I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.<p>Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.<p>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.
I’ve used discord for a long time and greatly prefer it to slack, teams and Mattermost (the three competitors I’ve used most often). Ironically the only think stopping me from strongly advocating for its adoption in business is that I’m already a user!<p>Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.<p>If I could stay logged into my social discord servers with my gamer handle and be being logged into work servers with work handles, especially on mobile, they would gain traction I think. Add active directory account management as a paid option and would be an easy sell some places.
Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux".
I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.<p>I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.
Discord is the classic freemium monopoly trap. They want to capture market share with a walled garden and once they do they will alter the terms to milk out every last drop of revenue they can before everyone jumps ship to the new new thing.
True sign of success: HN doesn't get the appeal of the product and they wonder why people are using it.<p>This have happened so many times, it's actually a good indicator.
Discord is easy to use which is why its so popular. Install, pick a name and go. I don't even remember creating an account, just typing in a nick name. Even on Void Linux Musl you can install it via flatpack, scan the qr code and you're logged in with all your servers and channels already there. You couldn't setup an IRC client that fast.<p>My great gripe? No 3rd party clients. It's also massively bloated for my need of sending a few bytes of text. For this reason I use it for just one server and to communicate with two friends and my brother.<p>Otherwise I use IRC where I'm on three networks and 26 channels. IRC is much less convenient for sure in terms of nick registering (some SOB took my name!) "back scroll" and persistence across clients/systems but it does 99% of what I want from a chat client: chatting via text.
Interesting to read that Discord has received higher offers than previously reported, as high as $18 billion, yet Jason refuses to sell and hopes to go public. Good for him to sticking to his guns, I don’t think I could say no to $18 billion!
In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it.<p>Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?
I've used discord for a number of years, and use it almost daily with my friends. Arguments over UX will always be opinionated, but one thing where discord absolutely shines is voice chat. There's just no competition to any other voice chat system out there; it's fast, it's high quality, and most importantly, it filters out non-voices. Clapping, water faucet, vacuums, crunching chips, coughing, breathing, desk noises, none of it comes through and all of it gets filtered out. It makes for a significantly better experience when I don't have to deal with someone else's "voice chat etiquette" incompetence/ignorance.
There is a huge wave of transitions from reddit/ forums towards discord because it offers voice chat / image uploads for free. It's not gonna last at that, chat is a bad format compared to hierarchical replies, hard to search etc. Gaming is their niche but at some point games will want to stop bleeding their community to them. There is also a proliferation of communities which leads to a lot of activity because it's a new platform, but as always, very few of them will survive. Then at some point they 'll also block all NSFW content and more people will leave. The value of their offering is that they re free, but money runs out, and slack already exists. Another case of overfunding for unsustainable growth.
Is nobody concerned about privacy?<p>I don't like this: <a href="https://www.tosdr.org/en/service/discord" rel="nofollow">https://www.tosdr.org/en/service/discord</a>
<p><pre><code> Hi ***,
This is a just a super quick notice that we will be closing your open support ticket and I will be eating it shortly.
Hopefully we solved your issue with such grace and finesse that you didn't need to respond. If that's the case, great! Meal for me.
Otherwise, please respond and we will sick our support team on the problem like a dog on some marbled wagyu. And then I'll find something else to eat, I guess.
Thanks,
Eater of Support Tickets
</code></pre>
Gosh, I really feel like I've spoken to professional support. Considering they didn't fix my issue, this sort of response is pretty annoying.
Hello!<p>This is the HN comments of Facebook’s latest valuation in 2007:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057</a><p>I wonder if HN will ever be bullish on a product that’s targeting the general audience. We seem to only be able to see technical expertise as the only moat. I guess this is why product managers that can’t code get paid the big bucks. Anyone know if there’s a HN made up of folks with astute product sense?<p>Or even better: Anyone know of a Discord server I could join. ;)
A killer use of Discord... push-to-talk audio connection to everyone else in the room.<p>If your team is on-call and incident management could be improved, just try putting your team in a Discord room and see what happens. Don't put managers in there, just the engineers.<p>It works great.
I despise discord. It's bloatware. It has constant popups that are difficult to disable.<p>I do read their tech posts on HN, and they are always fascinating. But it seems to me like a product that the MBAs have taken a over.
