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Comment by _n_b | Hacker News Reader

In both cases, I feel like they just stopped moving altogether. It wasn't even that they didn't innovate or add new features, they stopped even improving the features they had.

I feel like there's huge market space for an application like Ventrilo that just does a simple voice server really well, without all the frills and bulk that more fully-featured app like Discord has.

I know that we aren't entitled to software support from devs who get what they want out of their software and then move on... but I'm right there with you in being sad that vent/ts haven't stayed the test of time. Discord saw the stagnancy in the market and just ate it right up.

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I think Mumble tries to be what you're describing: https://www.mumble.info/

I've used it and it does indeed work well, but I think it struggles with adoption in part because—it turns out—all those frilly features do in fact drive engagement, help suck users into the ecosystem, etc. Basically it's a repeat of IRC->Slack; people tend to migrate away from things that are easy to migrate away from toward things that are hard to migrate away from.

Yea, you hit the nail on the head. Mumble is super functional, but ui/ux is tough to chew.

Engagement is so interesting to me. The notion that an app can be functionally better but practically worse in a marketplace because it doesn't have enough psychological hooks to keep users engaged. What an interesting software development challenge to face.

Agree! As an interesting counterexample to the trend, see video conferencing platforms over the past year: despite contact lists, calendar integration, cross platform whatever and decades of brand recognition, it wasn't Meet and Skype that got all the initial mindshare around pandemic WFH video calling— it was relative newcomer Zoom, whose killer feature was that you could just click a link and be in the meeting.

On the other hand, once Meet finally ripped off that feature, I basically switched to using it all the time. So maybe Zoom's ease-of-entry was an initial winner, but ultimately there was nothing keeping me there when Google offered the same but without the freemium time limits. Perhaps there is a parallel here with a service like Mumble?

Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018.

Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year.

(Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)

I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable.

Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".

Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.

I can't understand the argument that Mumble is functionally better. I used Vent/TS/Mumble/Skype for years while playing WoW and within 2 minutes of downloading Discord it clearly blew all of them out of the water. Joining a new server was frictionless, channels and settings were clear and understandable. It combined everything from those 4 services into 1 and did it better. I wouldn't call that "frilly features" it's just a flat out superior product.

Oh yeah, that reminds me of the one time I wanted to join a TeamSpeak server, but my "security level" was not high enough. My CPU had to calculate some stuff for 2 minutes to get that required security level, it's apparently an anti Spammer measurement.

Discord is easier to use, no doubt about it. However that ease of use has been achieved by ruthlessly cutting control. Mumble options have I think literally 100 dials you can turn to tweak audio. Discord has like three. The Mumble options require a lot of knowledge to even comprehend, which is why they're not good for popularity. However these options are a godsend when you run into a weird audio issue.

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