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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

#451

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 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. IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.

> IRC does one thing and does it well.

Unfortunately, the one thing that it does well (chat, and nothing else) is supported by a dozen things that it does terribly, and support for them has been hacked on top of the chat features in most places.

Bouncers, persistency, rich media (youtube/twitter/image embeds come to mind), mobile accessibility, presence, the ease of channel ownership... these are all things that IRC lacks. Users don't want to switch from their chat app to their imaging sharing app to send a friend a picture inline. IRC works great where people are willing to put in the work to make it great for themselves individually, but the people Discord appeals to aren't really like that.

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#453
post #199

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.

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

#454
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't matter to me that half of the loading messages weren't funny. I could tell from the moment I opened the app that they understood who I was and why I was there. I was there to have fun, and they got me. Now they have started the journey to be all things to all people, and I will not be surprised if they end up as nothing to anyone.

You had fun because of a little bit of stupid jokes during loading? Did that define your experience, or was you experience defined by what you did inside of discord after the loading screen had passed? Why is all this bullshit important to people? Dumb gifs, emoticons everywhere, wannabe cute gamey jokes. If you get invited to a whine tasting party with a bunch of boring stuck up people, but there is a kids-ball-pool…

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

#455
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you ever set up a free slack community? Because I haven't. It's a nightmare, you need custom software to even invite people. Besides that, its severely limited. Discord has a real free model, slack does not.

It hasn't been that way for years. You can generate and share invite links now. The idea that you had to set up custom software to do those invites only existed for a period of about 18 months when they were trying to foster organic growth.

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

#456
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just have a separate platform mode. Like Discord Businesses. Discord B8s.

They should use a different name then, because "discord" doesn't exactly conjure up images of handshakes and smiling people sitting in meeting rooms in stock photos.

ahem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

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

#457
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.

This was my impression as well. By coincidence, I recently stumbled upon this 'Discord for Business' support post from 2018 ( https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600302... ) that generated almost 200 upvotes and 100 comments. I The post starts as follows: > My company is presently evaluating alternatives to Slack internally. Turns out, Discord is one of the most feature rich alternatives, with a rel…

Did you look into Microsoft Teams at all? Just wondering if you have a comparison to Discord. At work, I've called MS Teams "Discord for business" because to me, a long term discord user, Teams development feels very "made by people who love Discord".

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

#458
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if discord could straight up sell/separate a 'fork' of their platform that targets a completely different audience. The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (ent…

> The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...

Facebook Workplace, too

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my impression as well. By coincidence, I recently stumbled upon this 'Discord for Business' support post from 2018 ( https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600302... ) that generated almost 200 upvotes and 100 comments. I The post starts as follows: > My company is presently evaluating alternatives to Slack internally. Turns out, Discord is one of the most feature rich alternatives, with a rel…

Did you look into Microsoft Teams at all? Just wondering if you have a comparison to Discord. At work, I've called MS Teams "Discord for business" because to me, a long term discord user, Teams development feels very "made by people who love Discord".

Teams has better Office apps, and better integration with Microsoft things. It's also clunky and buggy.

Discord, while lacking the app and file features, is much better in terms of what it actually does. It's almost enough to make me not hate Electron (?)

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

#460

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…

Discord now lets you change your username and avatar per server. Though to have a different avatar on different servers you need nitro.

People can still click your name and view your account name#number. They can also view mutual servers and friends. I don't necessarily want people in two communities to know or care that I am the same person.

I'm by default a private person, I feel uneasy sharing my preferences with people (even basic things like music that I like) and I don't like these broadcasted social features. The first thing I did when installing Discord was turning off the feature that says what game I am playing.

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