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Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

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Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#391

Post by Dangeranger »

jrm4 wrote: post #249

Higher ed instructor here. I've been teaching online for well over a decade, frequently subjected to the Blackboards and the Canvases and lately Zoom. I can name no tool that has improved what I do from when I started except Discord. I'm old-ish, so it was a bit hard to get to at first, but after some time with it, I'd replace everything with it if I could. (And this is coming from a big time free/open source guy! I'…

Can you talk about your instructional workflow a bit more and how you replaced your former tools?

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#392

Post by hunter-gatherer »

exhaze wrote: post #339
lacker wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)

Yeah, my parents refused to buy a second line so this is what we did.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#393

Post by diamondhandle »

unethical_ban wrote: post #266
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.

I've met the creator of Vent. Cool dude, moderately wealthy and I believe very happy to sit on his "fuck you" money and give back to the community upon occasion (Quakecon giveaways, for example). Vent 4 was DOA. Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism. Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming,…

Speaking of the founder of Ventrilo -- this video is priceless:

https://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/21/video-man-sells-gt500-ra...

I guess there's no more of that.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#395

Post by EricMausler »

vehementi wrote: post #351
tru3_power wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/

That's exactly it yes. Discord is ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak, but hosted and with IRC channels.

I still use mumble

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#396

Post by cortesoft »

dashwav wrote: post #306
unethical_ban wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've met the creator of Vent. Cool dude, moderately wealthy and I believe very happy to sit on his "fuck you" money and give back to the community upon occasion (Quakecon giveaways, for example). Vent 4 was DOA. Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism. Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming,…

I think that the biggest differentiator between Discord and the others (mumble, TS, Vent, etc) was that Discord has very mature text chatting as a first class citizen, rather than an afterthought. This is what I have anecdotally seen as the primary thing that has made even people who casually voice chat join public discord servers. The model is much more friendly to casual users than either TS or Mumble are.

When I was using Vent and Teamspeak you had to actually host the server, as I recall... so someone had to set it up and manage it, or you could pay a third party to do it, but that was always too expensive for my friends and I.... discord is a lot easier to set up your own server and find and discover other servers

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#397

Post by savanaly »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #309
savanaly wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I joined the Elm community I thought it was weird they use a Slack for real time discussion and not a Discord. When I asked why I found out that Discord's features are most certainly not a superset of Slack's. * Slack threads are an amazing feature and frequently used on the Elm slack. One discussion or one person's question can become a thread and then the channel won't be continuously pinged by the ongoing dis…

> Slack threads are an amazing feature Wait, are we thinking about the same very limited concept of one additional layer down? It feels like they must have intentionally developed it badly, so that you cannot create a thread to reply to a message that is inside a thread. While Discord does not have threads, I would not at all call the Slack solution amazing. It's actually quite a poor solution and an artificial limit…

A thread going down a single layer makes total sense to me. Not the engineer in me, maybe, but the human. The human who is well trained to, in a large gathering like a party or an office, pull one or two people aside to have a semi-private conversation. Others will drift in or out as they like, but would you usually join one of those mini-conversations then pull one of the participants aside for an even mini-er conversation within that small group? No and I don't ever feel the need in slack either... If you and someone realize that you want to talk about something just move to PMs or make another thread at the top level and ping the person.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#398

Post by BoorishBears »

Lorin wrote: post #343
Laremere wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard This is just such a bizarre statement. To exclude Unity while including Lumberyard in the condition of "commonly used game engines" makes zero sense. Unity is well known to be one of the most used game engines. Lumberyard in contrast has (according to wikipedia) has a single released game.

Honestly forgot about Unity - it wasn't a jab, been a long day!

Seeing as Unity has a competing product with enormous resources devoted to it for some pretty major titles... I could see why Unity wouldn't be the biggest champion of it anyways

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#399

Post by Fuzzwah »

derwiki wrote: post #342
exhaze wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)

I hosted a LAN party for my friends because I wanted to practice setting up a small network. It’s funny to think that was once semi-challenging.

The pain inflicted when someone had to leave the LAN and the BNC chain had to be broken and reconfigured....

Or... Someone getting totally owned in Doom cracking it and disconnecting a terminator.

Great times.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#400

Post by ehsankia »

vehementi wrote: post #351
tru3_power wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/

That's exactly it yes. Discord is ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak, but hosted and with IRC channels.

A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different.

I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:

1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting

2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy

3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people

Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.

All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.

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