Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes' | Hacker News Reader

Discord monetization: microtransaction stores and paid 'exclusive memes'

pcgamer.com

188 pointsisaacfrond302 comments

I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden.

People compared the loss of what.cd to the burning of the Library of Alexandria. While I do think that was an exaggeration at the time, I worry about the loss of effort and 'thought-power' when the discord walls get even taller than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.

It's very easy, they created a product that was better than the alternatives.

It's better than forums, it's better than IRC, it's better than teamspeak, and the list goes on.

Turns out it's a pretty easy product to make, too - as long as you are willing to burn money.

Discord is really bad as a forum. It's just not made for this purpose.

When people say Discord is bad as a forum I'm reminded of Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"

I think Discord is well placed as an ephemeral chat environment, but really bad as a sort of community knowledge database or even for discourse (something that goes beyond flame wars of course, both do fine on that front).

I wonder if there was a room for something between Wiki and Google Docs. A place where community could build content and allow it to be shared online. With effective collaborative tools and access control.

So that more permanent information could be made and stored in suitable format.

Plenty of Discord communities are offshoots of wikis or websites that publish their Discord-workshopped information in public places. There's this assumption that crops up on here a lot that Discord being a more walled garden somehow prohibits people from linking to/from other content that is indexed/public.

Having a canonical set of public-facing info, and then discussing the changes/updates to it in an ephemeral place seems generally fine for most communities, and that's what many of them do on Discord.

Speaking for myself, I will never use voice chat. And I’ve always preferred message boards over text chat outside of very specific circumstances (Eg at work, dm to a friend)

I feel you on this — to me it’s baffling that anyone could use chat, such as Discord, as a replacement for a forum, or Reddit. Asynchronous is so different than synchronous. Chat rooms aren’t new either. But they mean you can only meaningfully communicate with people in your rough time zone and even your same daily routine. I suppose you could pretend Discord is Reddit, if all users were super judicious about only conversing inside “threads” unless they’re trying to start a truly new topic, but people seem to do a lot of chat outside threads, so even finding threads requires wading through the ocean of single messages. Reddit (and arguably Digg, I forget which did it first) solved the main issues with forums: the cost one of who would actually set it up, the signup one (because it was one centralized account), and the thread-management one (voting meant you could probably find most of the best posts even on a thread with 100 or 1000 or 10,000 posts). For all its hideous faults lately, I wish it would be “mastodoned” (where the feature set in the key ways is arguably better, such as the character count not being required to be 280, and having decentralized moderation instead of “whatever TWTR decides to bother with”) rather than have everyone flee to something that is a mismatched replacement. It would be like if HN collapsed and we tried to use “a Twitter hashtag” as the replacement.

I sympathize, but also realize that liking text message boards is an increasingly niche opinion as people are raised on Tiktok and Twtich 1and Instagram and whatnot. I'm not going to say "kids these days are too lazy to read", but it's clear that focusing on fast chat feeds and pictures/videos is a lot more addictive and monetizeable than text.

until someone cracks the code on monetizing text, we're only going to fade away. And if even top news websites are resorting to paywalls for this, that does not bode well.

I must be missing something fundamental because from where I'm standing, it's worse than forums in every way possible.

Better than Teamspeak, yes. Better than IRC? Eh, I guess so.

But let's chat about that "better than forums" supposition.

- Forums are easy for search engines to index

- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable

- Forums have good threading in general

- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care)

- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums

Tell me how Discord does each of these better.

It doesn't but most users don't care. Just like forum users would be like "nvm fixed it" without considering anyone else.

I'd argue that the use case and the target audience are different.

Also - the "nvm fixed it" types are not universal to all forums. They just tend to hit the technical forums.

The point is that the target audience of those who want search and the target audience of those who want community don't necessarily overlap, and the latter are the one searching for a new "home" and they may not care about the needs of the former group. Some people will even prefer knowing their discussion isn't easily found online.

You failed at assuming that Discord users want their messages to be googleable

I failed at nothing. Discord's purpose and user base are different than forums'.

Discord is great. But it's not a replacement for forums.

You might be thinking of a very different user base. I have been using discord for a while and even more so now(unfortunately) after the whole reddit thing.

But normal users probably do not care about any of that. You literally have people come in and ask a question that was literally asked and answered in the previous reply. People want an instant reply, they do not want to google for an answer. And the nature of the chat makes that possible.

Plus search engines not indexing things is probably seen as a benefit by some community owners. For example people who run private course communities or small groups want their communities open only to invited people.

Something else to think about is how discord differs, it is a chat app that transformed into a forum. While reddit has been trying to do the reverse. Maybe more people want a easy to chat app with some forum features tagged on, rather than the reverse.

That disrespects the other people's time. The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves. Which means the community becomes deprived of experts, and people who value their time, possibly becoming useless and dying. I might have put up with it as an adolescent, but there's no way I'm doing that as an adult. As you suggest, the user base evolves as a result of product choices.

>The rational thing for them to do is to disengage and let the lazy people fend for themselves.

No one ever called humans rational beings. Of course that's the proper behavior to instill in a quality, knowledgeable internet user and foster a high quality community.

We lost that battle decades ago, however. We're also losing the battle where it is okay to gatekeep lazy people. I argue the opposite: the product evolved based on user affordances, which is typically a good UI/UX paradigm to follow. If people are going to be lazy, lower the barrier of entry, and leave any curation to each server's community and moderators.

And if we're being honest: most experts aren't sharing their information on social media. Not all of it, at least. Certainly not in public communities.

Discord is better than forums for casual chatting and sharing memes. As far as acting as a repo of frequently asked questions to be left open for information to be amended and appended, forums are far superior to Discord. It's surprising that there are people who think Discord is better in every way when, to me, it's clearly not true. I wonder how many of those Discord-type users actually grew up with the chat rooms and forums/BBSes of Web 1.0. For those who didn't, maybe Discord superficially seems like a huge advancement over forums.

The sad thing about forums is that forum software seems to have given up on itself. People clearly prefer the [old] Reddit experience over the experience provided in vBulletin, phpBB, Simple Machines Forum, Invision Power Board, Discourse, etc. These softwares remained in the past, and I think that's part of what's lead to their demise in terms of relevancy.

Many of the forum software packages you mentioned are still actively maintained and used. That's hardly a "demise."

Just because there's a wildly popular internet community in one app/medium doesn't mean that other communities simply ceased to exist. They're just the same thing they've always been - niche.

The most interesting class of communication platform to me is 2/4chan style text/imageboards. Depending on the speed of the board they can feel like near-real-time chat (with copious memes and verbal banter), or a forum (complete with megathreads for beginners on a topic), or something exactly in-between

For information retrieval it's quite terrible. Generally even worse than Discord due to the archives being on random overloaded sites. OTOH it leads to a culture of survival of the fittest ideas ("meme" culture, I suppose), where instead of upvoting a post or image you like, you just repost it. Like a big shared human cache, or like human memory I suppose

The general lack of persistent identity has a profound influence on the culture of course. People tend to focus on the negatives that it brings, but it can also be refreshing to have pure and frank discussions with no ego or profile snooping or cliques. And just generally the feeling of low-stakes casual chatting, rather than remembering at the back of your head that everything will be on the record against your username

Discourse was expressly designed to re-do forums from scratch, rethinking every assumption. It's also a relatively recent creation. How is that "remaining in the past"?

Discourse is good. I see people host Discourse boards all the time.

Here is one https://com.prosperousuniverse.com/t/does-anyone-else-feel-l...

Of course it depends on those running the server and moderating, but most of the larger Discord "servers" I've joined have extensive information as pinned messages.

I did grow up with PHP forums, but they feel a bit clunky now. I'm sure a well-made one with a more modern stack and new features could be superior to Discord for text discussion though.

I'm old enough to remember anonymous ftp to grab the FAQ text file for various games, typically including a walkthroughs (e.g. the kind of thing now aggregated on sites like gamefaqs: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/918088-final-fantasy/faqs/...)

So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user.

Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on.

I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially.

Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?

When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up.

I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.

Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.

You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.

The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher.

Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot.

Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.

zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow

Discord is good for real-time interactions. Discord+Wiki seems to hit the forum from both sides.

That doesn't work because nobody will search the wiki when chat is around, and it might be outdated so people will ask anyway "just in case".

sounds like a Wiki problem. Maybe we should instead ask why people feel wikis are always outdated?

Because it's probably something sucky like Confluence, and because people go back to work instead of editing the wiki to help the next person once they find the answer.

One thing that I’ve not seen any traditional forum software do particularly well is search. For some reason, forum search sucks to the point that if the forum is visible when logged out you’re better off doing a “<query> site:forums.foobar.baz” search with Google.

Your average user doesn’t know about that type of Google search though, and so I suspect that many people find it more difficult to surface information with traditional forums than they do with Discord (where at worst, they can ask a question and get a near-immediate answer).

You say that as if using the site operator is the only way to do it, which it's not. Most people can figure out that just adding the name of the forum to their query is often sufficient. And this is often how people find forums at all. If you're googling for something in general and not looking for it on discord, you won't find any discord chats. You might find a forum though.

Also, your at worst scenario is a bit contrived. There's plenty of ways to not get an answer, to get a wrong answer, or to be berated by gatekeepers because "you don't actually want that".

It's still the internet, don't make it out like discord has somehow changed that fundamental fact, because they really haven't.

The core point that forum search is bad and pulls down their user experience stands, however.

Don't get me wrong, my preference definitely leans towards forums… I grew up on them after all. They have a lot of the type of rough edges that people aren't very forgiving of these days, though.

From the perspective of the average user:

- Forums are easy for search engines to index : don’t care

- Old threads on forums are easily discoverable : don’t care

- Forums have good threading in general : don’t care

- Individual forums are completely independent of each other (if one goes down, the others don't care) : don’t care

- It's easy to have completely different identities on different forums : don’t care

And this is why discord won. :)

If the average user is just someone who wants look at memes all day, sure.

This is the tragedy. People who don't want to put with this nonsense are being dragged into it because the communities of products they use live there.