I can't remember where I read it (likely Joel Spolsky, or Paul Graham), but there was an article about businesses that thrive in the shadow of FAANG + MS and others because even though they're in the same business they don't compete in a way that's worth the big guys chasing.<p>In this case, MS Teams is obsessed with Office integration as it's key selling point. Which in turn means business workers. Whereas Discord users don't care about calendar integration and so on.<p>Modern chat apps are a Venn diagram with a modest intersection.<p>I can't see how Discord can get more users without losing original users. Basically, a demographic shift. And then you're in the big guys territory where they additionally have 'killer features' already and that's where businesses get bought or fold.
If Discord wants to win me over, they need to adjust their layout & themes. The default dark mode and the light mode both are not comfortable to me, and I'm someone that likes the default Slack theme or irssi/weechat in terminal on a black background.
I hope not, I don't like the tiny realm vibe I get on discord servers. I find it too stiff and less friendly than most webirc sites (i know irc is not 10% of discord in terms of features but even then I find the added bonuses aren't worth that negative feeling.)
Many software development communities are on Discord. General purpose ones as well as specific ones. There's one for Vue and a wannabe-official C#/.NET one (that's also pretty toxic unfortunately), and ones for other big frameworks and languages.
Sworn off Discord since I discovered it's really hard to get your chat logs out <a href="https://youtu.be/wA1aaIA27Iw" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wA1aaIA27Iw</a>
FWIW one data point - we had begun beforehand but especially when COVID started, the small company I work at moved nearly all our company communication into Discord.<p>We tried out Slack and other alternatives at the time and the huge advantage of Discord was how simple and playful it was while other solutions were so very enterprise-y.<p>Plus, Discord offers a great bot API, so it was super easy to write our own integrations. We are very happy Discord was not bought by Microsoft.
As a personal user, I'd give Discord more money if high-resolution streaming and higher bitrates etc. were a bit cheaper, and I could buy credit which using these features ate through, instead of having to pay an overly expensive subscription.
As a frequent user of the PC client, I think it's a bloated mess which gets slower by the day (with poor UX to boot). And they're talking about expanding their market? It's clear what their priorities are.
I kind of like this, assuming they don't change their software too much(or at all).<p>Discords voice channels are the perfect replacement for "watercooler conversations" for the remote working age.
They have a lot of issues if they "want everybody else on Discord" They cancelled an account of mine because it shared a phone number with a secondary account of mine. (1 for work; 1 for personal use.) Support said "Account ban is valid - FRAUD/SPAM" with no ability to have a conversation with them or escalate. My cellphone number is now blacklisted for SMS validation. Incredibly weird. No support for their products, not really.
I use teams at work. I hadn’t used discord much but then did for a hackthebox CTF.<p>I found discord way better for work that involves dynamic collaboration ie where folk are often working individually or jumping into each other’s streams to work together.<p>To achieve something similar in teams we have an open all day meeting that people pop into but it’s sub par vs the discord model.
I've never used Discord for gaming, but I've used it extensively in the maker hobby for various groups. I don't see it as being well aligned for business use, and any changes to make it better aligned for business use would damage it's ability to serve hobbyists (and gamers). I don't think this is a good move.
Yea, it would be refreshing for a company to say, we nailed this product, we are going to now just refine it more and more perfectly to streamline it even more. But instead everyone wants to cram more things into it. The old saying was that a SAAS product isn't complete until it has it's own email server baked into it.
They refused $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft?! That's brave.<p>Not they are worth $15bn? It is crazy valuation for the chat app that's basically gaming version of Slack. I always thought Slack would purchase Discord and make it its "Gaming division" chat app.
Forget about using Discord if you use a wireless carrier that uses VOIP (like Republic Wireless, for example). Discord will not let you authenticate. Their answer is "change carriers", but I don't need Discord all that much.
Discord has also joined the ranks of tech companies censoring speech. Which essentially means they can and have eavesdropped on various groups and closed groups. No thank you.
I feel like in order to campfire business users, they would have to rebrand. Discord is a cool name for gamers, but maybe not for your average business person.
Disclaimer - I can't read the article; paywalled(and I don't care enough to bypass it).<p>That said, will discord lose those initial advocates - gamers - in the process? They're already cracking down on NSFW channels, and constantly making things less convenient and more locked down in their pursuit of the general public.
I really dislike discord (slack for zoomers) and slack (discord for boomers). They are so bloated, messy and ugly. I still prefer email. The good side of discord and slack is that they are SO easy to ignore, and it was awesome when some of the groups i work with switched to them: the quantity of my email decreased significantly. By never checking them, I might miss a couple of things, but nothing worth the hassle.