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Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

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201–210 of 480 posts

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

#201

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

Because its free. Slack is not.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it goes one level abive execs. Execs who don't do these things get replaced! The shareholder model is broken.

What is broken about it? Did anyone tell the discord creators to involve other shareholders?

Not specific to discord, but what's broken is that work is organized to maximize personal profit of shareholders (and the remuneration and other privileges of managers), not to benefit users/society.

I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters: security in tech, safety in buildings/planes, low durability of products and planned obsolescence, impeding ecological disaster and the next massive extinction of species...

As a species, we have enough production capacity to make sure everyone is well-off, yet a tiny minority grabs resources and ensures most of it is wasted and thrown away (see food/housing supply vs needs). Capitalism is the name of the system which holds such properties as virtuous, and it has proved to be a failed model in many regards over the centuries.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is broken about it? Did anyone tell the discord creators to involve other shareholders?

I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those wh…

> but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else.

What alternatives are there?

> Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time.

The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.

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

#204

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

> Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

It offers a couple of gamer-y features that Slack doesn't like voice channels. But make no mistake, the main reason is because it is free.

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

#205
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSFT Teams, Slack, Google Chat. Hate as much as you want but there's virtually no difference in terms of capabilities among these players.

>MSFT Teams >Allow users to enable push to talk in group meetings >2021-06-01 >Thank you for your continued feedback, we have not forgotten about this ask. The feature remains on our backlog. We will share an update as soon as one is available. >In the meantime, you can try using the keyboard shortcut to toggle mute (Ctrl+Shift+M) It has 3400 votes since 2017(!) https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-publ…

Why isn't a mute toggle a solution? I set up caps lock with autohotkey to be a mute toggle in Windows. It works well.

The only complaint with this is that if I'm running multiple voice chats at the same time then I need to use some other keybinds to mute individual applications. Still, for most users this would be more than adequate.

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

#206

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

I don't use Discord for gaming, but I do (reluctantly) have to use it for volunteering work. One day I discovered Discord sets my status as "currently playing Game X" for everyone to see, to my horror!

What an absurd privacy violation.

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

#207

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

Its voice capabilities are light years ahead of slack. Which is why gamers use it.

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

#208
post #201

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

Because its free. Slack is not.

It's the easiest way for me to connect with the community, and basically every VR developer or VR project can be found there so it's easy to connect with like minded people.

There are also a lot of bots you can add for different tasks.

It kind of feels like a realtime social network.

Where it's really lacking is to structure information that should be available to anyone, but I guess that's not what it's meant for anyway

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is broken about it? Did anyone tell the discord creators to involve other shareholders?

Not specific to discord, but what's broken is that work is organized to maximize personal profit of shareholders (and the remuneration and other privileges of managers), not to benefit users/society. I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters:…

What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.

Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth.

It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not want to do the work of hosting it (e.g. teamspeak/ventrilo/matrix).

So what I am wondering is where the obligation for someone else to host these online services comes in, and why they “should” not have the goal of increasing their wealth in exchange for doing the work of hosting and servi the online services.

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

#210

In my limited experience Discord seems almost identical to Slack but with a much worse UI. Combine that with the fact that belonging to more than one server quickly becomes overwhelming (again, largely due to crappy UX) I’m concerned about how many communities are utilising it. Can somebody that likes it explain why it seems to be doing so well?

I don't use Discord for gaming, but I do (reluctantly) have to use it for volunteering work. One day I discovered Discord sets my status as "currently playing Game X" for everyone to see, to my horror! What an absurd privacy violation.

This is a bit ridiculous. It's a gaming platform before anything else. In that scene it's very common to share your gaming status with others.

Not to mention that you can obviously disable this.

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