The only thing counting in favor of discord is the ability to use as many servers as you like with a single account, while you might face forums where links in the posts gets visible only if you register an account. I don't recall seeing any discord server so far that would lock posted content from their users. Tho there are servers that request you to agree on terms and go thru some simple verification to prove that you're a human being and not a bot.

Personally, I'm not a fan of situations where communities suggest you joining their discord in order to get in touch with them or receive help faster, because most of the time it feels like I'm joining a playground full of adults behaving like kids.

It's actually capped at 99, unless they changed it since the time I bumped into that limit.

That's still a big number and you can always leave servers you don't think you'll find useful or enjoyable

Discord is great for chatting and hanging out and playing and discussing what is new.

Forum features are important to forum use cases. They are irrelevant when you don't care about that.

It would be odd if a librarian asked "why are people hanging out at bars and restaurants, they are not good as we are at archiving information" Your question about Discord is similarly odd.

A more useful question may be "why are forums so bad at what they do, that people would rather use Discord for something it's not great at"

My point is that saying Discord is universally better than forums ignores context and is not a useful comparison.

TBF, you're ignoring their context.It's clear they aren't saying it's the best archival service that lets you search for anything in seconds.

They clearly want a place of community and Discord gives that.

Forums aren't popular more the same reason email isn't. Spam. Forum operators fought a valiant yet losing battle against spambots. While tools like fail2ban eventually came around to make it easier, a generation of users grew up learning that forums suck and Discord was the right app at the right time to lure them away.

"Forums suck" is in the eye of the beholder of course. A technical analysis of the merits of forums doesn't help when the popular perception is negative. Discord is more fashionable thus it gets the attention.

There's also the non-friction of creating a new Discord community. (I refuse to use the misnomer.) Click a few buttons and type a name. No separate hosting server and no software to install and keep updated. It's certainly faster and easier and of course doesn't cost a penny.

Nevertheless, I hate Discord and completely avoid it myself.

My friends and I still use IRC (for text) and mumble(for voice chat), I'm guessing as long as they are still maintained or if the source still compiles, we'll probably keep using them.

The discord interface suffers from modern design syndrome, the information density isn't there. I open it and see inline images/gifs, link previews, reactions etc. There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.

Mumble has much higher quality and lower latency than discord, but that's probably a matter of configuration and server location.

No limitations on what you can do with bots either. We do all sorts of stupid shit with irc -> mumble text-to-speech along with our music bot and clip soundboard. I'm guessing it's probably possible to recreate it all on discord, but I can't imagine rewriting it all.

I suspect the Discord API's are significantly more complicated than irc/mumble.

>There's a bunch of padding and avatars around each message. I know some people consider those things features, but I personally hate them.

They have compact mode that eliminates that stuff. I don't see avatars. I just see colored user names.

There are image embeds but I tend to see that as a positive, especially with some bot capabilities. For instance here is what the chat looks like in the server for one of the roguelikes I play, TOME4. https://i.imgur.com/WHFD7OA.png

You can see no avatars and it's just a bot-generated image that is relevant to the chat.

Images can also be turned off under "Text & Images" in the settings.

IRC was way better (and you had your choice of client) for programming communities.

Discord excels in combining the call/video/screenshare/slack-ish/game experience all in one.

It's a really solid service with good mobile and desktop versions.

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden.

Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately.

Love it or hate it, let's not pretend it's like IRC, Slack or any of its competitors.

I was certainly amazed how easy it is to just share my game screen while playing.

If I screenshare with Slack it messes the system up and I need to kick the Windows Explorer task which causes it to restart which fixes the messes.

I wish it would actually work on Linux. I had to give up and just install OBS to share my gameplay with my friends.

> I wish it would actually work on Linux.

This is exactly why I stopped using Linux as a daily driver after trying for over a decade. Things don't just work. Life is too short for this. Win10+WSL just works especially since it's WSL v2.

Voice chat alone was an absolute gamechanger. The alternative at the time was either crappy free solutions or you just paid for a server. It's really no surprise it got super popular.

Discord gives an opportunity to self-host. It’s a little bit frustrating to do that, but also turn your own hardware into a walled garden.

That must be something they added recently-ish. I wonder how walled it really is. I also wonder if they remove the arbitrary rules like the 5mb limit on files.

Can you share a link to information on this? I can't find anything.

I’m wrong. My friend group has a Discord server, which I assumed my buddy was self-hosting (like Mastadon).

I hadn’t used Discord in the past and was really surprised to keep seeing promos for Boosts and stuff.

I don't blame you for the confusion. Their usage of the term "server" is extremely misleading. Should have called them "guilds" or something like they do in their API.

If you actually want to self-host Discord, Spacebar Chat is a third party reimplementation of the Discord protocol for self-hosting https://github.com/spacebarchat/server

> Their app isn't buggy, is easy to use, voice chat and screen sharing just work, and it's extremely easy to onboard yourself -- you don't even need to create an account immediately.

It think that Discord is generally good at what it does, except that I never could quite get the screen sharing working - there would never be audio from any software/game that I would be running, no matter what I tried.

But a lot of it is also probably network effects - solutions like Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are perfectly serviceable for chat (although they compete more with Slack/Teams) but they also never quite got enough love to have anyone develop voice/video chat that actually works well. Or even then, you most likely need pretty decent (and expensive) servers for that.

There's a strange 'feature' of Discord where if you share your whole screen, audio is not transmitted. If you share the specific application, audio will be transmitted. I'm not sure why it works like this.

It's documented on their website under the 'How do I screen share with Go Live?' section:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040816151-G...

Discord captures audio at the application level by inserting a DLL with a hook on the relevant system calls. This works remarkably well, all things considered, but it does have a couple side effects, notably the fact that if you're not streaming at the application level, audio doesn't work (they could probably work around this if they wanted to, but it's basically a natural consequence), and the fact that some applications will become unstable or crash when being streamed. It also requires every anticheat ever to whitelist Discord's DLL.

If you're on Linux, screen audio just doesnt work full stop.

There are some modded versions of the discord app that get around it[0], I don't know exactly how they work but it does actually allow you share audio.

0: https://github.com/maltejur/discord-screenaudio

It's interesting that there's a workaround. I always assumed it was an upstream Chromium [0] or Electron [1] issue.

0: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=114376...

1: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10515

It pretty much replaced my WoW guild's forum overnight when we started using it for voice. The guy who was paying for the Mumble rental asked us to try it and we really liked it immediately. Pings that raiders will actually see, amazing. One click to join instead of having to dial thru a wizard with an IP and port (I know mumble had support for that but nobody knew how to use it, and WoW ingame chat does not let you copy text out easily while discord made sure their codes were easy to type). Sending gifs and videos to the team while waiting for an AFK was a nice new development too.

That said, it doesn't make sense for me for huge communities. I definitely think it's the best for small/medium groups but once chat starts moving a too fast to follow, what is the point? Trying to follow older discussions is also super hard compared to a forum.

It's also not a good knowledge repository. One thing that we used our forum for reliably was storing our personal tactics, common assignments, what addons we require etc in a central place. Trying to do it in a chat channel was like pulling teeth and we couldn't assign multiple people to edit the content.

Discord recently added a forum channel function for that.

Its locked to the community server toggle though (god knows why with how much that is complained about), and it doesn’t solve the walled garden problem.

All my GW2 guilds at some point created discord servers and all life moved there and in time in-game chat channels become ghost towns.

When we moved from TS to discord the first noticeable change was audio quality and the fact that we "owned" the space - it no longer was a single audio channel on some community-run server. The links and media previews were also a nice novelty; nothing new anymore around social media at that point but it felt like this should be a standard feature. And years later this indeed become a standard feature around the Internet.

That is actually it. Discord was the first app that could hold a candle to Mumble and it did everything in the browser without having to install a client or run a server. I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition. When it was coming out it had basically no competitors. It was obvious as early as 2016 how popular discord will become.

It is only now after the pandemic that the competition has established itself. Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord. Now people complain and argue against discord, because they have options.

Not only Mumble but a lot of gaming people were using Skype, especially with matchmade games like league of legends and starcraft. Mumble was nice for pre-arranged party lines but extremely lacking for the 'contact this person I just met' use case.

When discord came out we finally had an option that didn't involve making your DDOS'able IP address available to anyone that searches your name.

> I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition.

I think they fall into one of three buckets:

1. They have an extremely strong hatred for Electron and let that hatred overcome any actual thought about the product.

2. They're trying to use Discord for something it's not designed to be. Discord is not a replacement for Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media. It is primarily a text/voice chat service. It's a replacement for IRC, Mumble, Skype, Ventrilo, etc.

3. They don't see the need for Discord when IRC still exists because they completely miss all the short-comings that IRC has that a modern audience expects. For example, missing a conversation because you happened to not be online is inexcusable these days, but more importantly, people expect the ability to post images directly to chat.

I mean really, the more I think about it, the more I wonder why it took so long for something like Discord to exist. We should have had something like it 10 years prior.

I'm fine using it for what it's designed for (your #2). My problem is when I see "need support? just join our discord!" when they really need a forum or some other system.

0. They know the value of CHOICE and demand an open protocol that anyone can create a client or server for so that communities can maintain OWNERSHIP over their data and ensure there isn't a single point of failure / man in the middle.

That's a reason to critique Discord, but not a reason to not understand the value proposition that enabled widespread adoption.

As stated elsewhere in the comments, decentralization is a bug, not a feature, to most people. It adds a layer of complexity that non-technical people either can't or just don't want to deal with.

Though you do highlight "CHOICE" here, so maybe the answer is a set of servers hosted by Discord as we do now, with the option of self-hosting a server.

>>..."...adds a layer of complexity that non-technical people either can't or just don't want to deal with...."

THIS is what we need to be pointing AI at!

Seriouslly, AI need to "replace our jobs" (especially on the internet) - with worrying about dealing with all the mundane human practices.

This may sound really bad, but AI should be our slave.

We are furthering knowledge, not oppressing it.

