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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

Ekaros wrote: post #225
cblconfederate wrote: post #114

There is a huge wave of transitions from reddit/ forums towards discord because it offers voice chat / image uploads for free. It's not gonna last at that, chat is a bad format compared to hierarchical replies, hard to search etc. Gaming is their niche but at some point games will want to stop bleeding their community to them. There is also a proliferation of communities which leads to a lot of activity because it's…

I see it as complementary service. Reddit and forums aren't really suitable for chatting. Where as discord wills that niche very well. So communities will consist of forum/sub-reddit and a chat on Discord. One is more permanent and one is more ephemeral...

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by account42 »

hhsbz wrote: post #159
southerntofu wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a few examples, for someone who's never used Discord?

https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png The entire app was full of crap like this - it's not funny or quirky, it's practically baby talk.

Ugh, even if you were into that, that's just lazy copying the same phrase for each option

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

#283

Post by lightbulbjim »

c0nducktr wrote: post #50
HumanMusic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a complaint I keep hearing. But the reason I switched to discord in the first place was because I loved the interface. Both in terms of usability and aesthetics. Makes me wonder why there is such a gap in how people rate their interface.

I'm pretty happy with the interface, with a couple exceptions: 1) I'd like to be able to collapse, or reposition, the right panel (the one with the users in it). 2) I'd like to be able to have multiple channels open at once. This one is probably my biggest complaint. It's frustrating having to frequently click back and forth between different channels in a server. I'm sure I could find more things to complain about i…

You can collapse the user list. Click the icon to the left of the search box in the header bar.

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

#284

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

I really don't take myself seriously at all but I find such things in software more annoying than humorous because it's distracting (the reason for me was because I have to reprogram my behaviour to ignore said loading messages rather than view them as actionable items). Streamlabs is another with stupid loading messages. Such things aren't annoying enough to stop me using their software but it certainly not something I get kick out of seeing.

I'd also add festival themed icons too. The whole VSCode trolling a few years back might have been overblown but the end result was for the better imo. I find it distracting having seasonal icons and the fewer distractions I can find in my productivity tools the better.

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

#285

Post by dalmo3 »

account42 wrote: post #282
hhsbz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png The entire app was full of crap like this - it's not funny or quirky, it's practically baby talk.

Ugh, even if you were into that, that's just lazy copying the same phrase for each option

Repetition legitimizes legitimizes.

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

#286

Post by themacguffinman »

Shacklz wrote: post #193
themacguffinman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.

There's a difference between "sitting on their arses" and "trying to grab every single customer possible". TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.

Let's not rewrite history and pretend that Teamspeak was always terrible. Their "philosophy" panned out for a long time and made them kings of the space, but to reiterate the GP's comment: things change. Now users want more convenience. Now they want better mobile support. Now they want GIFs and reactions.

You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.

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

#287

Post by antris »

nhumrich wrote: post #279
antris wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers

Which often isn't the case.

Companies have lots of priorities that have nothing to do with end users at all. For example:

- it does not matter how good your product is, if your company dies because there's a competitor that does not need to make profit and can temporarily offer their services for free, until your company is driven out of the market

- dark patterns are well documented examples how working directly against good user experience can increase profits

- lobbying politicians to drive out competition is extremely profitable, and does not take interests of the userbase into account at all

There are probably numerous other, obvious examples how capitalism disincentivises companies from serving their customers well, but instead incentivizes gaming the system.

The correlation between user experience and profitability is shaky at best. One could argue that user experience has almost nothing to with how businesses operate.

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

#288

Post by account42 »

square_usual wrote: post #269
Slartie wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were introduced to Discord in a non-gaming-related context, it is very common to be unfamiliar with the tendency of gamers to share what game they are currently playing. There is no such habit in other, more "serious" contexts - for example MS Teams does not set "currently using Microsoft Powerpoint" or "currently coding in VS Code" as my publicly visible status at work. I can thus fully understand that a lot…

> MS Teams does not set [...] "currently coding in VS Code" as my publicly visible status at work Don't worry, Discord will!

Will it? At least under Linux it tries to only show things it thinks are games.

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

#289

Post by darthrupert »

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…

What does it do well? I'm genuinely asking.

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

#290

Post by Mindwipe »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #214
stared wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because Discord will probably compromise the existing product in order to try and grow.
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