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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

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, though.

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I think that the biggest differentiator between Discord and the others (mumble, TS, Vent, etc) was that Discord has very mature text chatting as a first class citizen, rather than an afterthought. This is what I have anecdotally seen as the primary thing that has made even people who casually voice chat join public discord servers. The model is much more friendly to casual users than either TS or Mumble are.

I agree - text chatting is the first foot in the door. It's non-committal, but gets you the ability to voice chat when you feel up to it.

Things like TS and Vent is voice-chat-first and thus, you will only join _after_ you've made friends to voice chat with online in some other platform (like irc or a game). There's no TS community, since it's purely utilitarian, unlike discord.

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.

My friends and I ran our own free vent server. Limited to 8 people as per the terms.

Vent 4 release saw our v3 server die. It was then we realised that a "phone home" was part of the deal.

We now use Mumble.

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.

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