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How Discord Went Mainstream

theatlantic.com

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Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#141

Post by CM30 »

Part of me wonders if community moderation had something to do with it. With Discord, people have to know where to find your server link, and can be denied access to various channels until they get past admin set verification rules. This makes it much harder for trolls or troublemakers to brigade a server compared to say, a subreddit, and makes it tricky for your enemies to go trawling through your chat history like on Reddit or what not. It really puts off the content scraping services you saw abusing social media sites a while back for clickbaity articles (like BuzzFeed, College Humour, etc), and shuts down attempts to turn niche communities into a moral panic in the mainstream media.

Of course, these aren't the only reasons. Obviously the sheer ease of setting up a Discord server had a major effect, as did the pseudononymity, the voice chat features, the extra bells and whistles compared to IRC and Skype and the share URLs among other things.

But I definitely feel the moderation may have had some effect, and may be partly why it seems to be replacing Reddit as the network of choice in gaming communities and what not.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#142

Post by jgust »

LinuxBender wrote: post #120
zaarn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting those up isn't quite trivial for the non-programmer user and they have problems with some IRC servers (it's almost impossible to connect to EFnet via thelounge in my experience and convos had a variety of problems).

Agreed. On the upside, you need one technical friend that can set it up for many friends to use. For EFnet and several other networks, you need to get permission from NetOps/NetAdmins or an individual server operator if you don't need the fail-over resilience.

These types of arguments tickle me. Why isn't instagram just a shiny web frontend to a newsgroup?

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#143

Post by arminiusreturns »

CDSlice wrote: post #135
arminiusreturns wrote: post #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.

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…

Come talk to me in a year or two when it's found out discord was spying on users for the government and/or selling everyone's data to shady third parties, or being used as a backdoor on systems, and tell me I'd the tradeoff was worth it.

Of course I should have chosen my words more carefully, I understand child posters point about how technical things are hard, but I wasn't addressing a webboard of non-technical users... this is HN.

I only use Linux for many of the same reasons, and I openly acknowledge it's not as "easy" , but there is Morea to the products and services we use than just that, and I think things like the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations of these issues mean that we as techies and general trend leaders in that world need to set a better example on the security and privacy fronts.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#144

Post by LinuxBender »

jgust wrote: post #142
LinuxBender wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. On the upside, you need one technical friend that can set it up for many friends to use. For EFnet and several other networks, you need to get permission from NetOps/NetAdmins or an individual server operator if you don't need the fail-over resilience.

These types of arguments tickle me. Why isn't instagram just a shiny web frontend to a newsgroup?

I am not arguing, just providing alternate options. They are not for everyone.

FWIW, there are also shiny front-ends to NNTP. That would actually be a great way to have a threaded messaging system and attachments.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#145

Post by swiley »

zaarn wrote: post #91
aepiepaey wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - persistent chat history That's kind of misleading. "Server-side chat history" is more accurate. IRC logs are more persistent. It's possible to go back and check them at any time. If I've read the messages, I know they've been logged, and I know they'll still be there. Discord history, on the other hand, can be deleted from the servers at any time. Often when you go back to double check something that was written…

Only if you run a bouncer or IRC client 24/7, which means you either pay for it or some device in your house will be running all the team. Not great for the average user.

Most channels have a bot running that logs it. If you really care to read through every message you can go read the log.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#146

Post by sphynxie »

Can_Not wrote: post #131
fouc wrote: 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.

If you use macOS, you can do this: https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed2...

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#147

Post by gsich »

ihuman wrote: post #52
2038AD wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't using a 3rd party client like that against the ToS and could get you banned?

The question is: is it detectable and do the devs care?

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#148

Post by avinium »

ktpsns wrote: post #13
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

I recently looked into Discord since ~4yrs, and noticed the UI looks almost exactly like a copy of Slack ( http://www.slack.com ).

Completely disagree.

This is just my personal opinion, but I (and my circle) have found Discord to have the worst UI of any mainstream application.

First, there's only a dark theme, which I find much more difficult to read than Slack's default light theme.

Every window (native client) is crammed full of widgets, making it very difficult for fresh users to figure out which button to click to invite people.

It's also constantly firing off unread notifications, adding more and more density to the UI. It makes it very difficult to instantly know where to look.

As another example, I just fired up the desktop client and created a random server - and now I literally have no idea how to delete or disconnect from it.

I'm not a fan of Slack for other reasons, but its UI is far, far superior to Discord.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#149

Post by technofiend »

Notorious_BLT wrote: post #121
technofiend wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great until you discover that Google's migration tool doesn't port Google Authenticator data when you switch phones. Ask me how I know. :-)

You can recover 2FA if you're already signed in on any other device though. You just have to enter your password on the device you are signed in on.

Uh, no saying "any other device" is too sweeping of a generalization. You must be logged into a browser specifically: You cannot turn two factor off from the app.

Re: How Discord Went Mainstream

#150

Post by manicdee »

avree wrote: post #76
2038AD wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no way to mute "Role Pings" on Discord currently. You can mute @here/@everyone/@your name, but if you are assigned a role and that is pinged, it goes through. That is one of my main gripes with Discord, in addition to: 1. Uploading photos/videos through the mobile app stops if you lock your phone or background the app. No other modern app exhibits this behavior. 2. Blocking users shows a large "BLOCKED" mess…

I have channels full of “1 blocked message” messages, thanks to people using stupid pointless chat bots. That is one feature I wish they could implement differently (the idea being that you can click the “blocked message” message to see the content of the blocked message)
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