, they ask (since this is a EULA and they don't tend to stand up very well in court) for a license to do the things you expect of a chat client with the stuff you post on the chat client (the big distinction being this doesn't restrict what you can do with it at all). It's a symptom of how broken copyright is that it's necessary. A really important part of that clause is "in connection with operating and providing the Service". While there's possibly a wide range of interpretations of exactly what that would mean (for example, could they incorporate any code you post on the platform into the code used for the server or client?), it means they can't do whatever they want with the content.
taking is quite easy. the fact is that not only it is proprietary software, it has all the red flags - desktop application mining a shitload of metadata, everything unencrypted, no audits, hostility towards Free Software, and the owner also had a previous project that ended featuring a privacy scandal lawsuit. there is nothing preventing them from using people's information. it is abominable for communications software.
I don't even think they need to. If they added message history limits, and maybe capped how many people can use voice at a channel / join a voice channel to Nitro only, they'd likely make a lot of money. Gamers spend good money on good products, but as long as it's all free, they have no incentive to do so.
If they make voice chat require nitro, it would most likely kill the product extremely fast (my guess would be that people move to Steam, but there are other options as well). For things that voice chat is generally used (usually some kind of team based game), vast majority of people definitely don't want to limit their team mate pool to people with Nitro subscription.
Requiring certain number of nitro boosts might not be as serious, but that would likely just make people consolidate servers more (possibly split text and voice servers, but at that point they might as well consider other options for voice).
I think there is probably room for discord to sell 'premium' voice channels. Currently their stuff works /most/ of the time but is unreliable enough that a lot of people still use stuff like mumble/teamspeak.
> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion versus slacks 12 billion valuation?
Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.
We regularly have arguments among our gaming groups about which one is better. I find that Discord starts to get messy around 20+ people, after which a community starts to fragment into more smaller discord servers.
Slack has been pretty solid for large groups though. We'd normally hit the message limit in 3 days, sometimes even 1 day during a large raid. It didn't really matter because nobody really wants to scroll that far back.
IRC seems to have a chance with IRCCloud and the like, but it's just hard to get people into. But we are starting to see channels with 500-1000 people again, so maybe this appeals to some communities.
Interesting that my anecdata seems the exact opposite: I've never enjoyed being in a Slack of more than a dozen or so people. Slack never seems to have quite the balance for notification management that I want, but I've been in several huge Discords and not felt overwhelmed and/or like I was missing important announcements or things relevant to my interests/needs. Also, writing bots to auto-manage one off tasks always feels like more of a chore with Slack whereas I've spun up some really hairy "get the job done immediately" bots, that just run on my local machine, for Discord, with very little ceremony beyond convincing a guild leader to install the bot.
I've pushed zulip in my org (~50 people, 15 devs) and no one that has tried has "gotten it". I haven't used it that much myself so I can't demo it properly but i believe it could be "the right way" of doing internal communication for teams/dm. But maybe it's too advanced?
Do you know of any official/unofficial videos that would help getting traction?
Yes, Zulip has the disadvantage that the UX isn't exactly the same as every other chat program, so it takes some getting used to. The UX is great, it's just different enough that people don't grok it immediately, and that's too much for people unless you start with a core that's using it and grow the company around that (hard to do with an already established company).
I'm afraid I don't know of any videos, but I tell people "Zulip is exactly like Slack, but everything is a thread, and you can zoom in and out of threads" and find that that's basically enough for them to get it. Maybe try that with a few people and see?
In our early days of Zulip-use, I had to regularly edit people's messages to force them into using a topic. A handful of people still don't get it and treat topics as special/long-lived channels, but most of us devs love it.
You can break messages off into other topics, and we have one long-lived channel per stream, which I've found helps (you don't always want to make a new thread to post a one-off link).
We do something similar to Zulip that is (in my opinion) a little easier to use, Aether (https://aether.app). Its also thread based, but it’s a little more in the line of Slack and Discord in terms of design. So far as we can see it’s been a fairly easy uptake moving from there.
Also helps that we have a full email coupling, so if someone in your team doesn’t like or want to use the app, everything will stream to them just as regular email threads they can respond. This is useful for older folks who prefer email, or higher up people who don’t want to deal with an app but still be able to follow what’s happening.
God I hate Gitter. I'm forced to use it because some communities (such as Mithril.js) hang there but it's slow, riddled with UX problems, and search is completely useless.
