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

271–280 of 480 posts

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

#271

Post by antris »

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. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.

I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers.

It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down.

We need a systemic change.

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

#272

Post by square_usual »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #256
lugged wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because its free. Slack is not.

Slack is free as well. Or at least, like discord, it has a freemium layer. We use both and we pay for neither.

You're really underestimating Discord's free layer. I have a server that's literally just me which I've dumped tons of images and videos into. It's like an unlimited cloud storage bucket, so long as the individual files are below a certain size. It also won't prevent you from seeing stuff after you've got 10k messages.

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

#273

Post by lotsofpulp »

nicoburns wrote: post #247
lotsofpulp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some things that could help: - Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company. - Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets. - Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the…

Those are all interesting and viable proposition, but I would not say they have any relation to the “shareholder model” as you called it in your first post I responded to. All of those proposals, and shareholders, seem like they can co exist.

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

#275

Post by KitDuncan »

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…

I bridge Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram and you can absolutely start chats through the bridge bot. It might be a little inconvenient, but for the rare occasion I do need it, it works absolutely fine.

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

#276

Post by bruce343434 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #216
bruce343434 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

Oh, they well could have changed the color of the button then. Haven't used voice in a while.

And yeah, discord is for sure very javascript heavy.

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

#277

Post by retor »

dewey wrote: post #136
buro9 wrote: post #133

A killer use of Discord... push-to-talk audio connection to everyone else in the room. If your team is on-call and incident management could be improved, just try putting your team in a Discord room and see what happens. Don't put managers in there, just the engineers. It works great.

> A killer use of Discord... push-to-talk audio connection to everyone else in the room. Slack just added this recently: https://slack.com/intl/en-de/help/articles/4402059015315-Sta...

I experience them as very different.

Huddles are more like the audio calls Slack already had, but without the channel notifications.

It lacks the auto silence that Discord has, so you can't just hang in a huddle waiting for someone to talk. There's a constant hiss.

I guess they might change it, but didn't sound like this was something they were even thinking of as an issue when I spoke with a representative.

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

#278

Post by nkrisc »

rb666 wrote: post #211
d3nj4l wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Funny is relative. Personally, there was nothing humorous about those messages. I know they were trying to be funny, but it was about as funny as knock knock, who’s there?, banana!

I like humor. Humor that, you know, is funny.

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

#279

Post by nhumrich »

antris wrote: post #271
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. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the nega…

> blind to the needs of their customers

Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.

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

#280

Post by epaga »

FWIW one data point - we had begun beforehand but especially when COVID started, the small company I work at moved nearly all our company communication into Discord.

We tried out Slack and other alternatives at the time and the huge advantage of Discord was how simple and playful it was while other solutions were so very enterprise-y.

Plus, Discord offers a great bot API, so it was super easy to write our own integrations. We are very happy Discord was not bought by Microsoft.

Post reply on HN