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How Discord Went Mainstream

theatlantic.com

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#131
post #29

One thing that really irritates me about Discord is that it has really crappy low-contrast dark & light themes. And it's not theme-able at all. At least slack's default light theme is high contrast and also slack is theme-able.

> also slack is theme-able.

But no dark theme options, so not theme-able in any useful way.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#133
I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat...

I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#134

I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat... I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.

It's a classic example of the network effect for social networking.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#135

I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat... I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.

Maybe because they don't want to worry about life things happening and you dropping it for a while? Most people don't have the knowledge, capability, and/or will to run their own chat server when they can just use Discord for free and not have to worry about downtime or managing the server hosting.

While me and my friends could run a Matrix or IRC server or whatever the new open source chat awesomeness is these days we don't really see the point when Discord does everything we want and more and doesn't require any management beyond setting up our guild settings, channels, and roles.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#136
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There is still the Nitro classic with just the extra account features, the game subscription is an extra piece if you want it.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#137

I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat... I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security concerns for days.

Maybe because they don't want to worry about life things happening and you dropping it for a while? Most people don't have the knowledge, capability, and/or will to run their own chat server when they can just use Discord for free and not have to worry about downtime or managing the server hosting. While me and my friends could run a Matrix or IRC server or whatever the new open source chat awesomeness is these days…

This basic problem can always be summed up as something like: "Extreme nerds who are almost completely divorced from the needs and skills of 95% of all computer users are BAFFLED by the fact Social Effects Are Real, and people do not know how to run their own servers. News at 11." and it's extremely predictable and always on-time.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#138

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

It's the community. I joined a discord server a few months ago to get support from some product (I can't remember what), and once I started using it I realized there are vibrant communities for all of my hobbies and interests. I now have a bunch of new friends that are into building mechanical keyboards that live in the same city. I would never have met them if I hadn't accidentally stumbled onto Discord.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#139
post #119
post #29

One thing that really irritates me about Discord is that it has really crappy low-contrast dark & light themes. And it's not theme-able at all. At least slack's default light theme is high contrast and also slack is theme-able.

I wish Discord had an actual usable light theme. What they have now is an abomination. They probably look at the stats and see nobody uses the light theme and think "not worth to fix". Of course nobody uses it... it's unusable.

[deleted]

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those permissions are specifically granted "in connection with operating and providing the Service". I'm not a lawyer, but are you suggesting that they could do other things like steal your images to use in advertising and claim that it's "in connection with operating and providing the Service"? In order to host your (automatically copyrighted) content on their server and display it to other people in your chats they…

"Steal"? You gave them a license to do so. Yes, they could use your images in their advertising, or publish a book of your images, or make a movie out of all your messages and videos, or anything else they wanted to do with, as they call it, "Your Content". That's what a perpetual, transferable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to create derivative works is. And no, all those rights are not required to…

>you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to [snip] Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service

So what you're saying is that when you grant someone the right to use your content for a specific purpose, you're actually granting them the right to do whatever the hell they want with it?

Again, not a lawyer, but "in connection with operating and providing the Service" reads like a legally important part of that sentence to me.

"Service" in this context is defined earlier in the document:

>the Discord application (the “App”) or the website located at https://discordapp.com (the "Site"), which are collectively referred to as the “Service,”

IMO you're reading this very creatively if you think that grants them a right to publish a book of your private messages. Rights to use your content are granted specifically "in connection with operating and providing the Service." A book of your messages is not in connection with operating/providing the Discord app or website.

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