Same here, although it's still not a patch on IRC. The problem with IRC has always been that it's usually blocked everywhere and that there is really only one top-class client (mIRC).
It's such a shame that for chat you have the choice between something which turns your laptop into a helicoper but works everywhere or something super fast and extendable (and free!) which is blocked by every firewall everywhere.
I use a weechat relay over websockets (via nginx). It's a pretty convenient solution to the whole "my corporate firewall thinks I'm part of a botnet" issue (in addition to giving you channel history persistence).
Ha! Never thought I'd hear mIRC described as a top-class client. Unix has irssi, and I'd opine that even Xchat is better than mIRC.
I hadn't though of mIRC in so long. It makes me think back to the days of planning imageboard raids on IRC. They even had a special version of mIRC for imageboard raids called m/i/rc.
Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak and there are also many public servers. Rock solid, great voice quality, UX is still being refined, not as frictionless as Discord for new users, but I keep one running for family to fall back to. The server is just routing text / voice, so it scales to VERY large numbers of users with little resource usage.
I agree completely. I found what helps even more is to use fq_codel + google's BBR congestion control on the server and increase the netdev budget about 4x the default values and the latency remains very low with more people connected.
Define far behind? Discord solves the low latency communication problem for me like 99.99% of the time without any sort of issue. I don't really see how you're claiming it falls far behind if the difference between it and Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent or whatever is so razor thin. I've barely noticed any issues in the past 3 years of Discord, and it was the same with the previous 4 years of Mumble and however many years of Vent and Xfire before that.
Huh, I don't know if I've ever had server issues with Discord outside of the whole thing going down once or twice in the past couple years. I've heard people complain about it and it's baffling to me. Maybe it's a regional thing, which would be unfortunate, but the USW server work great as far as I can tell and I voice chat on disc almost every night for multiple hours.
I also have everything I want hotkeyed, so I still think that "far behind" is a huge stretch at best.
Our raid group (spread across Europe) has communications break down about 1 in 6/7 raid nights. Its quickly solved by swapping to US East but the latency is not great for our Eastern European players. We used to be able to bounce between Western Europe and Central Europe to avoid problems but discord recently pooled all the european servers claiming it would help solve issues like this, but it hasn't really.
Similar/same experience here: Friends are in Europe, I'm in SEA / Singapore. We randomly have the robot voice or people cutting out and then start the 'switch region' dance. Which might fix the problem for a while, but messes with the latency quite a bit then.
Does Teamspeak allow each user to set the volume of any other user they hear separately? This has made discord the current choice for our group of friends.
One of the biggest things that Teamspeak has over Discord is its ability to do compression and normalization on incoming audio streams. Between those two, it doesn't matter how poor or inconsistant a microphone setup the other party has, it sounds good.
Can even set 3D settings for each friend, which can be handy.
For some of the cooler things you can do with Teamspeak through extensions see the Arma 3 ACRE plugin.
Discord is one crisis away from imploding if they don't get serious about moderation tools and parental controls. They're turning a blind eye to the issues around tweens/teens interacting with much older folks online in pursuit of growth.
Ugh. Why would Discord, a tool for making private communities be on the hook for moderation and parental controls? Let's stop it with this tired "but think of the children" argument. It's not Discord's job to parent people's kids.
I'm pretty sure the parent is talking about the court of public opinion. Every few weeks like clockwork now the New York Times or the Verge runs some breathless story about how IG/YouTube/Messenger/whatever is harboring pedophiles; it's easy to see how Discord could be next. The difference is, those other companies are big enough to manage the PR hit and fallout; I'm not sure Discord is the same.
If you run a service that predators use in service of their goals, and you're in a position to do something about it, then I think you're obligated to do so, especially if no one else is in a similar position to do something about it.
I've had a personal experience recently where I had to report a situation involving older people and a minor to Discord. (Discord banned the minor, which I guess is one way of dealing with the situation, but it leaves something to be desired.)
Not every call for "think of the children" is a baseless call made by a strawman that just loves censorship or something. "Think of the children" is a silly phrase when it's about rock music. It's not silly when it's about a dark creepy alleyway that people keep complaining about running into pedophiles in.
I love using Discord, but I hope they focus enough on keeping it safe and take their position seriously.
Their permissions system and moderation tools imo outclass anyone else out there. I haven't seen parental controls but I'm curious what moderation deficiencies you're referring to.
