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Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else

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

#211

Post by rb666 »

d3nj4l wrote: post #199
sadness3 wrote: post #93

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. It makes me despair of business models which re…

> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.

You must know a lot of people who take themselves too seriously.

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

#212

Post by Lvl999Noob »

basisword wrote: post #197

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 feel the opposite. I used slack for sometime and I felt it to be bloated. Discord feels much better to me.

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

#213

Post by perryizgr8 »

WitCanStain wrote: post #144
konschubert wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's okay. Be THE product for half a decade, make your money, close up, next venture.

That sounds horrible. We should focus on making good products that last a long time. What is the point of making something new and almost identical every 5 years?

> almost identical

If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.

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

#214

Post by perryizgr8 »

stared wrote: post #150
sadness3 wrote: post #93

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. It makes me despair of business models which re…

I have the same feeling. If they succeed, they will become Slack 2. If they don't, they will sink their ship.

> If they don't, they will sink their ship.

Why would gamers stop using it?

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

#215

Post by morrbo »

basisword wrote: post #197

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?

From my experience:

Free

Able to hop servers/channels extremely easily (for a game it's just hey join this discord server/channel -> click and you're able to start speaking immediately)

Search is good, as it @ing someone to get their attention. Private messages also good

Share screen really easily

The bots are phenomenal. I use it to play world of Warcraft, we have a "raid bot" which is fantastic to organise stuff, and also have several music bots where everyone can hang out and listen to the same Spotify/YouTube playlists at the same time. I'm sure there are plenty of other bots but these two are just what I use.

Inline images, GIFs, videos etc are really smooth, as are reactions/replies

Drawbacks I've found:

App isn't the best. If I close it in the background as I do with most of my apps, I don't get a push notification so if someone PMs me I don't see it until I open the app again to check

Channel notifications can get overwhelming quite quickly, but tbh I'm not sure there's anything they can do about that other than maybe add an option to default mute everything and then only get notifications for what you want on joining a server.

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

#216

Post by alpaca128 »

bruce343434 wrote: post #175
alpaca128 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's intuitive about having to click one of the tiniest buttons in a corner of the screen to disconnect voice chat? I literally killed the process a couple times when I started using Discord because I couldn't find it. Why can I double-click to join a channel but not leave with any UI in the same area? It also took me a while to figure out how to quit the damn thing. The only way seems to be right-clicking the tray…

How about clicking the bright red phone hang up button. Other than that, most chat apps minimize to tray these days. You can toggle that behavior in the settings. With your last point, I agree. It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.

Ah, you're right, I didn't see that setting. The button to disconnect is white for me, though. I'll have to look again next time, maybe I'm going crazy.

> It's just inherent to being an electron app I guess.

A barebones Electron app has maybe ~100MB memory overhead and starts without noticeable delay. To me this seems like the same problem that leads to oversized and sluggish websites. Snappy, lightweight Electron apps exist, though they're uncommon.

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

#217

Post by Macha »

basisword wrote: post #197

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?

Have you used the slack client with more than one server? Last time I did the whole UI would reload when you switched.

Discord took off because:

* The message search is much better than free tiers of slack

* You don't need to set up a separate account per server

* It didn't have the user limits of Teamspeak

* It didn't have the ads of Skype

* A big inflection point was Skype launching their desktop client that was basically Web Skype in a window and sucked

* For a server with your gaming buddies, a drop in drop out perma voice channel is really a better model than distinct calls for slack. Also for public servers. And if you want to VC with your friends 1:1, the option is still there.

* Link sharing to invite users to a server vs having to set up a server/bot to give out invites as running a public slack used to require. Also used to not even require an account so was great for that pick up player you found for one night

* For the large server setups, discord's permission/moderation setup is way more flexible than Slack's. Slack basically has admin/not admin. (though discord does need to separate pinning from deleting other user's messages)

---

For a summary, Slack is targeted at the business case. In a workplace chat, there should be no need to moderate, since bad behaviour can be taken to someone's boss/HR. And the sign up/multi server flow was not optimised for this usage model as Slack didn't care (at least when I last tried public Slacks, these days the only Slack I use is my employer's).

Discord is actually optimised for consumer use cases, and consequently built up such a network effect that even if Slack did invest heavily in their UX there, would be quite behind.

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

#218

Post by Slartie »

basisword wrote: post #197

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?

It is free, and it has always had good push-to-talk voice chat using a permanent "room" concept (and not a "call" concept as is common with business-focused tools) suitable for gamers, towards which it actively marketed itself. This stuff has been in use by gamers for decades, but previous solutions either depended on paid servers or required one person to set up their own server on their own (or rented) hardware. Discord simply offered the same good voice chat, but without the server setup hassle or the costs associated with it.

The rest is network effects. If your entire gaming guild or clan or group of friends or whatever is using Discord, you are also using Discord.

If you mean "why is anyone besides gamer groups using Discord?", that is because most gamers are not just gamers, but also people working in day jobs, or open-source contributors, or active in NGOs, or have non-gamer friends with whom they needed to chat lately due to COVID restrictions, or whatever else. They knew Discord from their gaming life, so they just tried applying the tool that they already knew well to the (slightly different) job. With varying success, but with some success nevertheless in some cases.

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

#219

Post by gambiting »

sadness3 wrote: post #93

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. It makes me despair of business models which re…

>>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs.

It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?

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

#220

Post by Ekaros »

haunter wrote: post #130

True sign of success: HN doesn't get the appeal of the product and they wonder why people are using it. This have happened so many times, it's actually a good indicator.

Also I see nothing about Discord trying to compete with Slack or Teams. I see it to expanding other communities like sub-reddits, forums and Facebook. Offering a different service from them. And for such purpose it's perfectly good product. Managing and allowing largish communities a chat platform.
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