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Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

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Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#171

Post by superkuh »

2iP1zbR wrote: post #151
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…

> Teamspeak, which has other problems like server admins viewing the IP addresses of other users in the server, if that counts

The employees and their contractors and related at Discord corporate can see your IP address too and much more. Luckily it won't be Microsoft owning it as they could correlate against their software empire too.

But Discord does have significant profit motive to collect information about you. In fact, their entire proprietary protocol, client, and restriction of clients is based around ensuring this.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#172

Post by evanextreme »

debacle wrote: post #53

Amazon (Twitch), Epic, and Valve are all targeting gaming verticals. Each of them are integrating the other's features as also-rans: streaming, marketplace, reviews, community, platform. Most people would probably be surprized to know that you can buy games on Twitch and stream on Steam. What space will Discord be able to carve out? They will be a Netflix in an Disney and Hulu world.

Discord will always have a market as long as competing marketplaces / ecosystems exist on PC. Discord's platform agnosticism makes it a safer bet than the three companies you mentioned, all of which are incentivized to build closed content ecosystems that antagonize each other in order to move more product. There is simply no other solution that allows me to see what my friends are playing, jump into their channel, and see the gameplay broadcast live from multiple perspectives in a private environment.

The Netflix analogy is not particularly apt here either, as where Netflix produces the content, here the content is user generated. So its about technological executions, platform agnosticism, and features sets. Valve's Steam app on iOS didnt even support iPhone X screen resolutions until a year and a half ago so I wouldnt hold my breath for them to compete well in this space at all. Maybe Epic's acquisition of houseparty could cause some competition for them? But I doubt it.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#173

Post by MentallyRetired »

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…

The kids are using Guilded and dropping Discord these days, from what I hear.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#174

Post by rurp »

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?

Their treatment of Linux is pretty terrible, where they block you from even launching the app after a minor update until you go download and install the new .deb file. I've had many times where I went to jump onto a quick Discord chat only to have to stop and jump through those hoops.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#175

Post by snorrah »

dvh wrote: post #149
Jonovono wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It works fine on mobile.

https://imgur.com/9PiRQTI.jpg

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#176

Post by thow-01187 »

dekerta wrote: post #7
donkarma wrote: post #3

Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive

Teams definitely feels like it was rushed to market to take advantage of the pandemic. I'm really sad our company moved us from Slack to Teams. It's so much worse, especially on Linux

I wonder whether the near universal unpleasant experiences mentioned in this thread aren't caused by bad ports of MS Teams to Mac/Linux/Android. I use Teams solely on Windows, and the calls/video are flawless, recording just works, captions and audio transcripts are fairly accurate. The chat portion has minor warts, but it does get the job done. Markdown syntax works for most of the message formatting needs. Webhooks are easy to implement.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#177

Post by brundolf »

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…

As a 29 year old, similar (to a lesser extent) deal. I've used Discord a huge amount over the past year, mostly for gaming but sometimes while playing different games at the same time/just hanging out.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#178

Post by tacticalmook »

DethNinja wrote: post #78
mehlmao wrote: post #70

So what is Discord's path to profitability? They tried selling video games and closed the store not too long after launching it. Nitro/Server Boosts definitely don't come close to the cost of operation.

Advertisements I guess? I still cannot believe how fast they captured game chat market, even with lots of other competitors. Honestly I also would like to enter to this market but breaking the market share of discord will be very hard indeed.

That's not surprising to me. Discord offers free hosting for a feature-rich IRC and group voice service. Nobody else did that.

A gaming clan no longer needs to maintain their own Teamspeak/Ventrilo server + their own website and forum. The convenience of having it all in one centralized program wins out over Discord's UX oddities, privacy concerns and more recent bloat. This ease of use also lowered the barrier to create a clan, so it captures a larger audience than its predecessors ever did. And yet it still provides powerful tools for moderation and user permissions, an API for chat bots, video streaming...

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#179

Post by brundolf »

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?

The only thing I would change is small and weird: I wish you could make the window smaller on desktop. The min-width is almost half the size of my screen; it shouldn't be hard to gracefully collapse things further as you resize

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#180

Post by vkou »

InitialLastName wrote: post #152
tinus_hn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons of course is that every driver feels the need to add their great pane to the control panel applet, so now Microsoft can’t change anything to the applet or all the drivers break.

3 of those settings panes are baked directly into Windows 10 and have nothing to do with any 3rd-party drivers. If the sound isn't enough, the power management is even worse. I count at least 5 different panes to configure different subsets of screen saver, sleep, hibernate and power on/off behavior, all from Windows itself with no 3rd-party software involved.

I believe (but can't confirm, because I don't own enough wierd audio equipment) that third-party drivers can embed controls into one of those settings panes.

But yes, your point still stands. There's no good reason for this mess, and Microsoft needs to put someone who cares in charge of Windows UX.

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