Is there a reason why they don't just keep a fork their code and rebrand it as a "serious app" for corporate use and charge money for it? Discord has the best service for voice chat and screen sharing I've seen and I'd love to use it with clients instead of all the other weird apps I've had to use. The least painful so far has been Google Meet but even that one has its issues and likely an expirement date.
How Discord Went Mainstream
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#102Discord hits a sweet spot of design choices that make sense for online friends occasionally intermingling with strangers on the Internet. It's free and has share-URLs to onboard into the product, it's pseudonymous so one can be known by a chosen persona, it's centrally hosted so DOS-attempts don't impact users' networks, but the management and moderation of channels and spaces is distributed. History is searchable, 1-to-1 conversations exist, voice chat is optional but effortlessly available.
IRC is the ancestor of this kind of chat, but IRC isn't as widely known as it was in past generations, it has connection privacy challenges, and has a less cohesive service identity and onboarding story that people have come to expect with the spread of centralized services. Slack is another modern, centralized take on IRC, but reveals one's email address, and multiparty voice chat is gated behind paid plans and limited in size. Gamer voice chat systems are decentralized and are lacking in text chat. Old instant messaging networks have been shut down, new ones either don't have desktop clients, don't have a good group voice chat, or reveal personal info. Skype was fine on all three and was a hangout tool for many, until Microsoft ran it into the ground.
It's a bit of a meme now that companies are putting out chat services yet no one can do them right. Surely there's economic forces at play, and rich media chat is probably expensive, but there's companies with very deep pockets who could run it as a loss leader just to starve their competitors, to commoditize their own complements. But cloud storage for individuals or video hosting like YouTube is also expensive, yet an upgrade path exists for users who want to pay. Google has thoroughly ceded chat to Facebook and still can't sort their strategy out, Facebook is just now realizing that they could tackle a more private chat too and they could satisfy that demand, Microsoft has morphed Skype into everything from Windows-integrated platformwide IM to a bad Snapchat clone and back again to a WebRTC shim, this time with a Chrome-only client. Asian apps capable, but are focusing on other markets and aren't as well known in the US. Telegram still doesn't have group voice calls. VC companies focus on the enterprise where willingness to pay is higher, amounts are higher, but use-cases are different.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#103From the TOS: 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. The Company doe…
The first part of the TOS is standard, even something as simple as showing a thumbnail of a posted picture (which discord does) requires it. AutoHotKey have their own relatively active Discord server, so obviously, you can talk about it. What is banned is the use of macros on the Discord client itself. As for seeing every single message, then yes, certainly. That's how you get the entire conversation history when you…
"What is banned is the use of macros on the Discord client itself."
Good luck stopping that when the functionality is built-into my Logitech G15 (when the drivers are installed instead of using the default HID input drivers.) Built by gamers for gamers, HAH!
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#104I 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 ha…
I'm not a fan of Discord but I think you're mistaken. Right click on the channel icon and go to 'Notification Settings' rather than clicking on 'Server Mute'. From there you can choose whether a mention (inc./ex. @everyone/@here) counts and whether mobile notifications are enabled. As for the client you may want to try Ripcord[0]. It uses less memory though I'm not sure you can mute people the same way. While I don't…
I have EVERYTHING notification-wise turned off. I still get @everyone message pings on desktop client in channels I have explicitly muted and turned off notifications for.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely is. You know who else has a license like this? hacker news. ( https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ ) By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your Use…
So if Y Combinator did not have those terms, I could put my own copyrighted work onto Hacker News and then sue Y Combinator? That doesn't sound right.
You probably wouldn't have a leg to stand on with that kind of lawsuit.
But when a company lets a lawyer write their TOS, they're gonna end up with a "better safe than sorry" version.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#106maybe 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…
I've never used HipChat but I always hated Slack. My boss would always delete my comments without telling me when he didn't like what I said.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
He's probably right, it's not reasonable and dropbox is a shitty product. But the market has determined it's valuable, despite what we techies think.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#108Discord business model seems te be to sell games. Not sure if it's going to be a good fit for non-gamers in the future. https://riot.im/ powered by Matrix also seems a good alternative. It's getting more stable every day.
Matrix is really nice. I hope that some of the TUI clients improve a bit, though. I absolutely loved the weechat plugin made in lua, but it'd often take several tries to connect. One day I couldn't connect at all, and there hasn't been github activity lately. It was the only client I found that let me actually reorder rooms and people manually. I really hate the constantly changing order that I can't seem to configur…
There is a new and much more actively maintained WeeChat plugin, take a look: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've almost never used Slack, but isn't it more institution-oriented? Can you use it for free with a bunch of friends? I'd be interested in knowing what you prefer in both, since you're using both Also, have you ever tried a free software, decentralized alternative?
I'm not who you were talking to, but while Slack was definitely intended for use by businesses, you can create a Slack "team" for free (or at least, that's what I remember). There are limits around free Slack (finite chat history) but it is possible. > Also, have you ever tried a free software, decentralized alternative? Which are you thinking of? I've used Riot before, to see what Matrix was all about. The Riot clie…
When did you last try Riot? Version 1.0 was released last month, and in general Riot performance has improved a lot in the last ~year.
Re: How Discord Went Mainstream
#110From the TOS: 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. The Company doe…
The first part of the TOS is standard, even something as simple as showing a thumbnail of a posted picture (which discord does) requires it. AutoHotKey have their own relatively active Discord server, so obviously, you can talk about it. What is banned is the use of macros on the Discord client itself. As for seeing every single message, then yes, certainly. That's how you get the entire conversation history when you…
This is the most well-thought-out response in the thread. My initial knee-jerk is too extreme. Thank you for the sanity check.