181–190 of 515 posts
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.
'discord professional' seems like pretty low hanging fruit and an obvious upgrade over slack + zoom
What about Discord besides network effect makes it a desirable holding? Do they have any technological advantage?
They use(d) Elixir (based on Erlang VM) [1]. WhatsApp apparently considered Erlang to be one of the reasons why they could serve such a massive userbase with a tiny team [2], which I guess is a tech advantage. In any case, I enjoyed reading Discord's tech blogs on Elixir. [1] https://blog.discord.com/tagged/erlang [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... EDIT: added reference and clarified…
Are they one of the first Elixir shops to IPO?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That would be an improvement on the current status quo, where each third-party device adds its own new settings pane.
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.
Note: Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack. The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.
If they can parley this into solid trust over the coming mid-term, without any major security breaches, then they are set.
(plus the other feature options that were mentioned E2E, stickers etc... they have room to grow. There is already some payment duct-tape setup. I am sure that, barring a complete fuckup, discord is going to do very well.)
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.
That being said, I would argue that any voice chat with more than 10, maybe 20, active people talking is going to be nearly unusable. Not due to audio quality.
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> 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.
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> 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.
i've been invited to random, huge discord servers to play just one game, and after the games over i usually leave the server unless i know everybody. i never have to worry about the server admin or one of his buddies deciding they didn't like me for whatever reason and DDOSing the shit out of me for weeks, forcing me to change my IP address because i didn't use a VPN.
that's just personal; it could even turn a profit if a professional gamer joined a server, several users recorded the IP address, bet against them in an upcoming game, then DDOS'd the shit out of them.
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> - 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.)
What client do you use on your devices to talk via the server?
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.
Seriously! It's a shame that Xfire became a thing of the past. I feel like Steam baked in enough of the "community" features to steal their lunch, without ever delivering on the full community element that Discord is thriving on!