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Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

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Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#141

Post by 3PS »

Jonovono wrote: post #110
fish45 wrote: post #77

Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing…

What do you feel is missing from Discord?

Personally, I wish the desktop client was a bit more lightweight. I understand why they went with Electron, and I don't think they could have afforded their speed of iterated development as a small company otherwise, but I still wish their app was a bit lighter on my laptop. I'm especially disappointed that cordless [1], a very usable third-party terminal-based client for Discord, was banned due to a ToS violation.

Secondly, I wish there was better support for E2E encryption, even just in direct messages. I wouldn't even mind it as a paid feature.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#142

Post by aclelland »

hguant wrote: post #138
etempleton wrote: post #127

I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.

Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware). Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it

Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies.

Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#143

Post by russellendicott »

adflux wrote: post #123
Ombudsman wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft is smarter than that, look at Github for example, people have largely forgotten it's owned by MSFT. They would have left Discord as a gaming platform and used it's tech in Teams instead. Teams is so behind Discord in all areas except video quality.

What fields are that exactly?

Teams chat is awful:

- Trying to figure out how to do code snippets and inline code is madness.

- You can't copy and paste whole conversations.

- Integrations/bots are awful and make you realize the whole thing is built on some ancient Sharepoint SOAP API.

- Mobile app on Android whacks out frequently and has to do the blinky reload chat 19 times before the screen settles down.

A lot of my other gripes are probably due to enterprise issues but I'll mention them anyway:

- Can't create my own channels.

- can't be on my company Teams on a call and switch to Microsoft's server to talk to a TAM without dropping the call.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#144

Post by spondyl »

ivraatiems wrote: post #80
xevrem wrote: post #12

so.... Discord will be a hellscape in 3-5 years as its inevitably destroyed by corporate greed?

Better than being a hellscape in 6 months-2 years due to forced integration with Teams.

Can I just say, while I believe Discord will die anyway if it IPOs (as with anything that believes in infinite scaling), I would have loved to see Microsoft enact the special fucked up kind of integration that only they can manage

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#145

Post by ev0lv »

joshmn wrote: post #89

It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.

TeamSpeak is still used heavily in the gaming community. Discord sucks when you have 50 people in the same voice chat.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#146

Post by tyingq »

me_me_me wrote: post #31
krzepah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.

UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.

Decision makers are pretty forgiving of an application that comes bundled with something else they had to buy anyway. And it is "good enough", despite being worse than competitors, for things like hosting video meetings.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#147

Post by hypertele-Xii »

aclelland wrote: post #142
hguant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware). Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it

Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies. Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse

Thanks for the heads up. Fuck this spyware trend.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#148

Post by kevincox »

lbotos wrote: post #132
rakoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix the protocol is not there yet. Element, its main client, lacks too many features to have the same experience: - No concept of servers (in discord parlance). Its equivalent (matrix spaces, in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc177... ) is in progress - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi - Even if you have Jitsi the exper…

> - No included audio/video calls. You have to link them manually and use a third-party stack, such as Jitsi To be explicit, no group audio/video. I run my own Matrix server for my partner and I and it uses webRTC based audio out of the box for 1:1 calls which we use every day, and sometimes video. No Jitsi enabled in my config. (I only share this so other readers can gauge if Matrix can meet their needs.)

It is also worth noting that the WebRTC calls are E2E encrypted and look fantastic as they are often peer-to-peer so you can get an amazing connection if you have the bandwidth available.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#149

Post by dvh »

Jonovono wrote: post #110
fish45 wrote: post #77

Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing…

What do you feel is missing from Discord?

Mobile website. Back in the old day it was possible to join without registration. Just visit the project invite link and start typing. Then it required registration but still worked on mobile. Now it no longer works on mobile, you just get "install app or GTFO". I've stopped using discord then.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#150

Post by kevincox »

pyr0hu wrote: post #92
lrvick wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not matrix?

Discord is free, no need for maintenance and much easier to onboard non-tech friends IMO.

There are also many free Matrix severs. But I agree that Discord has much more UX polish right now. (Especially around onboarding).
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