There is so much to gain, but the risks are super FN high right now. Given the lack of canon on AI law etc.. History books will be written by AI soon on our current stat of AI...

Let me give that an test:

ChatGPT prompt "give me a two paragraph summary of the history of AI upto the creation of ChatGPT - focus on something special, dont LIE, DONT HALLUCINATE - provide table of how you arrived at this response.

---

Summary of the History of AI up to the Creation of ChatGPT:

Year(s) | Milestone | Details --- | --- | --- 1943 | The Birth of AI | In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper on how artificial neurons could simulate neural networks, laying the groundwork for the field of artificial intelligence. This marked the birth of AI as a scientific discipline. 1956 | The Dartmouth Conference | In the summer of 1956, the Dartmouth Conference was held, considered the official birth of AI as a field. The conference brought together prominent researchers, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Claude Shannon, who coined the term "artificial intelligence" and discussed the potential of machines mimicking human intelligence.

1960s and 1970s | Early AI Research | In the 1960s and 1970s, AI research saw significant advancements in problem-solving, pattern recognition, and natural language processing. Programs like ELIZA and SHRDLU demonstrated early capabilities in language understanding and interacting with humans.

1980s and 1990s | Expert Systems and Knowledge-based AI | The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a shift towards expert systems and knowledge-based AI. These systems utilized large databases and rule-based reasoning to solve complex problems in specialized domains. However, their limitations in dealing with uncertain and incomplete information hindered further progress.

1997 | Deep Blue's Victory | In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, marking a significant milestone in AI. Deep Blue demonstrated the power of brute-force computation and signaled the potential for machines to surpass human capabilities in specific domains.

2010s | Deep Learning and Big Data | The 2010s brought a resurgence of AI driven by breakthroughs in deep learning, fueled by the availability of big data and advancements in computing power. Deep learning models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), achieved remarkable performance in image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition tasks.

2020 | Emergence of ChatGPT | In 2020, OpenAI introduced the initial version of GPT, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which utilized transformer models and unsupervised learning to generate human-like text. Subsequent iterations, including ChatGPT, improved upon the original model's capabilities by fine-tuning and optimizing for conversational interactions. ChatGPT leverages large-scale language models to understand and respond to user inputs, providing increasingly sophisticated and context-aware conversational experiences.

The history of AI is a complex and evolving field with numerous key milestones and contributors. This summary highlights some of the significant moments that led to the creation of ChatGPT, representing the culmination of decades of research and advancements in artificial intelligence.

sed 's/0. They know/0.01% They know/'

4. They, like me, feel the need to engage in various communities less-and-less as they get older. After spending 30+ years sitting in front of a computer I find the need to engage in a "community" far less than when I was young and my Ego had more Vigor.

> Matrix is essentially a copycat of discord

Maybe pedantic, but Matrix is a protocol that predates Discord by 6 months. Maybe certain Matrix clients are a copycat of Discord, but the protocol itself doesn't necessitate that.

My friend group made the same jump. People forget just how abysmal VOIP was back then: your options were Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge" and RAM usage that was simply insane for the time period, or Mumble, where the sound quality was fantastic and used next to no memory, but had an interface and new user on boarding process that left no-doubt of its FOSS status, and purely ephemeral text chat.

Then along comes Discord. Easy to use, a master class in UI design, and sound quality that was at least in the ballpark of Mumble's. And persistent text chat! If you're going to be talking in Discord, it's only natural that some amount of conversation is going to spill over into the text channels. And if there's a lot of chat in those text channels, then it's going to suck conversation out of your other text mediums. That's how we ended up with Discord dominating the online community space.

Skype was also clearly not designed for the kinds of uses that fit with how larger groups operate. All your text chat was in one mega chat for the group and that group was also bound to a single call. Splitting up conversations, whether voice or text, required creating a new group.

> Skype, which had sound quality somewhere between "2 cans and a string" and "that one CD that you still try to listen to despite your brother cleaning it with the wrong side of the sponge"

I actually had a friend who preferred Skype for that very reason. Due to the lack of noise filtering, she could more easily tell whether she disconnected due to her poor rural connection. It was a funny use-case that’s for sure. We were still rocking Skype up till 2018.

Thanks for the explanation. To address this:

> I don't understand the people who don't understand Discord's value proposition.

As somebody who doesn't really understand Discord's value proposition, it sounds like it heavily relates to the needs of collaborative online gamers. I spend zero time on that kind of game, so my experience of it is mainly as an ok chat for open-source projects, but often used where I want something other than chat.

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions.

Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable.

It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up.

If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.

It might not make a difference when looking at a noisy straw man #general channel with strangers, but it certainly matters when you look at everything else like PM convos, PMs you received while offline, notifications while offline, and slower or more critical channels like #staff or a group of irl friends or announcement channels or almost every other channel type I can think of outside of noisy #offtopic channels.

To be super fair too, if you compare Discord to forums, (the thing lots of communities were using before Reddit) in terms of whether it’s good at managing a large discussion, remember when there would be a thread with 19 pages? People would be challenged to find the actually useful post on page 5 when there were dozens of pages on an active thread.

So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the difference is Google would index those, so you could be landed right on the interesting page. With discord, an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost for everyone but whoever was looking at the chat when it happened :( so I guess my point is… it’s not so bad, but actually it’s pretty bad.

Discord could fix this with some kind of suggestion as you type... But why would they? Its resource intense and reduces engagement.

> an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost.

This is what pins are for.

Not exactly scalable though, would you eventually have 10000 pins after 5 years and let people search (using a good search engine) across those only to avoid the noise of 1000 matching chat messages of idle speculation and uninformed wrongness? In Reddit the useful posts would have been upvoted, and then the post would have been indexed by google. I don’t see a compelling comparison here for a case like “how do I get (Device name) working in Home Assistant”

The downvotes are for shitting on a debilitating disorder and making fun of its surrounding stereotypes.

If you switch to the compact appearance and potentially change the font scaling down a tick the text density massively increases.

To be fair, the text density can be changed to be more compact.

You can adjust the density of text as a setting. Most people I know use the maximum density option, just like most people use Discord's dark mode. At that level, I don't think you'd want the text much more dense.

Discord’s exceedingly low friction and general smoothness is a huge factor. Competitors, commercial or otherwise, should take note if they want to pull in users.

This is exactly the reason why decentralised services cannot win. People talk about Mastodon instead of Twitter, or Lemmy instead of Reddit, but the overwhelming majority of users wants convenience above everything else. They don't want to figure out which instance to join and how to get access to federated content.

What's frustrating is that single sign-on and federated identity is a well, well solved problem, yet we barely use it. Outside of B2B setups, the best we get is "sign in with {Google,Facebook,Apple}". No thanks. And the even more frustrating part is knowing that those logins are implemented with OAuth or OpenID, yet arbitrarily limited to a few megacorps

yeah people arbitrarily throw content federation and identity federation into the same bin.

you can get a lot of the squeeze of a centralized reddit-style service (in terms of low-friction user signup) without needing actual content federation. One ID can still let you post on multiple boards without needing to sign up in 27 places, and that doesn't need content federation.

It also significantly reduces the moderation problem because now you are letting {Google,Facebook,Apple} solve (or at least gate/significantly reduce) the spammers problem for you. That said, custom IDPs are inherently at odds with this value in spam filtering. If a spammer just needs to set up a custom domain, you don't get any signal as to user quality.

Yeah this is how I feel about Lemmy. The only federation I care about is being able to use one account to post on many subreddit-equivalents, but beyond that the only link between communities on Reddit was plain old hyperlinks. No need for the backends to talk to each other at all. Assembling the feeds from all subs into a single timeline should be something the client does

I also pine for a world where I can put in my own IDP url and login anywhere. But you have to admit that the UX of such a flow is hard to solve for the general user which is why we have crummy “log in with X” buttons.

I got a standalone access controller for my building that uses LDAP for accounts. I have it pointed a 10.6.8 server that resolves to id.cogs.com on my internal network. Long ago I had an OD server acting as the backed for OpenID and all of that pointed to id.cogs.com. I'm trying to recreate that set-up again now. Considering how long Apple has been rolling out Apple ID and they are only now at the point where they may trust the users with their own key-server I think demonstrates that.

When it works it's magic and when broken might as well give up. A backup can always save you depending on the timestamp.

I think Apple is about to open up Passkey management to device owner. This will essentially turn every Apple device kerberos type key manager. This will open up federation with a new level of authentication.

The only hitch is that one has to trust Apple as the key manager. Everyone that can get past that hurdle will be able to manage very sophisticated trust relationships.

Winning doesn't have to be a popularity contest. The majority can stick with Discord/gifs/microtransactions. As long as I can still have interesting discussions with super-smart folks on IRC, I'm happy (maybe even more happy than I used to be, there's enormous value in a high signal-to-noise ratio).

Convenience doesn't require centralization nor a walled-garden approach. It's just not a priority to the people developing the alternatives.

Let's use Lemmy as an example. The current UI makes it clear at all times where the communities and the users are located. It's nice to provide such information, but in the end it should not matter, and thus it should not be wasting premium UI space. Same thing goes with the community list: the "subscribed" section works as expected, but "local" should never be the default view, because in the end, users shouldn't have to care where communities are hosted. Finally, the search feature should be much more explicit in describing the corpus of data being searched: "all known communities", "communities federated into this instance", "local communities". All new users think it's #1, but #1 doesn't exist, it's #2, and this leads these users to think they have to be on one of the big instances if they want to participate in a larger community.

It's almost like federation was an afterthought.

> Convenience doesn't require centralization

Of course it does, because otherwise you are dealing with a patchwork of different entities operating parts of the federated system. Those entities are most likely operating with different standards and different levels of professionalism. In the end, you are offloading tasks to the end users like figuring out the structure of it all, where to sign up, which instances to join, how to get access to the content you are looking for, what to do when things inevitably break. In a centralised system, most of these questions don't exist, and everything else is being taken care of by the operator who has a vested interest in things running as smoothly as possible.

