Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has there been an exodus of talent from Github if they are leveling salaries?
Probably an influx of talent. They suddenly started shipping stuff after the acquisition..
I wonder if that extends to their data org...
Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
381–390 of 515 posts
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've met the creator of Vent. Cool dude, moderately wealthy and I believe very happy to sit on his "fuck you" money and give back to the community upon occasion (Quakecon giveaways, for example). Vent 4 was DOA. Teamspeak though, yeah, I'm surprised it didn't try to integrate streaming into its mechanism. Mumble is still alive and well, and very functional for audio-sharing. Nothing in the way of video or streaming,…
I think that the biggest differentiator between Discord and the others (mumble, TS, Vent, etc) was that Discord has very mature text chatting as a first class citizen, rather than an afterthought. This is what I have anecdotally seen as the primary thing that has made even people who casually voice chat join public discord servers. The model is much more friendly to casual users than either TS or Mumble are.
I agree - text chatting is the first foot in the door. It's non-committal, but gets you the ability to voice chat when you feel up to it.
Things like TS and Vent is voice-chat-first and thus, you will only join _after_ you've made friends to voice chat with online in some other platform (like irc or a game). There's no TS community, since it's purely utilitarian, unlike discord.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#383I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.
Nobody mentioned the fact that their main audience (Gamers) love spending money on vanity stuff (hence Twitch).
I think that's a massive overstatement. A small minority of gamers spend money on that kind of stuff.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole Settings app also feels like something thrown together in a really primitive GUI scripting language that doesn't support anything besides text and its alignment. This is the old disk management utility: https://i.imgur.com/AqhYewC.jpg This is the new one: https://i.imgur.com/DNb0qJl.jpg While the old was far from perfect, it at least gave visual hints to how partitions relate to disks. The new """design"""…
That's one painful side-by-side
“Just throw it in a webview and let’s grab an early lunch.”
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big gamer and heavy Discord user. Haven't heard anyone even mention TeamSpeak in a long time so I'm surprised by this comment.
It's still used milsims like ArmA and DCS (where there are plugins for radio simulation integration).
This is the only place I have used anything but discord in 6 years.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware). Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it
Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies. Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse
A lot of that information is public already:
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
UI design? Teams has no UI design, but haphazardly aranged buttons that are hard to spot. I can't describe how bad of experience it is to use. How does a corp that actively pushes their users/clients into using Teams makes no UX effort.
My Org went from Skype for Business to Teams.
Teams is 1000x better.
The part I like is how it integrates with outlook. My workflow is pretty email oriented so being able to send an email meeting request and have that meeting seamlessly show up in teams app is really nice.
Same thing when you receive an email from someone you can click their name and dial them via teams (you could do this with skype to but it was dodgy).
Group calls, screen sharing etc. is miles better than Skype.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#388Discord does not give users a choice to opt-out of their wildly invasive data collection methods including logging executables running on your system while the desktop client is open, not just games. This data alone is very valuable. Comment from a 2019 support thread "I am pretty flabbergasted that people aren't making a bigger deal of this than they are. Discord actively monitors your executables, but the larger co…
It sends a list of running programs, including the command line arguments to the server. It's worrying because although it's bad practice some programs get passed credentials like this. With regards to Discord's invasion of privacy as a whole, I'm not sure if it's malice or incompetence.
it doesn't send anything like that anywhere. it matches a list of executables it downloads with what it sees running, to determine if you are running a game.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am also a little miffed that someone can right click my profile in one server and then see that I'm the same guy in another. Just a little annoyed, not much, but it'd be nice to turn it off. Unless I missed an option?
IIRC, it only shows mutual servers though, right?
Yes if you're on two servers with someone and you right click their name it will show that it's the same person on the other server. It's not really private information if user IDs are public, I just prefer to keep things a bit more private if I can.
Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
A valuation based on metrics more closely tied to reality because the owner would actually focus on the viability and sustainability of the product.
Doubtful, in this case. Microsoft would have bought Discord for the gaming community and pursued tight integration with the XBox ecosystem. Which could have boosted the platform, but probably not in a way that resulted in a lot of direct revenue.
The S-1 will reveal all, a tight integration with Xbox and not a lot of direct revenue may still ultimately result in a sustainable and viable product, once you go public indefinite quarterly losses don’t get saved by the next funding round at higher valuations.