I think the parent comment is more concerned about the prospect of young Discord users being allowed to communicate with a very large and diverse set of users/servers, which includes a lot of adult/fringe/pornographic/political content, easily allowing them to receive direct messages from others in these communities.
It would be great of dev communities didn't use chats for everything. I get that the casual nature of chats is great for getting a sense of community but the same issues pop over and over again. Users with issues or questions should be redirected to somewhere that can indexed (Forum, Github issues, etc).
Might as well ask here as it's trending, what happened to Discord's store? It was unceremoniously shuttered and removed from the UI. How much of a loss was it? I imagine months and months of work, nevermind the deals needed to be set with the publishers and game developers.
Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?
You won't get an answer from the Discord themselves. But here's my take, as a game developer who was offered to sell on Discord: Discord was trying to turn their massive userbase into a source of revenue with the Discord Store, but they didn't quite anticipate what developers would actually need from a storefront, and they didn't seem interested in understanding the storefront wars of time past, the many "Steam Killers", GoG, Desura, Origin, UPlay, Windows Store, the list goes on.
Basically, no AAA partners really care, they've all been burned before, so they do the old standby when you need to rejuvenate a platform (like the Xbox 360 and PS3), and turn to the indie market, in hopes that would showcase a more cooperative community desperate to get any press or attention they can. But the indie market already has itch.io, and Steam, and Discord didn't seem strictly better than either of those, so it was already a bit underwhelming of a launch.
Around the same time, the Epic Games Store launched, offering much better royalty deals than Steam/Discord, and Epic offered large grants to developers in exchange for limited-term exclusivity. This got a lot of developer/gamer attention, so quickly all the renewed "storefront war" was seen as Steam vs. Epic, with maybe GoG/itch.io as a very distant third.
Discord's Store had no chance out of the gate. They tried to pivot to "buy a Nitro subscription, get some free games", but between their awkward Store interface and nothing really that great on offer, they eventually shuttered it. [0]
It wasn't removed secretly; they refunded everyone, wrote a blog post or two about it, and floated the news to the top of most news aggregators at least a few times.
I find Discord to be the worst UX for a chat app I can imagine. And nothing is open source so what few client alternatives there are live in mortal danger of having their API hacks closed.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.
Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check "Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still don't know if I should.
It depends on your channel’s culture, but generally you check the box when you want to draw some of the general channel population into the conversation or just want them to see your reply.
If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in your reply. No need to send to channel.
Slack only has an embedded thread feature, not a reply feature.
Stackexchange chat has a proper reply feature. You can reply to a message in the same channel. Your message still goes on the bottom of the current channel, but it pings(highlights) the user and contains a link icon to the original message. Hovering on a reply also highlights the message it responds to (if it's on the screen). This is mainly used when responding to older messages, where it otherwise wouldn't be easy to see what you're responding to.
I agree, Slack replies are awful. The only chat reply feature I've ever enjoyed was Flowdock's. It doesn't create threads it just connects replies with colors. It's great.
Myself, I would not go that far but the UI seems to have fallen a bit into Apple's "discoverability" trap -- just go ahead and touch every square centimeter of application surface to see if anything will happen.
I agree that that the loading messages are silly, and that could be forgiven, but for the fact that when Discord has trouble updating (which happens when Discord feels like it, not you), you just keep seeing them happen over and over, with no sense of progress or ability to debug.
Discord isn't too bad in that sense.
Other critiques about their administration and overall culture aggravate the UI issues in a way that has a similar non-serious tone. It's Bastard Operator From Hell run through I Can Haz Cheeseburger; I have witnessed people banned on the basis of frivolous complaints with messaging that has a tone of "lolz ur acct bann't" that has left some of the Discord servers I am on without some solid admins until things magically straighten out with the same "guess how this works on the inside" attitude.
It's funny because all over the Discord documentation, the "servers" are referred to as "guilds". I'm fairly certain this was the intent in the beginning. But because gamers are used to joining a server to play a game, it became synonymous.
Funny. Discord is the one line I will refuse to cross on yielding my data and metadata. They _are_ downright dangerous. Their CEO's previous project, OpenFeint, already had a privacy scandal lawsuit.
Are you the original author of the article? The article itself seems to be experiencing issues right now, but from what I recall, the author mentions "extensible roles" and "good free tier" as the features that got him to use Discord. I don't consider these features crucial enough to use non-Free Software. If you are not the original author and have other features in mind, please explain which features of Discord are "so incredibly good".