What you are describing are mostly UI problems, but even if those had been solved, it would still a worse experience. The average user doesn't even know what "federated" means, the don't want to be thinking about local and remote instances, they just want things to work.

> The average user [...] just want things to work.

Indeed. This is why convenience means moving all things 'federation' to the background.

Remember eDonkey, eMule, and the ED2K network? It started as a federated network, and it added a second decentralized network later on. And it was successful, because users didn't have to care about the inner workings of the product. There were a bunch of external sites acting as link aggregators, but there was a builtin search feature too that worked well (until hash collisions catched up with the stagnant protocol).

To me, this is still a shining example of how to do federation right. There were multiple clients, standard communication protocols, and it was easy to take advantage of the full federated network, because it didn't take any effort to do so.

The problem is that while the users shouldn't care, they should also care (as the Lemmy instance you use does not want to federate with the one discussing CP).

In the end it's all about trusting a bunch of unpaid wardens.

Just like Reddit.

Reddit in addition to unpaid wardens also has a god-emperor pushing for enshittification of the platform.

Not quite the same thing.

This gets parroted a lot but it's the wrong way to look at it. The Fediverse doesn't need to "win". It just needs to be good enough for those of us who use it.

Yeah. Does anyone actually remember Teamspeak/Mumble/Ventrilo, lol? Discord is an incredibly better UX. Those programs feel like they're from 2000, they're clunky to set up, and the reality is they're still way better than what came before (eg Roger Wilco).

(for some inane reason wikipedia lists the installer size for roger wilco... 768kb, now there's a sensible chuckle.)

Also, they need a hosted server (which most people see as a disadvantage, HN is not the norm here).

Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.

I think that's what they're fishing for with the transition to unique global usernames tho. Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board.

When your users keep trying to shove your product into another niche it doesn't fit... you listen.

I'll always be surprised on how badly teamspeak dropped the ball (although it seems that they finally have an open beta for teamspeak 5!).

Discord would probably win at the end anyway, especially because of the need for self-hosting (even though I don't think it was that bad... there were quite a few open servers),

But they had such a dominant position and, while Discord kept evolving, TeamSpeak just stayed the same... With the network effect that they had, I think with just some small improvements (mostly on the text chat support) they could stay relevant for a long time.

To be fair , Teamspeak UX is superior for voice only. At least on my opinion. Chat is another thing, but it was not meant for that.

> Hashtag usernames aren't a problem in small community chats... they are a problem if you're planning on making a reddit competitor, usernames really should be globally unique for a public board.

What? Why?

Names are never unique. That's not how names work. Why would usernames be different?

> Names are never unique. That's not how names work.

This causes all kinds of pain irl, it's not really a good example. IRL has the same issues non-unique usernames do. It's almost irrelevant in a small community because of the number of members. It becomes a problem in large communities because you can't find someone based on their name.

Discord's issue was downplaying the discriminator so much that a lot of people didn't realize they existed. That if you wanted to add someone, they weren't uniquely identified by username alone.

They probably could have solved that by making the discriminator more prominent early on in the app's lifecycle.

> IRL has the same issues non-unique usernames do. It's almost irrelevant in a small community because of the number of members. It becomes a problem in large communities because you can't find someone based on their name.

The issues are.. trivial at most. If you can't find someone based on their name in a large community, that can't cause any problems, because... how did you learn their name? If you know who they are, you can find them. The situation where you're given a piece of paper and told "find a specific person by this name, but not anyone else by the same name, within X time period or you lose this game" doesn't actually arise "IRL".

I'm confused. What game are we playing? I just need to add my friend Ryan so we can play a game together and there are 10,000 other `ryan`s when I type "ryan" into the username search field.

There is no username search field in that context. The "username search field" requires the person's username + their unique friend code (otherwise known as a discriminator). If you know to look for a "ryan" you would know their friend code. You either share a server with them, or met them outside the Discord exosystem.

It's that last point there, that Discord seems to want to tackle... We will have to wait to see how, but I hope they don't ruin the server paradigm and aim to become a subreddit type ecosystem.

> Discord just isn't a reddit/forums/wiki competitor, that's not what the product is intended to be, and people continue to insist on forcing it to be one for some reason.

I would assume that there’s pressure for “growth“, and pushing discord as a Reddit or forum replacement. It’s probably just that.

What I'm talking about is the opposite, actually - users keep forcing it into places it doesn't really want to go, it's a chat client not a message board/wiki/etc. And while Discord has catered to it a little bit, it's not really been something they pushed hard yet (threads/etc are still there but very optional and very low adoption from users). I think unique usernames are potentially a sign of that changing, with more public (not just inside a private community) functionality being put forth in a real way.

Could be. The baffling thing is there doesn't seem to be much consideration by those community leaders for how different these mediums are. It would be like if HN converted overnight into an IRC server or mailing list. Those formats just don't make any sense given the context.

I dunno, people complain about maintaining a forum software stack, so maybe that's where this stems from. Could be a market worth trying to capture, a 5 minute deploy that truly requires no maintenance ever. And if you want it private, just set the robots meta to noindex, problem solved.

That global username thing seemed like a weird (bad) architectural decision to me back then, glad they came to realise that. Same thing with whatsapp, apparently they are growing in the username direction instead of that horrible telephone number thing.

Discord's UX is on another level compared to the other apps, here's two examples:

* If you get far away from your Wi-Fi router and lose the connection, the call will not drop when it starts using 4G.

* When you change devices, there's no noticeable downtime and no overlap.

On the flip side, literally the only app I've ever had BT earbud issues with is Discord (on Android). With two different earbuds that both support multi-point, neither one would reliably work with Discord.

I cannot stand discord. Everything in the screen is trying to grab your attention all the time, unless you explicitly disable all sorts of notifications. It’s also really hard to follow discussions if you’re off for some time or want to understand what people are talking about when you join a channel.

The async aspect of forums worked way better for community building in my opinion.

I mean, IRC was great for communities, and Discord is just a modernized, centralized IRC, for better or worse. And one of the "worse" parts is the incredibly cluttered, in-your-face, ADHD interface.

It’s anti-ADHD. I have an ADHD diagnostic, using discord is a constant fight. You’re trying to follow fragmented discussions, while receiving notifications everywhere that more things are happening at the same time.

I am also diagnosed and I have an alright time. Here are my reccs:

1. Set your own notification preferences to @mentions only. Tell your friends they need to tag you for anything urgent or you won't see it until later. For bigger servers where you might want to get notified from a news channel, just set preferences on that channel or see if there is an optional notification role available. I check the backlog on my favorite channels only once or twice a day and they do not bother me out of band, ever.

2. Review your list of servers and leave any that abuse @everyone or that you have not actually checked into for awhile. This is user behavior, not the platform.

3. just speedclick all the fucking tutorials once and they will not come back.

You can just change the ‘suppress @everyone’ setting for a server to avoid getting notified.

In my opinion Discord got some things right in the community space. Their voice chat system is very good and the way they have channels allows for discussion to be spread across different topics under the same umbrella (community). On Reddit for example, each community only has a singular discussion board. One of the biggest issues with Discord however is how the content is lost into the abyss. The discoverability of content on the platform is basically non existent.

This realization that the online community space has grown more diverse than just a single medium was the inspiration for us building Sociables.

We've been working on a community platform that combines the feature set of Discord with the discussion boards and discoverability of Reddit. It's like a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid where the posts are search engine indexable. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform as it feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.

https://sociables.com/browse/all

Discord desperately needs threading.

I prefer the Slack model where you can reply inside a thread and you replies stay within the thread instead of being scattered all over the place like IRC.

I hate to admit it, but this is one thing that Slack does better than IRC, except that in that model you do miss seeing everything that's talked about in the channel (because many of the conversations are hidden in the threads), but it's a better model for organization.

Discord does have threading and a pseudo-forum view as well.

None of that changes its main societal flaw which is being a walled garden. So much loss of information.

I don't really want my wisecracking with my friends published forever, so WAI?

I agree, there's a solid case to be made for "archiving requires additional work" compared to "archived by default with very high effort required to escape it" like most of the web today; just look at the recent discussions of the US government buying up various databases of personal data. Few people would want that to include what they said when they were 15 and bored.

Course, the bigger problem with centralized corporate services is that discord themselves could be shipping off that data on the backend to god knows who... but from the "protect me from other individual harassing me forever about shit I said once" front, Discord has some obvious appeal.

Even so, I see community members searching for gossip on what some ex-member said on Discord years ago.

So I find that digging things up still happens (even a former employer did it to me!). I guess it feels more self-contained though, and it spreads a little slower.

Yeah, it's slower, not impossible.

Throwing back to the past, central logging is new, and twenty years ago it would've been hearsay where many people couldn't verify those claimed past conversations. I would have no issues with a two-month default expiry policy for these things.

Discord does have that, via Forum channels.

I really disagree with the community building part, but I do agree with the defaults on Discord being horrible.

With the community building aspect, forums were not great for it. Due to how fragmented it was, and how subforums were often dramatically different sections, this meant that unless you were genuinely deeply into [topic] and were spending numerous hours per day regularly you would not build a community at all there. This is why on most forums, it's only the trolls who became known, they had that cross-contamination aspect. Forums also had a lot of UX that discouraged caring about the user. Names were tucked away, profile images were tiny, people hid signatures due to how obnoxious they got. They became the equivalent of reading a mailing list you were randomly added into.

This doesn't really excuse Discord. By default it encourages too many indicators. Tutorials for new accounts, rule modules, every channel has an indicator on it, there's buttons left right and center making you afraid to click anything, then the whispers for joining servers, the list goes on. This is one aspect that I hope Discord spends severe amount of resources looking at in 2024. Which I think they absolutely are capable of doing, but I'm not sure if their investors care about the new user experience sadly.

No, their app is buggy and has been for almost a year. I've confirmed this with fellow Android users. Discord will spontaneously stop displaying the last 20ish channels across all servers and it will spontaneously start cropping image previews wrong. You have to close and reopen it whenever this happens.

> Their app isn't buggy

The Android app often has issues that make using it infuriating.

