Hacker News Reader

Could they not just drop the quality of the whole call down to the lowest bandwidth allowed by a user? I feel that would reduce a computational burden on Discord's end, while allowing the lowest client-to-client latency

View on HN

Keep in mind that a major use case for Discord is open voice chats (e.g, for gaming groups), not just organized person-to-person calls. Having the quality for a whole chat drop just because someone joined from a mobile phone would be a really disappointing user experience.

This is absolutely something that Discord does, though. I've had friends just drop the bitrate slider as low as possible in Discord just to make the whole channel sound awful

That's a channel-specific option though. You can set per-channel bitrate, but it's not something Discord does automatically to accommodate lower throughput clients.

They could, but if you have 4 people in a call and 3 can receive high bandwidth audio, lowering it just for the 1 person with low bandwidth is the best user experience.

Otherwise people with good networks who have their call quality dragged down will just think Discords voice chat is bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com