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How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

blog.discord.com

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Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#61

Post by grlass »

SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #49
m4rtink wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works nice and is free, but for how long? How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?

> It works nice and is free, but for how long? I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).

one of the founders and current CEO Jason Citron had a previous org called OpenFeint, which:

> was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications" [1]

Of course that doesn't mean anything about the current model of Discord, but good to be aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFeint#History

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#62

Post by colesantiago »

mishafb wrote: post #52
colesantiago wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With privacy concerns, companies should be shamed for storing billions of messages. should we shame ycombinator for storing the messages, accounts and comments on hacker news then? I am still unable to delete my account here even though the CCPA and the GDPR exists. But here we are.

Your comments are a public thing you choose to publish to the world, but many (most?) discord messages are not. You'd want them to get deleted.

Not if one would want to choose to delete their account afterwards with the expectation that all comments would be deleted as well.

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#63

Post by Sikul »

res0nat0r wrote: post #51
Sikul wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true anymore. We switched to allowing and supporting permanent remote work (writing this from Seattle).

I applied the other month for a job that mentioned SFO or remote, then halfway through the signup it stated that they were allowing folks to work remote until COVID was better, then wanted folks to be onsite, and then prompted for a yes/no if I was willing to move to SFO at a later date. Didn't get a chance to talk to anyone and expect it was because of this, so is a bit disappointing.

That's weird. Do you have a link to the job posting?

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#64

Post by herodoturtle »

RHSeeger wrote: post #36
tester756 wrote: post #2

Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn. One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.

Honestly, I find discord super frustrating. Can't have multiple chats open at the same time, can't close the right rail, etc. It's UX is subpar in almost every way that matters to me. I use it because _everyone_ uses it, not because I want to.

I second this.

Find the UI very confusing. Perhaps I'm just old; but damn, my intuition in using discord's interface constantly lets me down.

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#65

Post by grlass »

bonesinger wrote: post #58
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works nice and is free, but for how long? I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).

IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.

I have some contacts who work for organisations use it instead of Slack for SMEs of 100-1000 employees.

Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#66

Post by ryanianian »

TFA states:

> we knew we were not going to use MongoDB sharding because it is complicated to use and not known for stability

But then goes on to describe using Cassandra and overcoming sharding and stability issues. I.e., changing the key, changing TTL knobs, adding anti-entropy sweepers, and considering switching to a different cassandra impl entirely.

Are these issues significantly harder to solve in MongoDB than Cassandra?

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#67

Post by jgilias »

Can anyone share experiences with using Discord as a communications tool in a workplace? We're currently on Google Chat because it comes with the package that we pay for anyway, but it's pretty lame. So from time to time we consider jumping to Slack. But then, why not Discord?

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#68

Post by judge2020 »

bonesinger wrote: post #58
SaltyBackendGuy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It works nice and is free, but for how long? I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).

IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.

Unless businesses are paying for server boosts[0] (which would only be useful for 1080p60 screen-share or a 50mb upload limit), there's no way to use Discord for business or pay extra for business use outside of creating a free server like any other; there's no real reason to choose Discord for business either, since it has no real retention policy (other than storing messages forever, for now), DLP is non-existent, there's no SSO/SAML, etc. The only reason to use Discord for business is if you really like Discord and/or other parts of your business are on Discord, like if you run a video game.

0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

Re: How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)

#69

Post by EamonnMR »

caymanjim wrote: post #60
yelnatz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market. I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical. Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.

It's free for the same reason everything is free these days. VC funds anything that will attract a lot of users to mine data from so they can sell the data. Discord didn't do anything that was groundbreaking or even solve a problem that had no solution; they just came along during a time when investors are willing to fund a company operating at a loss for a decade until FANG buys them. Discord's a pretty good product…

Slack isn't free, they sell you history-in effect, you generate the data that they sell back to you.
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