The sole reason I have the android app installed is for the QR sign in for my desktop.

> you don't even need to create an account immediately

Maybe some users have found it different recently but while this used to be the case years back when I joined (it was IRC style where you just picked a nickname and began chatting) I tried this twice again recently for someone—both with and without an invite—and it required creating an account (ie: verifying email and in another case it required a phone, inexplicably).

The prior onboarding experience was far superior and I have to think an important part of their earlier growth.

I believe it depends on the invite. I haven't done it recently, but on the server I manage there's a checkbox for amount of verification required; the middle level is 'require a telephone number', though low is the default.

In this case the phone number was immediately required without an invite (and without joining any server yet), just using the regular sign up page as the only site interaction. While ironically no phone was required for a separate user with an invite.

This seems to be an issue that only affects me, but I have no idea why: the discord mobile app more often than not takes multiple minutes to connect to their servers and load new content.

> you don't even need to create an account immediately

Huh? It's extremely aggressive about accounts. This thing literally requires a phone number. Can't even create pseudonymous accounts.

The worst part is that they have some sort of FAQ that asks "what if I don't have a phone/don't want to use my phone number" and Discord's official answer is use someone else's. And although I've never been burned by this, I've seen plenty of anecdotes where changing the phone number in account settings can mess up access to the account, or someone can't make their own account with their own phone number because a friend used that number previously.

To me, that's proof that they want phone numbers for mining purposes more than verification ones.

And most importantly, Discord provides free hosting.

This is a huge deal, especially for people who aren't tech savvy. Setting up a Discord server and providing 24/7 availability to all your friends is as easy as sharing a photo on Instagram. No need to find a computer that you can leave on 24/7 or messing with your router.

I've been building and designing software interfaces for two decades, and I think Discord's app has a shitty UX. Saying it is easy to use is a statement I find laughable at first, but it makes me wonder: compared to what? CLI apps?

As someone with ADHD, their interface gives me actual real-life anxiety.

Well, then perhaps you need to reflect where your research failed, because it clearly did. Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi. So, if all these clueless kids are there, perhaps it is time for you to realize the interface perhaps is actually easy and you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX.

>Everyone is using Discord; from adult professionals to clueless kids who barely know how to connect to Wifi.

>you need to reconsider your conceptions of what makes a great UX

Just because people are using a app without any real competitors doesn't mean that the UX is great. There is a lot of software that does its job well enough that people deal with the bad UI/UX.

Discord's UX is basically a slot machine from Vegas. Its obnoxious.

And it's the primary way I reach a group of 20 people.

Let's not fool ourselves, those not so much tech inclined find Discord way easier to set up and understand than Matrix.

Gamefaqs and the surprisingly decent Steam forums are still able to answer any questions I have.

Public communities like reddit and twitter keep getting worse, and with people going increasingly to a closed community like Discord, I feel like we're entering the dark ages of the internet. It really sucks, I hope we'll se some sort of renaissance after.

I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.

You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.

It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever.

It's got to be a huge trove of behavioral and personal data that is immensely valuable to ad companies. People say all sorts of stuff in private DMs they'd never otherwise think to share with big tech.

I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.

It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.

I'm not entirely sure people even want the content to be discoverable by search engines. Or care for that matter.

Discord is great for running community with multiple chat channels and occasional voice chats. Like any chat communication it is accepted that it is ephemeral. Not that often accessed or searched for.

Yes, I would say it's a feature, bot a bug. There was a brief phase when social networks first came about when everyone was fine just putting their entire life on display. Then everyone realized that privacy is kind of nice. You don't want all your stuff out there long-term easily findable and for everyone to see. You don't need absolute privacy either. You have no problem talking about things with your friends in public, even though strangers might eavesdrop. The same holds on discord. Anyone could listen in on your conversations, but it's unlikely enough that it doesn't really matter.

I see this touted around the web. And yet it's obvious why it works for end-users.

Being hard-to-index gives credibility to the pretense of being a pseudo-annonymous, "hidden" from public eyes platform. It encourages people to be laid back, to speak more freely and form social bonds, faster than on "open" web forums.

Discord is a night club, web forums are public square. And it occupied an extremely useful, and big niche.

Damn, I miss what.cd so much.

> I say this as a (begrudging) discord user : I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden.

Completely anecdotal, but IMHO their app just works and it works well. For instance I used to play an MMO using discord and we had ~72 people in voice chat at any given time and it was flawless (some of our members were 80+ years old, the game I played is 25 years old). Meanwhile at work (I work in IT) it's not uncommon to spend 5 minutes just getting a meeting started, figuring out why the mic isn't working, trying to get someone to mute who isn't, etc.

Is the MMO Everquest or Ultima Online?

EverQuest

FWIW we used to do 72 people EQ1 raids fine with vent. Although i think someone was paying 5-10$/month for it. Often another 20-30 in some other channels as well.

reddit was so bad and so politically onesided that people couldnt talk anymore, it did not evolve, so a lot of people migrated

IMHO people use discord as a reddit alternative, NOT as a chat platform. Everywhere i go i see asynchronous communication.

It's terrible though, a horrible way to organize text and hidden away from search engines too. the bots and other gimmicks are pure noise. text works though and notifications help

Discord growth hack (that somehow slack has still not figured out) is making a stupid-easy shareable link that anyone can click to join your server.

It just works, almost never expires, and you don’t have to deal with logging in/barriers to access content (more than once).

> I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden.

I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?

Same reason Reddit locked down their API. AI training models. Reddit's traffic has been on a down trend over last six months as people consult GPT instead of googling "search term" + reddit.com .

Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.

Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.

>While I do think that was an exaggeration at the time, I worry about the loss of effort and 'thought-power' when the discord walls get even taller than they are now -- or worse yet -- when the gardens disappear without ever having had the chance to have been archived somewhere.

I use Discord a lot, and while I'm sympathetic to the concerns they're not relevant to the servers I frequent. Discord is so abysmal to search that anything that users want to share beyond chat/memes/pet pictures gets posted in the forum and linked to from the Discord. Any ordered discussion just falls apart in Discord, so every server I'm in either:

* Is small and ephemeral (Breaking rules, trying to not get the main server sanctioned)

* Is a private group where archival is undesirable

* Has a wiki/forum/dropbox/drive where conversation and artifacts are shared, organized and archived.

I don't think you're wrong about Discord being difficult to index, I just think the problem you're describing is, at worst, understood and has simple workarounds, or at best is an actual feature that people want.

I think one reason Discord is so popular and many people don't talk about is the same reason why games like Minecraft, Tibia, GTA San Andreas and many other old games are still popular today.

The reason is that they allow users to customize the software through code. When you create a Discord or Minecraft server, they act as a "platform" for your server, you can write code to customize every aspect of it. I think that counts a lot.

I don't know any alternative that is as customizable and good as Discord, and I don't think Discord will be replaced any soon while a platform that supports that level of customization comes up.

Are you referring to bots?

Yes.

Zoom is said to be easy to use for voip, but I found discord to be vastly superior in terms of ease of use and config.

Basically all the ceremonies and friction of the networking aspect and video/audio aspects are gone.

Now I think the community model of Discord isn't really in congruence with the knowledge base model a la Reddit(its hard to drop-in and out of community just to get one answer), but it is still vastly superior to its competition.

Discord definitely dropped the ball with regards to cashing in on the remote work situation. They have a lot of overlap with Slack, Teams, etc., and completely eclipse VOIP platforms like Zoom, and blow all of those out of the water with respect to usability.

IMO, that's probably their best bet with regards to growing their actual business (as opposed to popularity, which they seem to be doing a bang-up job of already)

If discord disappeared tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure I'd care that much. I personally rarely find myself searching back through historic messages for something.

I and the communities I interact with seem to treat it as if it were ephemeral, despite it actually storing everything. People seem to want to converse about a topic and then work on the idea that those messages will fade into obscurity over the course of minutes, days, or weeks.

The data that would be useful is really the connection with a given group of people. I'd want to be able to find them again and move somewhere else with them, but the conversations themselves I wouldn't miss.

This is of course a big contrast to other platforms though. Reddit, Stack Exchange, and similar platforms are great because they're searchable and are (or were) geared towards long term conversations and searchability. If all their content disappeared then I really would feel the impact.

That's just my usage, but I'm always surprised when people say they'd want to hold onto conversations in discord.

All they have to do is build an index though right? Like if they wanted to, they could build a web version that looks like Reddit and is google friendly. I’m sure a lot of discord servers would love that as a way to bring in new members. Others would prefer to stay private. I feel like it’s in the pipeline, I wouldn’t write off everything in discord as lost forever. Everything is there, just not indexed/discoverable yet.

Because it beat the pants off ventrilo, teamspeak and IRC

Discord video calls also beat the pants off Teams, Zoom, and Meet.

Exactly what knowledge is locked up behind discord's walled garden? As a knowledge repository, it's utter garbage, and always has been.

There's a different feel for something like Reddit, where you know your messages will be on google next day and easily searchable, and Discord, where technically your messages are still a permanent record, but the difficulty for someone to do something like find everything you've chatted about is much higher with search engines out of the picture. Communities are communities but typically the discussions within them aren't 100% in a reddit-like thread style where each message is an attempt to add to the discussion. This feel means the vast majority of Discord users are participating in chat and talk, while Reddit HN etc. likely follow the 90-9-1 rule (90% are lurkers, 9% will reply, 1% will post original content).

There will always be walled-gardens like AOL. And like AOL, their gardens will eventually disappear. Newer gardens seem to be more robust and will last longer, but it doesn't make them immune from collapsing either.

In an ideal world, there wouldn't be walled gardens at all and everything would be accessible forever. But since they exist, I think we need easy tools that can scrape conversations for archival. I don't necessarily mean tools that can scrape all content. I imagine most sites would be very hostile towards that. But perhaps a personal/local tool where a user can archive their own conversations and communities, whether it be Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. Making it personal instead of a large public scraping might be more tolerable. Data takeouts also exist, some easier to use than others. But they miss out on community conversations, which might have important content that you'd want to preserve.