I'm not the author, just agree with the basic argument of the article, if maybe not every detail in it.
The thing is just the incredible ease of use. The easy with which you can join a server and then drop into any text or voice chat you feel like.
There are probably programms that technically replicate the feature set, but I haven't used anything that feels as effortless as discord does. And I can't even pinpoint why exactly that is.
What's the best Free alternative? Since WebRTC is pretty powerful & cross platform, is there a really good WebRTC text + audio chat system that matches the core functionality of Discord?
I would say mattermost and/or mumble. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses, and neither completely fills the discord role, but I think as soon as mattermost has a murmur integration it will be the place to be. Also irc is totally underrated.
I've been on IRC more or less 24/7 since 1996 and love it, and started using Mumble in 2005 or 6.
While I think they're both great, neither of them are an alternative to Discord.
Getting in? One click on email/URL and then sign up. Join a channel? One click. Voice chat? One click. Stream your game? One click. Seamlessly switch to mobile app? Done. I have yet to meet a user that can't get into it with just an invite link. It's amazingly user friendly.
And if I want to, I can granularly create roles for users and administrators of arbitrary levels and access rights.
I share the privacy concerns, and that I can't grep any logs easily (though with voice chat that's harder regardless), but simply from a user perspective if it wasn't for the network effect of my IRC communities, and Messenger groups, I could happily just use Discord tomorrow.
I strongly dislike that it's closed source and partly Chinese owned, but I've been using Messenger to reach people I couldn't on IRC for years already, and that experience is much worse, with no privacy gain.
Credit where credit is due, they knocked it out of the park in most aspects.
For anyone without the wherewithal to deploy their own Matrix server and without a friend who has one, it looks like there's nothing like the (generous) Discord free tier. Looking at the recommended hosting provider on Riot.im's website:
I should also say that Matrix has a lot of other really nice aspects to it that give Discord and friends a run for their money:
- Open source. Self-explanatory.
- Federated. Sure, you can probably redundant-ify your IRC server with Apache Something and Amazon AWS/ Cloudflare whatever if you really wanted to, but I regularly see Matrix rooms with 10+ addresses because the protocol's designed around that redundancy, not the other way around. And of course with Discord none of this even applies...good luck if Intern Greg elbows the Big Red Button, or they pull a yahoo groups/google+/etc.
- The protocol leaves a lot of room for experimentation that Discord isn't nearly open enough for. [1][2][3]
- There's bridges to other discord, irc, and dozens of other platforms, sidestepping the adoption problem (note that there's been even more added since this graphic was made). [4]
They aren't exactly languishing in obscurity either: the government of France is one of their userbases [5]. Yeah, I'd say Discord-style VC would be nice, but the lack if it isn't exactly holding them back.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know Discord gives people their own exclusive servers to host their rooms on for free. I assumed you just create new rooms on their main server, in which case it would be comparable to signing up to the matrix.org homeserver for free and create as many rooms there and invite as many users to those rooms as you want.
A closer equivalent would be riot.im's servers, which are free in the same way as Discord/IRC's public rooms are. If you wanted custom integrations or the like you'd have to pay out for it, but the free option's still there. You can find a decent number of communities there--#GnuLinuxLovers comes to mind.
That's only if you want your own server. If you just want a room for you and your friends, you can use the primary instance for free (you can make private rooms too, if that takes your fancy).
The only thing this doesn't let you do is install bridges to other services (such as Discord). For that you'll need your own server.
I'm not a fan of paying per user, but the usage is only counted towards the billing when they stick around for two days. That makes it a better deal than if you were charged per invite.
I do not use Discord but I'm under the impression that it has voice channels like Mumble and Teamspeak whereas Matrix does not (yet) have them. This is a big deal-breaker for many teams and I'm definitely waiting until it has that feature before I deploy my own server.
For a chat-only replacement, it's definitely perfect.
Voice chat is apparently harder to implement, but it's still possible to do right now with Jitsi [1]. And even without it, Matrix supports an 'opt-in' style of voice channel that should work fine with smaller groups.
what's surprising about discord's privacy policy? it seems pretty straightforward.
we can push open source alternatives all you want but the truth is that these alternatives don't do a good enough job with the most valuable part of social networks: building the network. yes, word of mouth is a big part of growth, but the developers also need to put in work. discord didn't simply blow up because early adopters told their friends and so on, as much as we want to think that to be the case.
