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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

#251
post #5

In comparison to Teams, Discord is a godsend. I think the biggest problem in this space is a lack of quality competition.

Bravo ... discord client on Ubuntu has never crashed or sat there using 100% of cpu doing nothing unlike Teams

That may works with the client, but not as a tab which sorrily is the only privacy sensible option

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

#253
post #162

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…

Reddit also provides image uploads for free, and most people on discord never use the voice chats as far as I can tell. It's mostly real-time vs less than real-time communication. Discord for what is worth isn't that hard to search, and I wouldn't mind if they gave the option to some servers to have their logs automatically go to a crawlable page so they'd be indexed by Google. Of course, that won't work everywhere a…

No one uses voice chat in public servers. You use voice chat in private friends servers. You get home turn on your desktop and see 3 friends on a chat and join in.

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

#254
post #16

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 initially found discord UI a little confusing, not sure why. I use it all the time for work, and the layout is essentially the same as slacks. Admining servers is much nicer with discord.

Slack learned us to join and leave channels on purpose. This is something I totally miss with discord. There is always EVERYTHING at once hammering at me. For me a definitely not work friendly environment because it builds on distractions.

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

#255

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…

Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.

The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight.

Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.

On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.

So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)

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

#256
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.

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

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

#257

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.

No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 altern…

> What alternatives are there? Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers. > 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. The most profitable companies yes, but not necessarily the ones making the most money for…

Nothing stops workers right now to buy shares and appoint someone to the board.

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

#259
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I'm not sure why they don't just create a business version branded separately from their gaming product. Even if it's just 'Discord for Business' a second client for business would solve almost all these problems. It's written in Electron, there wouldn't be millions of lines of code to change to enable a second branding and different ports.

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

#260
post #159

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.

why is calling yourself a "good boy" twice so much more unsettling than doing it once?
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