It's crazy to me to think how TeamSpeak and Ventrilo had more than a decade to iterate and never came up with something like Discord. Xfire came close multiple times, but never got the voice part right, though for the time the client was acceptable. Granted, the server model was very different for TS and Vent (more so the latter), but it was normal then. Kudos to the Discord team on making a solid product.
Seriously! It's a shame that Xfire became a thing of the past. I feel like Steam baked in enough of the "community" features to steal their lunch, without ever delivering on the full community element that Discord is thriving on!
Speaking of Steam, it's also a shame they snoozed on it until way after Discord picked up steam. They were also very well situated to replicate it, but to date they STILL don't have message history in chat conversations...
Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing…
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/
Ventrillo ended up being the defacto voice chat for years in the gaming community I was exposed to.
I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!
Speaking as an 18 y.o. doing my first year college online, I wouldn't have made it through quarantine without Discord. I've a server with my high school friends and since Discord lowers the barrier to join a voice call so much it's super chill to just hop in a channel when doing homework or playing a game or whatever else, and anyone else who's free can join. I really wish there were competition, but there's nothing…
My daughters are 16 and 17 and use it exactly the same way. It’s far more valuable to them than any social media. My TTRPG group meets on discord too.
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/
pff in my days we used MSN messenger for friends and IRC for girls
TeamSpeak is still used heavily in the gaming community. Discord sucks when you have 50 people in the same voice chat.
I agree, though discord recently has put out updates to improve audio quality in those instances. That being said, I would argue that any voice chat with more than 10, maybe 20, active people talking is going to be nearly unusable. Not due to audio quality.
I use discord as voice coms to raid in wow. A raid can have anything between 10 and 30 people.
Maybe it’s the wow culture of having raid leaders and specific callouts, but it’s very much usable and enjoyable.
If you want to see how it usually plays out, just search twitch for anyone streaming a raid.
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/
okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom
We stole an insanely long ethernet cord from school and hung it over our joined back fence. Lag? Ha! Broadband sort of existed then, just not in rural Australia, so we improvised.
When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!
Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive
Been using Teams for school for two years now and have zero complaints.
My workplace switched from Slack to Teams a year ago and it was a complete disaster. In addition to numerous flaws that would be repeated by others, some users including me couldn't sign in with cooperate accounts at all---every time I put the email address it skips passwords and always ends up with a clueless generic error message with a non-functional "retry" button.
I have since found a workaround which requires reinstallation per each launch, because the installer installs an older version that will soon be automatically updated to a newer version, and that older version can retry on the failure with an alternative login prompt that actually works. So Microsoft has at least two login prompts, only one of which is working for me but unsupported by some versions of Teams so that I can barely work around. Brilliant.
Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)
I hosted a LAN party for my friends because I wanted to practice setting up a small network. It’s funny to think that was once semi-challenging.
The “DHCP server” for us was a sheet of paper where you’d write down the IP you were going to ifconfig.
Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are very few other platforms that encourage you to use a single account to join servers for work and gaming and anime and music? And users trust that Discord will allow them to keep their membership in spaces a secret unless someone is already a member of both sp…
>I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. These suggestions wouldn't really help. Every Discord account has a permanent public user ID attached to it that stays the same regardless of if the username changes. Someone wishing to track an account across multiple servers is always going to be able to. Using multiple accounts is the on…
Certainly this is possible, but only if you are a member of both communities. Due to the confusing UX you mention, the threat model of "accidentally accept a Alabama or Saudi government job's Discord invite, or the Discord invite for your now-potentially-required-to-out-you-by-law-thanks-Alabama cousin's D&D group, in the desktop app while logged into an alt account with a LGBT or trans flag profile picture, or nonbinary pronouns in your username" is significantly more likely and probabilistically dangerous than "Alabama or Saudi state actors are lurking LGBT communities and extracting user IDs at scale to correlate with Discord users on other accounts." And yeah, that last one's problematic too, but Discord can still start somewhere. I'd argue that Discord has a moral obligation to start somewhere.