Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 480 posts

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

#71

Post by hammyhavoc »

ejj28 wrote: post #59
ls15 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 messa…

The 'average person' is not uncommonly switching to Matrix. Even non-technically savvy people are asking how to do it following Apple's PR disaster.

You clearly don't understand Matrix. Dendrite introduces a hybrid-P2P model, ergo home servers become largely irrelevant, and portable identities become a thing.

Can Discord work offline P2P via Bluetooth LE? Nope.

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

#72

Post by hammyhavoc »

awake wrote: post #36
sodality2 wrote: post #22

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

I had very high hopes for matrix because of the bridging capabilities but I was sorely disappointed after spending a couple hours to set it all up. Some of the bridges require violating the TOS for other applications, or going into the dev tools to copy cookies. Basically completely unapproachable for non-programmers. Once you have a bridge it's impossible to start a new chat with someone in another app. You need to…

Of course it breaches plenty of ToS, they're third-party bridges for Matrix that are developed by people within the community. Do you really think that big corps are going to be happy about people not seeing ads? Of course not, ergo there are ToS clauses there to discourage people from doing so.

For non-programmers, there are cheap turn-key SaaS. Look at Beeper for example: https://www.beeper.com/

You also don't need to start the chat in another app, that's complete and utter bollocks, regardless of whether you use SaaS like Beeper, or your own home server.

I'll check back in with you in 5 years and we can laugh at each other: @hammy:matrix.splitanatom.com :- )

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

#74

Post by hammyhavoc »

digitallyfree wrote: post #48
aero-glide2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have unverified logins > verify this session > please backup your keys D'Arvit!

First time I've heard someone use "D'Arvit" on a tech forum... wonder how many readers here still recognise it.

I'd say most people who have picked up a popular book in the last 20 years.

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

#75

Post by lillecarl »

Amasuriel wrote: post #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 shoul…

I've thought exactly this for years now and I'm so surprised nothing has happened.

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

#76

Post by Barrin92 »

bagels wrote: post #27
robbiet480 wrote: post #2

Interesting to read that Discord has received higher offers than previously reported, as high as $18 billion, yet Jason refuses to sell and hopes to go public. Good for him to sticking to his guns, I don’t think I could say no to $18 billion!

It's a chat app. I cannot imagine not selling for an offer like that. Your opportunities for what to do next would be unbounded.

opportunities aren't really a function of money in particular in the software world. You need a good project, good people and whatnot, but you don't need 18 billion dollars for your next company.

In fact if anything I'd honestly say it might be a negative to be that wealthy. A lot of ideas are the products of inventiveness in the face of constraints and a sense of urgency. There is a lot of super-wealthy 30 year olds that have emerged out of the big IPOs and a lot of them have basically retired.

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

#77

Post by ls15 »

ejj28 wrote: post #59
ls15 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 messa…

> the average person who isn't as concerned about privacy

I think the average person does indeed care about privacy, otherwise we would use public bank accounts and would get rid of passwords, curtains and summer clothing.

Most likely, most people do not fully understand all implications of all technical details and aren't making fully informed decisions.

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

#78

Post by returnInfinity »

Amasuriel wrote: post #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 shoul…

I have to agree with this. I find discord better than slack and I don't want to mix my gaming life with work.

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

#79

Post by sodality2 »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #71
ejj28 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 messa…

The 'average person' is not uncommonly switching to Matrix. Even non-technically savvy people are asking how to do it following Apple's PR disaster. You clearly don't understand Matrix. Dendrite introduces a hybrid-P2P model, ergo home servers become largely irrelevant, and portable identities become a thing. Can Discord work offline P2P via Bluetooth LE? Nope.

I rarely chat with people close enough to just talk to them IRL. Though I think it has merit and good use in some areas, like during HK protests, I heard Briar was used for local p2p chats.

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

#80

Post by sellyme »

ejj28 wrote: post #62
sellyme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> advertisements for Nitro when someone was trying to upload a photo The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking. Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free ser…

> The gifting button is only beside the upload button on mobile, and personally I've never hit it accidentally. To me it just seems like they've made it more prominent, I don't see any intent to trick people into mis-clicking.

Perhaps you don't remember what that UI used to look like. For most of Discord's existence, there were two buttons to the left of the chatbox in the mobile app. The leftmost of these was a camera icon (for taking a photo and immediately uploading it), and the rightmost was the gallery icon, for uploading an existing image. For the vast majority of users, the gallery icon would have been the most commonly used.

In 2020 they got rid of the camera icon entirely (now requiring an additional menu to get to it), moved the gallery icon, and then where the gallery icon used to be they added the Gift Nitro icon. Instead of using the empty space vacated by the camera icon they moved a feature used >10,000x more so that the Nitro button could benefit from everyone's muscle memory.

At the time it happened misclicks and feeling tricked was an extremely common complaint [1], to the extent that I do not believe for a second that a team of people competent enough to build such an otherwise excellent piece of software could possibly have not foreseen it occurring. That this is not an isolated incident but rather part of a pattern helps cement that judgment.

> Like I've said, I have no problem with them trying to make more money, they need to make a profit to keep providing a free service.

I do have a problem with it, because they're trying to make money by tricking their users. I'm perfectly happy to go back to IRC if the only way they can think of to keep their company afloat is to deliberately make their product worse to use.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=discord+gift+nitro+button+im...

Post reply on HN