Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#431

Post by nextlevelwizard » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #275

sbagel wrote: post #228

Discord 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…

Why would you install the desktop app? Isn't it Electron anyways, so aren't you basically running the same thing as you would in the browser, except now you've replaced the exceptionally well sandboxed, trusted browser with an outdated, unsandboxed browser and have given an app that doesn't need this access to your entire system?

Easier separation of ideas. I want to be able to close my browser while still keeping VoIP running. Alt-Tab-ing is far superior UX compared to trying to find the VoIP tab in browser. Over all UX is way nicer with separate application even if it is just another browser running.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#432

Post by herbst » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

vehementi wrote: post #366

donkarma wrote: post #3

Considering the state of Teams they really needed Discord for their amazing technology of actually being semi responsive

Discord doesn't have particularly amazing technology, what do you mean?

They combined a lot of things others were doing well too and combined it into a resource hungry piece of software. I too am not really impressed

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#433

Post by denkmoon » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #374

denkmoon wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the people you're playing with DDOS you, you need to find new people to play with.

Sure, but that doesn't help you in the midst of it. It's also like, sort of kind of not how social games work in many cases. In order to make friends in the first place, you gotta get out there.

Do you want to be friends with people in a community where having the admin look up your IP and ddos you is acceptable???

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#434

Post by denkmoon » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

throwaway3699 wrote: post #422

denkmoon wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the people you're playing with DDOS you, you need to find new people to play with.

Games with matchmaking will permanently ban your account if you leave games too often. It's a risk: "CS:GO - Competitive Cooldowns and Bans - Steam Support" https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1203-WJC...

How many competitive games are you playing where the enemy team is an admin on your teamspeak server and feels it is appropriate to ddos you?

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#435

Post by akamaozu » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:59 AM UTC

holler wrote: post #258

hemloc_io wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha love how people have rediscovered the functionality and joys of IRC and the like!

Totally... If you enjoy the text/irc aspect, I welcome you to check out https://sqwok.im , a new realtime public discussion site very much inspired by growing up using aol chat/irc/icq/aim and others. I think we live at an amazing juncture of technology and ideas, where excellent communication software like irc that was always limited by it's own access requirements (install something, client, server, huh?), can now…

Sqwok looks amazing :)

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#436

Post by btown » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

btown wrote: post #410

meowface wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 nonbi…

s/Alabama/Arkansas/g but the point still stands!

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#437

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

lacker wrote: post #329

tru3_power wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I bet you could have fit both on the same connection.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#438

Post by f1refly » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

throwaway3699 wrote: post #386

aclelland wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

It's quite something else to monitor the processes that have been launched from the application itself than to monitor all processes that run on the host system.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#439

Post by globular-toast » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

joshmn wrote: post #89

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.

Why does everything have to grow into an abomination that does everything? Teamspeak and Vent were for talking to your team in game. This was their purpose and they did it very well.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#440

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

savanaly wrote: post #254

RobLach wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack. The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.

When I joined the Elm community I thought it was weird they use a Slack for real time discussion and not a Discord. When I asked why I found out that Discord's features are most certainly not a superset of Slack's. * Slack threads are an amazing feature and frequently used on the Elm slack. One discussion or one person's question can become a thread and then the channel won't be continuously pinged by the ongoing dis…

> For a big organization

Dealing with the difference in default channel permissions requires an extra minute or two of work. Adding user-controlled joins means grabbing a bot and spending a few more minutes. For a big organization it's absolutely negligible.