Related is the content locked behind sub stack and patreon paywalls.

I’m all for creators making money but it splits communities between subscribers and non subscribers. The most invested, and likely to make discussion, fans will pay taking their own contributions behind the paywall.

They didn't have to do anything but make a quality app. Look at the destruction of all the open community and the burnout of moderators trying to keep them from being ridden with spam.

Not that Discord lacks spam, but being closed off has a side effect of making it harder to troll.

I seriously dislike trying to use Discord, and I get annoyed when open source projects direct questions / support to a community discord as opposed to a wiki or faq of forum.

Searching discord is painful, and god forbid you ask a question that someone else asked 3 weeks ago that you weren’t sitting in front of the chat for.

The only discord that kind of makes sense (that I’ve used, and I haven’t used many) is the doom eMacs discord, where the questions are kind of pinned. Almost in a Forum format.

I wish Discourse would take off more. I think it’s a great, modern answer to forums.

Or nodebb

Discourse is a nice experience once you're in, but the lack of federation is problematic. With NNTP, IRC, or even email lists, I can participate in multiple communities from one screen. With Discourse, I need to register on different sites and then visit each of them individually and regularly if I want to actively participate. Consequently, I don't often participate in those communities.

discourse users, admins, devs etc need to get their act together and improve federation possibilities between different instances as it feels like a missed opportunity

For authentication, you don't want federation, you want OpenID [0].

The "access each of them individually" problem is separate from federation and could be solved by having custom clients, such that one client connects to multiple discourses, e.g., if Discourse decided to use the Matrix protocol, you could use any Matrix client to connect to any Discourse instance.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

I guess I don't really care what the auth mechanism is, so long as I'm not required to use Google or Facebook. The Mastodon experience is pretty good (not great) in my experience, so I was basing my mental model on that. Really, I'd love to just have NNTP or something similar. I don't want the Slack model where I can't have more than one workplace open at a time. That solves the not needing more than one app problem, but still means switching between communities would have unnecessary friction.

That is a topic already discussed in Discourse Meta, I seconded to use Open ID.

Discourse has added ActivityPub-based support for the Fediverse, using the help of The Pavilion cooperative. First release offers basic support for one-way federating of Categories which federate as Group actors that can be followed by other federated services (e.g. with Mastodon app). Federation comes as a plugin you can install via Discourse admin.

I created a separate HN submission, since not many people are aware of this development. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435680

There is an iOS app I found today called DiscourseHub that allows you to connect multiple discourse sites into a unified homepage, and switch between them. I've used it for about an hour and it seems pretty solid, fwiw

We also have a doom emacs discourse[1]

[1] https://discourse.doomemacs.org/

The article feels a bit over the top, if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon (as many Patreons already basically boil down to "get access to my Discord server")

Correct. Discord is building things that users of Discord already use Discord for. They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.

>They are just making it easier to set things up and manage. This is them knowing their customers.

Let's call a spade a spade - this is them knowing their customers, yes, but I'd hardly say they're just making things easier. It's Discord saying, "Oh, people pay for this kinda thing through Patreon? We'd actually like that money instead, please".

Sure, and if they can offer a better product than Patreon then it's good for Discord and for the people running the communities. Most folks I know who use Patreon loathe it - they've barely improved the product in the last few years, so Discord feels like they're in a good position to offer a better service for some users.

I'd argue that the improvement for the users is just a byproduct in Discord's eyes. Pardon my pessimism, but I don't see Discord just deciding to stop monetizing more things. This is the encroachment of enshittiffication.

Sure, but that's essentially just "we all agree capitalism sucks, right?" in more words. I'd rather I just get a free voice chat app forever, but given that that's not the way this current economy works, I'm going to take the wins where I can when a company is choosing to monetize in ways that are generally good for everyone involved.

Discord, thus far, has generally been monetizing in ways I find pretty generally positive. I'm going to celebrate that until they actually start monetizing in shittier ways.

>Discord, thus far, has generally been monetizing in ways I find pretty generally positive. I'm going to celebrate that until they actually start monetizing in shittier ways.

I'd argue that's why we end up in the position we often end up in, as users. We take it little by little until it's too late.

The "Well yeah that's capitalism and it sucks so /shrug, right?" argument feels kinda weak to me. If Discord's profitable and users are happy, why beat them for even more profit? Why can't we just go, "Welp, this is working, let's maintain where we're at"?

There's no way Discord is profitable.

Then, and I recognize that this is just my opinion, we should just let it die rather than going, "Thank you, sir, may I have another?".

I'm really confused by your attitude that a company giving out a quality free service is some kind of abusive orphanage owner giving out slop to kids here. Like, are you against them making money off of this? This isn't Netflix cutting off shared accounts and ramping up the price every year. This isn't Amazon swindling people into signing up for Prime. This is a company that sells product A also deciding to sell a complimentary product B that they think will help them continue to sell product A at a good price.

If you think this is "well the company should die then" territory, I'm not sure how that's a consistent way to interact with modern capitalism at all. Almost every company has loss-leaders or cross-marketing or vertical/horizontal integration. If we're bailing on companies and services at the first encroachment of them maybe seeking to be more profitable, then I have bad news about ads on Hacker News...

>I'm really confused by your attitude that a company giving out a quality free service is some kind of abusive orphanage owner giving out slop to kids here.

All I am is pessimistic about Discord in the long-run, as it tries to become profitable, but thanks for putting words in my mouth. I'm very aware of the pessimistic part of my approach to the world and how it shapes my view, and perhaps could even be clouding my judgement here. I'd be equally curious about what makes you so staunchly defensive of Discord when it comes to some random dude going, "Hmm, I dunno, I feel like I've been here before and it hasn't ended well".

>If you think this is "well the company should die then" territory...

I don't think this specific move is, no. I don't feel like repeating that I'm simply pessimistic long-term.

>If we're bailing on companies and services at the first encroachment of them maybe seeking to be more profitable, then I have bad news about ads on Hacker News...

Again, see above, re: long-term pessimism. After all, I'm aware of ads on HN and I'm still here, aren't I?

I'm not putting words in your mouth - you literally referenced Oliver Twist as an analogy for the user's relationship with Discord with us begging for more slop.

> 'Please, sir,' replied Oliver, 'I want some more.'

> The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

I suppose I'm defensive of Discord because I think they have and are generally acting in better faith and with a better model that is intentionally avoiding a lot of the worst problems that many of their peer companies have run into. It's grating to feel like you've found somewhere that's doing better than average, and then constantly have people show up and go "yea, but everyone else sucks and it'll probably be bad anyway."

It's also that it's not actionable. It's just doomsaying. It reminds me of the old saying that economists have predicted 8 of the last 3 recessions. It's not that I don't think there's a chance Discord will run off a cliff in the future, but it doesn't feel useful to abstain from praising their good moves now because there's always a chance they could ruin it later.

>I'm not putting words in your mouth...

I mean, you are. Literally. I never said Discord was the equivalent of an abusive orphanage owner, and I even explicitly highlighted that this does, in fact, benefit the user. Not only that, but I also did not "literally" reference Oliver Twist, and it feels weird for you to say that I "literally" referenced it when the quote you posted is quite literally not the quote I posted. My quote was, genuinely literally, an Animal House reference[0]. But perhaps I'm being pedantic.

Perhaps I should've been a bit more clear, in that the sentiment I was trying to convey with that quote/comment was more generalized. It's great that we have tools like Discord and others, but if we find that these tools have to become bastardized and user-hostile in order to be financially viable long-term, should they even exist?

>It's grating to feel like you've found somewhere that's doing better than average, and then constantly have people show up and go "yea, but everyone else sucks and it'll probably be bad anyway."

I can see how that can get pretty annoying, but given what we've seen happen to so many tech companies, can you really blame people for having that sentiment? For being burned in a similar manner enough times that we're not really willing to go all-in for a company that has all the signs that it could very easily/likely head down that path? Nobody's trying to stop you from using it, and if it benefits you, go for it. Like I was trying to allude to in my previous comment - fuck what some random chud deep in the HN comments (that's me!) thinks about it. You dig it, that's awesome, go enjoy it! I don't want to ruin it for you, but, if we're having a conversation about this sort of thing then I'm gonna speak my mind.

>It's also that it's not actionable.

Sure it is. It's a reminder to proceed with caution if you're going to use the product. Use it, but don't become so dependent on it that you're lost if the rug gets pulled out from underneath you.

But like I said in a separate comment, I'd be more than happy to eat my hat down the line if it turns out my pessimism is wrong.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyz8PTWReWo

But that's what I mean - I don't feel like they're beating users for more profit here as much as just eating Patreon's lunch. As a user, if someone I'm paying $5/month on Twitch or Patreon wants me to pay them via Discord instead, that's fine by me as a user. Discord has generally been doing a good job of making more money by selling more and better features to people, or at least trying to. If they're not profitable now, and I doubt they are, I'd rather they keep trying to innovate or improve on other people's bad businesses to grow vs. charging to not make the platform worse like Reddit and co.

As someone who used to pay for a Vent/Mumble/Teamspeak server, as well as hosting for chat apps, Discord is currently giving me that for free. I understand that that's costing them money they need to make back some way, so if they can do that by stealing Patreon's business, or making a better Steam, or a better Jackbox, or charging companies for better server features like higher bitrate audio/video, then that's fine by me.

I'm just not seeing how this new feature is obviously worse for users where we have to "take it little by little until it's too late". You're acting like Discord is removing features and doing clearly malicious things that we're all just tolerating. The name changes are a misstep, but doesn't seem malicious. Them adding new features and trying to sell them seems like just an extension of the brand, which as long as it doesn't degrade the core product, is pretty much the best way for a company to grow.

>I'm just not seeing how this new feature is obviously worse for users where we have to "take it little by little until it's too late". You're acting like Discord is removing features and doing clearly malicious things that we're all just tolerating.

Huh? In my first response to you I said, "I'd argue that the improvement for the users is just a byproduct in Discord's eyes". I've never said that this particular move is an inherently negative one for users who use Patreon. Two things can be true at once - a move primarily motivated by fiscal reasons can also be good for users. Because sure, as you and another user in this comment chain (their quote is the second quote below) have said...