Honestly I don't think that's the reason at all i've never seen anything push by discord or it's developers that actually worked and affected me or people I know.
No advertising until it reached critical mass. No invite incentive programs that made people get it going (despite apparently there being that one month free nitro thing most people don't know off)
Most people came because a)others were there and had chosen it as a platform. b) It's just really nice in every way (other than the bottomline control an privacy part) c) There's no competitors that completely match it's functionality and profit model or if they tried to get close they came too late.
You have your voice chats, video chat and of course text chats. No trouble hosting servers. Easily and extensively customisable modding, structure, permissions, etc. Pins, pings, etc Almost all functionality one might need is there and if it isn't there's bots for it.
Sharing and inviting is easy. No time limit on how long stuff is saved or needing to be online to see messages.
Linked images, articles, videos what have you show up nicely. Theming is consistent. It works on every OS (except maybe bsd idk) and the browsers consistently so you won't have one group being left out and crusading against it.
Everything is in a single place unlike the various irc networks.
Want to show a pic you took? a webm? No need to host it somewhere else first.
If there was an open source alternative that got close hell yes of course I'd use it. I'd consider it a big bonus that i'd drop a bit of functionality for. But as it stands there's no comparable private alternatives either.
yes as i said, word of mouth is an important part of growth. but word of mouth doesn't just happen out of nowhere. discord knows their market, did their research, and did tons of work behind the scenes in marketing, partnerships, developing features that would add growth, etc. you see discord literally everywhere at events, other social media platforms, involved in communities.
where do you see this kind of effort from open source alternatives? i believe this is the biggest issue with the "alternatives". my perception is that they think they built an amazing product and that people should just start using it. but that's not how that works.
People don't often talk about https://spectrum.chat/ when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities. Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of messages.
I'm an admin in Reactiflux, which is one of the largest programming communities in the world, and hosted on Discord (https://www.reactiflux.com).
I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked and who's around.
At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive help, _right now_.
One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of misses the point.
As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them through their current problem, right now.
Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.
Spectrum is real-time too, but conversations are threaded rather than separated by global topics. I suppose Discord and Slack offer a kind of urgency to messages that are hard to replicate in threads.
Some things that come to mind on a quick reading of the website you linked:
- you can only sign up by using github. This is equally nonsensical as requiring a facebook account to sign up. I have neither. But I have e-mail, so why can't I play along?
- I legitimately cannot tell what platform this is on. Is it a webapp or is it a OSX/mac only local application?
- Does it exist on mobile?
I mean this as constructive criticism and I hope that somebody related to the project/company reads this and improves the information. But from what I can see this application is locked down for those on github and who operate macs. That makes it useless to a whole lot of people.
Spot on, the 10,000 free limit is much more limiting than many people think. I've seen very small businesses of even 3-4 people lose tons of institutional knowledge just because they wouldn't pay for slack. With larger tech groups you can start losing information after a few days. And the larger the group the less likely they will pay for it. I like the UI of Slack but am happy when I see tech groups using Discord instead.
We've been using Discord since the official developer server days - it just made sense given the flexibility and pricing compared to others such as Slack.
Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.
Voice? Really? In the communities I've hung around in (gamer & tech) it sits idle, unused. Curious why it keeps being placed front and center as a major feature, when people don't seem to actually want it.
IME, in large community servers (usually info dumps or LFG platforms like the video in the article) I almost never see it used. But in my smaller friend-focused Discord servers, there's always someone in the voice channels.
I think the greatest thing Discord did for gaming communities was make it so easy to get people together in a voice channel that everyone stopped using Skype. I tried for years to move people to Mumble/Vent/TS but it never stuck. But Discord managed to do it. I'd say voice is still the main feature that draws me and friends to the platform.
Discord is usually used in online games in which voice communication gives you a big advantage. In the Discord homepage it says "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" which were the programs used for voice communication in online games.
I find this post odd. As far as I'm aware, it seems like the momentum of Discord has slowed, if anything, since ~2014.
That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes blindness.
From the title I thought this would be Bret Weinstein's the "dark horse podcast". Check it out if you like evolutionary psychology. Even better is his brothers podcast, "The Portal" (https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/). Its brilliant, in a mad scientist kind-of way. Its where the dirty laundry, of the science community, is aired.
The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots.
You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...