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How Discord Went Mainstream

theatlantic.com

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Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#11

Post by Klover »

bathory wrote: post #6
panic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a few things that make Discord nicer than IRC for ordinary (non-voice) chat: 1. You can start a new server right in the client by clicking a button. 2. Logs are saved server-side and synced across all your clients (phone, PC, etc). 3. You can upload images and videos to be hosted by Discord's servers. Media and links appear inline in the chat log. 4. No strange rituals involving NickServ or ChanServ. 5. Mobi…

Regarding 4.), only once which is your account creation which is valid across all discord servers

That depends on the server. You can set it to public, or a mix between the two. Or even a public channel, a registered channel, and a channel for people with 2FA.

The way I got into Discord was some open source project had a link on their GitHub page for collaboration, I clicked that, entered a name and within minutes I was helping out with some code. A cookie kept my temporary account alive.

I don’t remember any trolls or spammers or anything. I noticed there’s a setting to control the amount of filtering for your server. And I think there’s also a captcha the first time a temporary user joins.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#12

Post by SeanDav »

I was a huge Discord fan, but now stopped using it for several reasons.

- I can't mute some channels completely. I have raised bug reports, tried all the various options, researched everything I could find in Google about this issue. Bottom line is that "mute" is taken by Discord to be "only mute, unless I think you need to hear this", with no way to fully mute a channel.

- I only use Discord in browser and it now has a complete and very distracting screen refresh every few seconds.

- It is a memory pig in browser and my browser seems to become unstable after a short time, while running Discord in one of the tabs.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#14

Post by worble »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #3
gaspoweredcat wrote: post #2

maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

People were tired of getting DDoS'ed so they switched away from Skype/Teamspeak. The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use, and the community aspect is appealing. IRC isn't very easy to use for the common person.

>The nice UX makes it easy for everyone to use

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but am I the only one who finds the UX to be atrocious? Everything seems to a nondescript icon that rarely represents what it's supposed to do, nearly everything is flat so it's hard to tell what you can actually click on and whats decoration. Everytime I use it feels like an exercise in mental gymnastics just to navigate it.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#15

Post by ngrilly »

What do you think of Telegram, compared to Discord?

Telegram has one feature I miss in Discord: quote replies. It makes easier to follow conversations in a crowded channel. It is the most upvoted feature in the Discord feedback tool: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600....

But Telegram misses a lot of things provided by Discord: multiple channels on the same server to organize conversations, reactions/likes, voice, the possibility to transfer ownership of an existing server.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#16

Post by jypepin »

gaspoweredcat wrote: post #2

maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

not saying that in a negative way, and I agree that for someone who understands IRC, IRC is great!

But this comment is very similar to the infamous rsync comment on the Dropbox original Show HN post. Most people don't know IRC, are put off by it's raw (or lack of) design, etc. It's much easier to sell something like slack/discord than IRC.

I remember having so many engineers fighting against HipChat being too slow, and saying we should just use IRC. Yes, in a way it's true, it does everything we'd need, it's fast, can be self hosted etc... but Nancy from HR or Paul from finance would NOT want to figure out how it works.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#17

Post by Semaphor »

fvjft wrote: post #7
gaspoweredcat wrote: post #2

maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

Apart from the (more than obvious) technical feats, they've raised a lot of money and can afford to offer all of their services, some of them a bit expensive, for free. If they can't find a way to monetise, though, they'll be in trouble. Had TeamSpeak or Mumble been able to offer hosted services for free, maybe Discord wouldn't have existed.

They have pushed monetization recently. Discord Nitro went from custom id, animated avatar and all emotes of all your servers everywhere to a game subscription service (obviously while raising the price)

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#18

Post by nindalf »

jypepin wrote: post #16
gaspoweredcat wrote: post #2

maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

not saying that in a negative way, and I agree that for someone who understands IRC, IRC is great! But this comment is very similar to the infamous rsync comment on the Dropbox original Show HN post. Most people don't know IRC, are put off by it's raw (or lack of) design, etc. It's much easier to sell something like slack/discord than IRC. I remember having so many engineers fighting against HipChat being too slow, a…

The top comment on Dropbox's original announcement went like

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software ... is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#19

Post by wetpaws »

ngrilly wrote: post #15

What do you think of Telegram, compared to Discord? Telegram has one feature I miss in Discord: quote replies. It makes easier to follow conversations in a crowded channel. It is the most upvoted feature in the Discord feedback tool: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600... . But Telegram misses a lot of things provided by Discord: multiple channels on the same server to organize conversations,…

Discord is a replacement for irc, telegram is a replacement for messenger/blogs. You can't really compare them, it's like matching oranges and apples.
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