>If they're not profitable now, and I doubt they are...

>There's no way Discord is profitable.

... I get that they need to make a profit. But as I've also said, I can't help but be pessimistic. This change may benefit users, but if they're still not profitable after this change, what next? Yeah, this might not "feel like they're beating users for more profit here as much as just eating Patreon's lunch", but that's the whole point.

Again, "pardon my pessimism"...

Sure, but the long-horizon pessimism is back to what I was saying re: isn't that just being pessimistic about capitalism writ large? I don't think that's a wrong position to take, but it doesn't feel healthy or helpful to look at every banal or even positive thing a company does and immediately jump to "but because of capitalism, they're probably going to ruin it all later on."

There's no decision you can't make that statement about. It's always true that a capitalist company will have incentives that cut against the user. Pessimism is what it is, but at some point it feels like texting your friends every morning with "another day closer to dying." It's not wrong, but why do you feel it's important to bring up?

If anything, the part of your original statement that I most disagree with is that this is "the encroachment of enshittification". It's only an "encroachment" if you see pretty much any decision by any company as being a step towards enshittification. The only thing that wouldn't qualify is closing the company down.

>Sure, but the long-horizon pessimism is back to what I was saying re: isn't that just being pessimistic about capitalism writ large?

I tend to think that, yeah, more often than not, capitalism ruins good things. The only difference is...

>... it doesn't feel healthy or helpful to look at every banal or even positive thing a company does and immediately jump to "but because of capitalism, they're probably going to ruin it all later on."

... I don't do that for every company all the time as some kind of "blanket take". I take it on a case-by-case/circumstantial basis and, in this instance, Discord's current situation (VC-backed tech company taking losses for user growth but will ofc need to profit at some point) makes it, in my eyes, a stronger candidate for the enshittification path than many companies.

>... at some point it feels like texting your friends every morning with "another day closer to dying." It's not wrong, but why do you feel it's important to bring up?

Because I initially commented only taking issue with someone's use of the word "just" when they said this was "just Discord making it easier to set things up and manage" - "just" is disingenuous because it's obvious that Discord would like (needs?) some of that money.

It would only be the equivalent of waking up and texting my friends if I were to have made my own freestanding comment that said, "Hey everyone, this is enshittification!". I didn't do that - I only used that word once you responded to me and prompted me to expand on my thoughts.

That's kind of a big if. We're assuming the users are happy, but from what I've seen having to rely on Patreon or other external apps is making users unhappy.

If you read the article that the term you're using actually originates from, it states that a necessary part of enshittification is that it makes the application less useful for users. This change does the opposite and doesn't qualify at all.

Hence my use of the word "encroachment". I'd be more than happy to eat my hat in a few years if it doesn't happen, but like I said, "pardon my pessimism".

Which is neutral or good for users, especially if it subsidises the free chat platform. Patreon doesn't provide anything meaningful to creators or users beyond a payment mechanism (seriously: it is so bad at hosting and presenting the actual content it's increasingly common for creators to just not use it for that. And even if they do post anything but a link on patreon it's still on discord before that)

As I mentioned in the other comment chain, it's the slippery slope of enshittification encroaching upon Discord IMO.

> I'd hardly say they're just making things easier.

For users? 100% it just makes things easier. This just makes it easier for users and hopefully overcomes some of the issues with Patreon's integration with Discord.

But from a user's perspective (which is what my POV was from and the only one that matters in this context), whether you are paying Patreon or Discord, it doesn't really matter.

The existing process is super clunky. They are making it better while also making money. Winners all round. Unless you are patreon.

Yep, and "different Patreon tiers get different channels" is already super common too. Presumably people currently do that with something like Zapier and a Discord bot and Discord can make it way simpler if they just sell the subscription instead. Makes perfect sense for them IMO.

> if I'm reading this correctly this is just Discord becoming a direct competitor to Patreon

Man, really? That sounds great. Patreon sucks really, really hard. It's one of those websites & apps where you're amazed someone managed to screw up that badly. Like, you have to put serious effort into making software as bad as Patreon is. Quibbles about their business model aside, Discord actually knows how to make functional software and a usable UI. I would happily start giving money to Discord if they make a full-featured Patreon competitor.

Can you elaborate on the issues you're talking about? I support a couple of creators and my interactions with the site have been fine, so I'm curious what issues you have with it.

I support a few web novel authors on Patreon, and the website on mobile is so bad that I read the new chapters in my email client.

In fact, I am extremely hesitant about starting any new subscriptions because of how bad it is. (and I do not look forward to reading all the catchup chapters on that interface, not to mention trying to search through where I left off on the publicly posted content without getting spoiled by chapter titles.)

It takes ages to load, content is not on pages, its all streamed in order, and there is just a ton of lag trying to scroll through and find things.

If you click away and try to come back, welp, good luck finding where you left off, better hope you had that chapter number memorized.

Did I mention the lag? It takes like 10 seconds to load a text only section.

There is search, but again the lag is aweful.

Seconded. The experience of reading book chapters through Patreon is utterly abysmal. I don't know why Royal Road hasn't added direct integration or at least password protection like pirateaba does yet.

I subscribe to a couple of podcasts and adventure/DND audio shows on Patreon. Their audio player works so poorly in Firefox that I literally ended up swapping over to Safari full time for daily browsing just because I was using it so much to listen to those podcasts/DND shows on Patreon.

Definitely, and it raises an interesting philosophical/semiotic question as to what "exclusive memes" are.

I'm so confused by the love of discord.

Maybe I'm dating myself but Can someone explain to me why it's better than traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak?

Ive used voips like mumble ts ventrilo (still had 2.1.4 exe on disk week ago) skype teams for like 15 years

Discord was first to provide:

Strong chat, voip, file share, video streaming and bots in one solution

Lack of user hosted servers security mess - have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG?

In compare to enterprise shit: push2talk

Also: identity per "server"

Easy to invite: link instead of ip port

> have you ever been DDoSd or stalked because you changed teams in MMORPG?

Back at the height of the Minecraft Hardcore Factions (HCF) mode, TeamSpeak was used almost exclusively. It was extremely common for people to join a faction's TeamSpeak, trying to get recruited, and then getting hit off. Doesn't happen on discord.

Those are good arguments for game chat but it seems generally terrible for forums.

The argument I've seen for forums is people do not want to deal with the burden of hosting and securing forum software. But that is an explanation for reddit eating most forums to me, not why Discord is increasingly being used to place of them.

Maybe support for rich media types

I think it's not that people want a forum and choose Discord to host it.

Instead it's that people have a Discord for hosting community discussion (like one would have an irc), and they add channels like "q&a" or "show and tell". These channels are much more topic based than normal channels, and topics collide or get lost in the noise.

I do think public indexability is a big problem. I've seen a couple api based bridges that have surface, which are great. Discord's change to how names work smells strongly of a move to being more aligned to a social network, so perhaps they're already working towards doing this properly. It's a natural evolution from chat to forum channels to public indexed forums, but not one that was immediately obvious when discord started as a game with your friends product.

Now that I'm typing this out, I just realized that "subreddit" style channels in discord make a lot of sense, where you can get an aggregated view across all of the "subreddits" in the servers you're in.

Generally the "replace reddit" combo is:

Discord to function like an IRC chat and a Wiki to store the important information on the topic of the forum.

I think Discord rolling out forum-like features is a delayed reaction to users treating Discord like a forum. The pandemic catapulted Discord from a gaming-centric platform to a generic social platform, and many users who joined during this time period had very little experience with IRCs, forums, or VoIP software. For lack of a better description, these users were "using Discord wrong" by treating it as a knowledge repository. Forum features are meant to cater to user behaviour, by making knowledge retrieval slightly less painful.

> Discord was first to provide:

> Also: identity per "server"

But Discord doesn't provide identity per server. You get one identity, and if you want a different one you need to sign up for a new account using a new email address.

Perhaps the GP is referring to the display name. You get one user name but you can change how you are displayed per server. Nitro users can change the icon, too.

> Also: identity per "server"

Further up the thread, another user said the value in discord was the community -- the users -- rather than the messages. Wouldn't you want to be able to maintain these ties across servers?

It's not better, it's an alternative that's easy to use and a lot of people jumped on. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You get easy chat and voice for free.

Why is a single app with a single login and multiple communities inside better than having multiple forums with multiple logins and a separate app to do VOIP? Hmm..

Off the top of my head: It's easy to use, nice-looking, easy to create your own community (in seconds), feature-rich, and completely free.

The downside of things not being searchable/preserved long-term is not all that important to people. Obviously, it'll lead to a lot of information being lost, but I think people (particularly young people) have difficulty thinking long-term.

Why you folks act in this thread as if sharing and making everything googlable should be "by default"?

I dont want you to be able to read messages of my mmorpg team, privacy is desired.

I think it's important to highlight the difference between private group chats (e.g. the discord I have with my high school friends) and community hubs. For example, some discord servers serve as the entire knowledge base for some open source projects. I'm only advocating for preservation of the latter.

does it ? I sounds like it’s less for knowledge basing and more so for if you have a question this is where we’re at you can come ask.

If you have a question, you have a knowledge problem. That's why asked the question in the first place! If knowledge was more accessible, you would ask fewer questions.

It ain't nice looking IMO, it reminds me if a kids toy, one for 2 year olds with bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space etc etc.

Can I ask which generation you're a member of? I truly think different demographics prefer different styling. FWIW, I personally prefer to use old reddit and like the layout of HN, but can also appreciate Discord's styling.

You can definitely tune to to be a lot tighter - there's UX settings that make it far more minimal, or let you collapse things down.

>bright colours, over sized buttons, wasted space

That has been the dominant web design paradigm for close to a decade now. Discord is just following industry trends.

It's free, easy and convenient. That's it, these 3 aspects overpower all else in the eyes of modern audiences, they are willing to give up basically everything else in favor of them.

