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Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

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Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#481

Post by ehsankia »

vehementi wrote: post #415
ehsankia wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different. I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great: 1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting 2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy 3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO esp…

Obviously discord is different than only mumble alone. Discord is not very different from mumble + IRC, which is what we are comparing to and what I said in my post. IRC of course does have history if you keep your client open which most people do. Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course…

> keep your client open which most people do.

[citation needed]

I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.

And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#482

Post by WorldMaker »

herbst wrote: post #426
Karunamon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the default - if you can see a channel you can read it and be pinged by it. Roles can restrict this, and you can configurably ping roles and remove the ability of regular users to do things like @here and @everyone. Discord's permission system is one of its killer features, IMO.

Thats only partially helpful. What if you get mentioned in channels you have no role for? What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles? Discords roles are really we…

> What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone?

There are certainly bots that automate that on Discord. A bot can open the private channel, add the temporary role, assign the temporary role, then close all that stuff when the chat is done. If it's a voice chat you don't even need a temporary role, the bot can "drag" users to/from other voice chats, so you can have a "public" lobby for the private voice rooms that only the bot can fill. (I've been in game servers built that way.)

> What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles?

Discord just released a much more comprehensive slash-command system. It will be a while before more bots migrate to it (and away from Reaction "buttons" and weird individual choices for command prefixes), but it supports now some powerful auto-complete/help prompts and argument schema validation.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#483

Post by WorldMaker »

pell wrote: post #207
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.

> Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. From what I understand Slack's model is based on selling plans to teams and companies. Within that framework users are actually representing a real monthly recurring dollar value. I don't think Discord is anywhere close to this.

I'd be curious to hear some numbers on the percentage of active users with Nitro subscriptions. Slack's business model makes it easier for them to make monthly revenue off passive users (by encouraging teams/companies to over-provision and also double-dipping in the user overlaps between teams/companies), so in some respects it incentivizes them to optimize for passive users. The Nitro/Server Boost business model is likely to have fewer passive users paying the subscription costs recurring monthly and doesn't as easily double/triple dip users (unless they intentionally and optionally overpay for server boosts), but it incentivizes the company to keep active users happy.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#484

Post by antpls »

anticensor wrote: post #452
antpls wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to other comments : advertising. Imagine having to watch, or listen to an ad before you can join a channel. Imagine contextual ads in-between text messages.

Discord has zero ads.

I was precisely replying to the parent who is wondering about a path to profitability for Discord.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#485

Post by unethical_ban »

diamondhandle wrote: post #393
unethical_ban wrote: post #266

Earlier 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,…

Speaking of the founder of Ventrilo -- this video is priceless: https://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/21/video-man-sells-gt500-ra... I guess there's no more of that.

Funny enough, my story is not quite so bad but still sad. I got bored of the events that evening and went back to gaming. The event stage and the BYOC were at least 1/4 mile apart - I get back to my desk and all my friends are texting me that my name was called to play a "RAGE" 4player deathmatch to win a raffle ticket for the Raptor F-150.

I didn't make it back in time.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#486

Post by unethical_ban »

bradlys wrote: post #413
cortesoft wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was using Vent and Teamspeak you had to actually host the server, as I recall... so someone had to set it up and manage it, or you could pay a third party to do it, but that was always too expensive for my friends and I.... discord is a lot easier to set up your own server and find and discover other servers

Yep. This is the major differentiator to me and it's obvious why it caught on after that. When I heard about Discord I was like, "Weird, so many people are hosting their own servers or paying to host a server now? Why did it catch on now? More affordable?" Once I learned it was all free... kinda obvious.

"free"

Sure there is Nitro, but I believe data mining is part of the devil's bargain.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#487

Post by cedws »

naikrovek wrote: post #388
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of my GDPR data downloads contained a list of programs I had ran along with the command line arguments. Not sure how you can explain that if it's not sent to the server.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#488

Post by denkmoon »

steveklabnik wrote: post #473
denkmoon wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imagine I want to go out tonight. None of my friends do. So I go to a new place and start talking to people at the bar. One of them stabs me. No, I do not want to be friends with those people. But I don’t know that yet, because we have not met. The only way to meet them is to... meet them.

The consequences of being ddosed are not exactly the same as the consequences of being stabbed. I think you'll survive this terrible, unlikely ordeal.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#489

Post by TheFlyingFish »

steveklabnik wrote: post #280
savanaly wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny enough, I hate Slack threads. Discord has added a reply feature already that better captures the IRC feeling, and rumor is real threads are coming, we'll see :) (If you like threads, be sure to check out Zulip.)

Threading in group IM's seems to be one of the more polarizing UX discussions that I've come across. A while back I was reading some of the discussions the Matrix people were having about implementing a threading model, where it became clear that there were three very distinct ideas of "good threading" floating around:

1. Infinitely-nestable threading, a la Reddit and HN (and probably other sites first, but those are the ones I've used it the most)

2. Single-level nested threading, a la Slack (and maybe Facebook? I forget how much nesting they allow)

3. Discord/IRC-style replies (like you mentioned) where the responding message just quotes the original, possibly with a slight UI indication to make it easier to parse.

I guess you could argue that Zulip-style threading is a fourth option, but IMO that's closer to a bulletin board than a group IM, because you can't have a message that isn't in a thread, so almost no discussion happens at the top level of a given channel.

What's interesting to me is that the split between who prefers which style of threading is pretty close to even.

I suspect, although I'm not sure, that it comes down to two things: the size of the groups in which you normally participate, and how closely-knit they are. A small, closely-knit group would likely prefer Discord/IRC-style threading, because sub-discussions are more likely to be of interest to those not participating, and the added noise isn't too big of a deal if the group is small.

A larger, but still closely-knit group would probably prefer Slack-style threading, because even though sub-discussions might still be interesting to more than the immediate participants, but a single message space starts to become unusable with more than a couple of sub-discussions going on.

A large and loosely-knit group is is likely to prefer Reddit/HN style discussions (and in fact those are two examples of large and loosely-knit communities) because a sub-discussion is less likely to be of interest to a significant portion of the main discussion's participants.

Maybe, at least. It would be interesting to do a poll and see how those factors correlate.

Re: Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft

#490

Post by k12sosse »

curiousgal wrote: post #9
donkarma wrote: post #3

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.

As an M365 admin for a district with 65,000 students and 11,000 staff: thank you for saying as much. Teams gets a lot of hate here, but honestly.. it does a lot right. I do admit the Teams client is a bit of a pig.

I really wished this deal could have been reached, but then again, competing products will do each other well.

Teams is basically Discord for business. It's as if the development team were big fans of Discord. It shows!

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