Live data from Hacker News

Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

ft.com

51–60 of 480 posts

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#51
post #38

Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest. I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time…

> you don't have to host it I really wish you could though

A lot of the ease of using Discord comes from the fact that every server just works, and you can join using a link. If people could host their own servers I'd imagine you'd end up with poorly-hosted servers that would degrade the overall experience.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#52
I’ve used discord for a long time and greatly prefer it to slack, teams and Mattermost (the three competitors I’ve used most often). Ironically the only think stopping me from strongly advocating for its adoption in business is that I’m already a user!

Much like GitHub and to a lesser extent teams, they seem to not get the idea that I have different personas related to different parts of my life that absolutely should not mix.

If I could stay logged into my social discord servers with my gamer handle and be being logged into work servers with work handles, especially on mobile, they would gain traction I think. Add active directory account management as a paid option and would be an easy sell some places.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#53

Matrix or death.

Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me. It's a good UI but to consider them in the same ballpark is pretty uncomparable to me

> Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me.

In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever.

That's an instant knockout for Discord for me. There is no way that I willingly let companies read my private communication in 2021 after everything that we learned over the last couple of years. No amount of nice productivity features can compensate for that.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#54
post #35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is an abomination, in other words it's a typical Microsoft product.

It really is. It doesn’t even make a casual attempt to adhere to MacOS interface guidelines. Even the notification system is completely custom and doesn’t work with the OS level system. It’s insulting.

They just rolled out the option for Mac native notifications. Of course it’s easy to miss the permissions request snd then you get no notifications at all.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#55
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is an abomination, in other words it's a typical Microsoft product.

OT but seriously, name one good Microsoft product other than paint.

Windows Terminal is pretty good. VSCode is heavier than necessary but easy for everyone to use. Mostly their recent developer tools are good.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#56
post #49
post #38

Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest. I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time…

> Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX Since I started using Discord, they have on three separate occasions moved a button I used frequently, and in its place added a button that attempts to extract money from me. They've established a pattern of trying to monetise the application by tricking the user into doing somethi…

I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#57
I've used discord for a number of years, and use it almost daily with my friends. Arguments over UX will always be opinionated, but one thing where discord absolutely shines is voice chat. There's just no competition to any other voice chat system out there; it's fast, it's high quality, and most importantly, it filters out non-voices. Clapping, water faucet, vacuums, crunching chips, coughing, breathing, desk noises, none of it comes through and all of it gets filtered out. It makes for a significantly better experience when I don't have to deal with someone else's "voice chat etiquette" incompetence/ignorance.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#58
post #56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux". I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX Since I started using Discord, they have on three separate occasions moved a button I used frequently, and in its place added a button that attempts to extract money from me. They've established a pattern of trying to monetise the application by tricking the user into doing somethi…

I don't think tricking is the word for this. You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something. Yes, they've made monetisation more prominent, but I think that's fair for a platform that's free to use. I'd rather they attempt to get more revenue out of users via premium features than have to shut down cause they were operating at a loss.

> I don't think tricking is the word for this.

Tricking is 100% the right word for it. They are putting those Nitro buttons there with the clear intent that a user will click it by accident while attempting to access a different feature that used to be there.

> You're not going to click something by accident and be immediately billed for something.

If it didn't work, they wouldn't be doing it. I'm not claiming that they're outright scamming people out of money, but that they're using actively hostile UI/UX to profit by serving advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo. That's absolutely worthy of criticism.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#59
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me. It's a good UI but to consider them in the same ballpark is pretty uncomparable to me

> Matrix is miles behind discord which saddens me. In which way? Discord is miles behind Matrix in terms of privacy features. It does not even support e2ee for PMs or self-hosted servers or federation. They probably don't even plan to implement that ever. That's an instant knockout for Discord for me. There is no way that I willingly let companies read my private communication in 2021 after everything that we learned…

For the average person who isn't as concerned about privacy, Discord is absolutely light years ahead. Personally, I don't mind that Discord doesn't have E2EE or self hosted servers, I think having those would severely degrade the experience. Discord works so well because it's unified and /I don't have to screw around with somebody's poorly self-hosted server on their rural internet. If I want to send top secret messages to people I'll just use Signal.

Re: Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

#60
post #44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is an abomination, in other words it's a typical Microsoft product.

OT but seriously, name one good Microsoft product other than paint.

VS Code, TypeScript, C#, F#, GitHub but it doesn't count... I've heard good things about OneNote, I guess.
Post reply on HN