Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

Sometimes it feels like technology from the past was so bad that, given no alternatives, it interferes with the thing you're wanting to do (Skype/Internet Explorer). Those products can easily be subsumed by a competitor that is a superior product (Discord/Chrome).

But now it feels that because the options for those niches have been completely filled by those services, everyone becomes beholden to them, and in many cases there are undesirable aspects of the services that are not mutually exclusive with them being the most competent product on the market (inability to use Discord 3rd-party clients, Chrome's user tracking, Plex still showing you advertisements after buying a yearly subscription).

It feels like those products became too polished and attractive to users, if there exists a good reason to convince them to use something else, and even if we want to move off them, the network effect inevitably draws some of the holdouts back in (Messenger as a compromise for not using Facebook, sites that are incompatible with non-Chrome browsers). These products now have millions of active users whose behavior can be controlled or manipulated on a whim, for better or worse, if the company decides one day to make changes.

Now I'm starting to get the impression that succeeding in being the best solution in a given market is not necessarily a universal good. So many people were loathing how terrible Skype was for the longest time, and so Discord was founded. Yet, while the experience of participating a chat community is so much easier than in the past, I can't help but thing that so many people are now beholden to a new technological dependency.

What I have to wonder is: if money was not a factor in driving developer decisions, would Discord have allowed third party clients to be used? Preventing automated spam is not a problem unique to Discord.

Once a game is sold, there's not much of an incentive to keep it alive other than making sure it's moderately playable so that they manage to sell expansion packs or downloadable content. A hypothetical "someone might overflow a buffer and run arbitrary code" bug is going to be pretty low on the list compared to "all the graphics are broken on the latest nvidia driver because our code base is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking."

Even for the developers that do care about writing decent code (and a lot of them do care about making great games), after 60 hours or more a week of fixing random bugs on Barbie's Plastic Adventures, Call of Battlefield, or Mobile Lootbox Idle Clicker, there's not that much motivation left at the end of the day to work on these kinds of issues.

Surprisingly, Slack's sales seem unaware of Zulip from what I heard from some colleagues so I doubt Slack is going to steal Zulip's (much better) threading model any time soon.

Wait, are we thinking about the same very limited concept of one additional layer down? It feels like they must have intentionally developed it badly, so that you cannot create a thread to reply to a message that is inside a thread. While Discord does not have threads, I would not at all call the Slack solution amazing. It's actually quite a poor solution and an artificial limitation.

We also don't even need to get started on performance. The comparison Slack vs Discord in terms of performance is like comparing 2 completely different things. Switch a channel in Slack? Merely takes a few seconds :D

> For a big organization like a programming language or a company the Slack model is preferable.

And yet communities decide otherwise (examples: Pharo community, general progamming community servers and probably many more). Slack does not handle Markdown well at all, while in Discord it almost always does what you expect, including escaping of special characters and highlighting code blocks properly, which is a must have for programming languages. Basically I would never choose Slack over Discord, because of how crappy they implemented these things. It really shows no attention to the details. In almost any programming language, one can find a markdown parser, that works better than what Slack cobbled together.

Now those are very basic things to get right in any messenger like application, but it is indicative, how bad these things work in Slack.