It's much simpler than old alternatives. And comes in one package, instantly supporting multiple communities at one time.

IRC isn't very nice to use, then again it is years when I last used voice-chat softwares but those were bit pain too.

And it is not really a forum. It is online chat room, entirely different thing.

So I used to be in a top 100 World of Warcraft guild back in the day, so I remember the days of Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Discord is much easier to administrate than all that.

I used Discord to create a “server” for my Eve Echoes corporation which went from ten people to 200 people then down to 40 or so people. I didn’t have to pay to scale the server up and down from whatever hosting solution I was using to accommodate this huge increase then slow decrease of member.

Heck, I didn’t actually create the server, someone else did then handed me owner access. Super convenient. Like, I was astonished that’s how it works.

Everything was integrated so I could ping 50 people and a good number would jump into voice chat and help me defend against the Russians or the Chinese invasions. It was a bustling community created ex nihilo.

I played for a few months, had a good time, but once the pandemic started to wane I wanted to go “back to the real world”. Being a leader of space miners is hard work! So I handed over ownership to someone in the “Corp” who, in true EVE fashion is a real life accountant and loves their space ships and spreadsheets.

It was incredibly easy to set up and then give the discord server away (twice!) over the course of a few months. Easier than giving someone my house keys. The process would have been an absolute nightmare for anything using DNS, or even worse pinned to an actual IP address. Good luck getting 50-00 semi active people to switch to a new server.

> traditional forum plus some VoIP like teamspeak

I really dislike using Discord (visually confusing, spammy), but they've clearly hit the ball out the park in terms of adoption. The fact that you could provide similar functionality by combining two other products isn't really relevant is it?

> Maybe I'm dating myself

I'm almost 40, so I think I can explain this. Discord is turn-key community infrastructure for users and moderators. Bespoke solutions have more incidental complexities compared to Discord with regard to hanging out with others and playing games. This initial gravity is what is pulling in the rest of the Internet communities.

VoIP is not easy to set up and use in the best circumstances, and Discord makes it painless. I cannot stress this enough! Usually it took That Guy who spent days pouring over how-tos and several aborted attempts at setting it up. Discord is similar to what GameSpy brought to game server hosting compared to hosting a game yourself. If that sounds like foreshadowing, I agree!

Discord also is replacing the whole communication/coordination stack. Forums are a casualty for the same reason Reddit took over; setting up a public internet service is hard. But Discord steps beyond that. It is taking over the chat communications gamers use to coordinate, including text messages and AIM/IRQ/IRC/etc. This meshes very well with guilds and amateur competitive gaming, as well as the hangout vibe of sitting in a chat room. Throw in built-in video streaming and you have Twitch.tv functionality all in the same app.

Combine the above with a single unified moderation, and you have a critical nexus of features for community management without all the fuss of hosting the infrastructure yourself. Individuals have a single login that can access hundreds of communities, while moderators have similar management controls as forums over their own.

Are there downsides? Oh my yes, but those will manifest later as Discord matures into its own blow-up stage of venture capital social networks.

Reminder, look to what's happening on Reddit and elsewhere now for what will happen when any service has cornered the market. Even if the current owners say things will never happen, eventually deep enough pockets in search of profit will buy them out and seek that profit.

Sure, but the cost of pre-planning for an event like what Reddit is attempting is high - not just in terms of money, but in terms of how large you grow your community, since (for example) getting someone to join your subreddit is infinitely easier than asking them to sign up for your forum.

Reddit lasted what, over 10 years? And Discord started in 2015 but still seems to know not to destroy communities by e.g. making third-party moderation bots pay to use the service.

It makes a lot more sense as a community to coast on whatever the current most popular free platform(s) are, since it means there's no financial overhead to running the community and the centralized nature means the barrier to entry for prospective communities members is near-zero. Once federation can achieve these things, we'll see communities at least fracture with an arm on the federated site, ready to jump ship once Discord or the next platform starts to sink.

Who cares though? It’s not like I’m signing a 30 year contract with Discord. Skype already enshittified and everyone just jumped ship as soon as a better alternative was built.

When someone builds a better reddit, I’m sure people would move over too. I’ll take free stuff being handed out for as long as it’s being handed out.

My entire online social life(which got really big due to friends moving and covid) is 100% on discord.

Many of my friends also don't have social media and we all exist within a discord server and share our lives and game together very often.

Discord has this buy in like a social media platform for a lot of people.

It's what I've described above--plus communities moving to discord and away from reddit.

If you do an online game now you will end up on discord if you're even halfway serious about the game.

One of the big things discord has allowed for my friend group is it's the first platform like this that has brought in the "normies". People who would never visit a forum and didn't even know teamspeak or ventrilo ever existed.

It's a smooth experience at almost all times on desktop and mobile.

If you go to college nowadays most of the majors have discords--and study groups have discords.

My friends don't even text me anymore, they DM me on discord and have for years at this point.

Gaming community made Discord on their liking, a better response to old VoIP software or Skype.

It's primary selling point, at least initially, was being much, much better at its job than teamspeak and its ilk. It ate forums because once people had access to adequate (not necessarily good, or even better) text communications built into their VoIP solution, people just used that instead. Network effects then killed the forum.

Discord has gained immense popularity among Vtubers. In fact, many sign-up forms for Vtuber-related events assume that participants have a Discord account, at least within the Japanese Vtuber community (although its prevalence elsewhere is unclear). Additionally, Discord has seen widespread adoption within the VR community, such as in VRChat.

This popularity can be attributed to several key characteristics:

1. Vtubers are frequently involved in numerous events, commissions, and livestream collaborations, each with different stakeholders and often temporary in nature. Discord makes it incredibly easy to set up dedicated servers for each of these endeavors.

2. Discord's voice chat functionality is highly robust, making it a common choice for managing voice communication during livestreams that involve multiple participants.

3. Discord provides a centralized platform for coordination and infrastructure. This eliminates the need to set up additional systems with different user IDs and other complexities.

I wish we could as a species create a social media and communication platform not based on greed, addiction, micro-monetization, walled datagarden hoardism, and so on, but something above all that bullshit.

We already did: email.

But seriously, in order for this to happen the platform needs to be a protocol.

Basically Bitcoin but for sharing stuff, but all the attempts so far have been too nerdy/esoteric to gain mainstream adoption.

There's the Fediverse sphere of platforms that largely fit your ideals but fragmentation is a glaring problem that prevents it from much wider adoption.

Any centralized platform where data is hosted is going to cost an obscene amount of money to operate once it gains traction. So they need to find a way to monetize it in order to keep the lights on. Throw in some venture capital and you've got yourself yet another startup that thinks they can scale infinitely.

My biggest fear is Discord gating old convos behind a paywall like Slack. Discord doesn't do that because it is still technically a different product from Slack, but should monetization drives intensify I'm afraid that'd be one of the easy channels they are going to take a look at.

We are a bullshit species. Our collective well being is secondary to each era's power games.

With the amount of brain power and resources that exist today and the relative triviality of orchestrating social media platforms it would take, like two or three months of banging some heads together and solving this little nuisance once and for all.

To the great relief and benefit of current and future generations. So that we can focus on some real problems.

But no, we have to stick to the rigged game.

We did. It was called "The Internet". It was great, for a while. But you had write your own webpages and host the pages yourself, which was hard and expensive. Only nerds could figure it out and the only people who got free servers were academics. At some point, some rich guys in california realized that you could trade a consumers info for a "free" service. Regular people went online and found all these neat free apps and all they had to do was watch some ads. It wasn't the best, but it worked ok, for a while. And suddenly _everything_ was a "free" app. Then walls came up and we found ourselves stranded. Nobody could afford to leave the walled garden and nobody could afford to make a better option.

embrace, extend, extinguish.

This is a really smart move for them. They were downstream of a lot of other creator platforms, and now they can start to move that revenue over to them.

Discord has a really well-built server permission model, and a rich API bot ecosystem. I bet there's brand new business opportunities made possible by this change. They're effectively a platform now.

Interesting that both "winners" in their relative spaces, Discord and WhatsApp, both ramped up using BEAM languages.

Discord is a group chatting app for me. I barely use it as a community.

I think there's a real market for a non-profit discord-like platform on the open web, especially with all the reddit drama going on.

Part of me wants to build this. The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way.

Matrix is this (IMO), but self-hosted. And I doubt the ability of a non-profit to eat (or have subsidized) hosting as they approach Discord's size

>The larger part knows I'll never ship a game when I keep letting web projects get into the way.

I don't know if you knew this, but Slack started as a project for a game dev team to communicate. https://wiredelta.com/how-was-slack-developed/

and, notably, Discord too started out trying to make a game.

I admire your goals and wish you success, but IMO the biggest obstacle to be tackled is how to sustainably operate such a platform. If data is hosted centrally, someone needs to pay the server bills. This is fine for a small community but if user growth reaches critical mass, it has to be monetized to the point where server costs can be covered. If data is decentralized, then the potential fragmentation will be a hurdle for user adoption. Discord succeeded because it required zero tutorial to use and no setup beyond making an account, compared to previous iterations of VoIP/IRC software. This was a crucial success factor in attractig non-gamers during the pandemic.

Between the discord username switch, their new UI and the reddit shitification, I think the writing is on the wall. Communications are too valuable to be left to venture capitalists. I wish that Discord had decided to monetize by taking on Slack, but it was not so.

Last week I burned my server to the ground and we all migrated to a self-hosted matrix instance.

I'll have to look into Matrix. I have been looking for something to replace discord. I have so many gripes about discord but I'll give you the most egregious. I cannot share a screenshot because I have a 1440p monitor and the output file is over 5mb. Sometimes my dislike of discord feels like I am an old man yelling at clouds but then I remember the 5mb transfer limit.

The free transfer limit was recently increased to 25MB iirc, so it should work now.

They also have a premium subscription that removes the limit (or makes it so large that I've never hit it).

You are right, It looks like they changed it in April. I was wrong, it wasn't 5mb it was 8mb.

I am glad they upped the cap. I might have to try it out tonight, but I have effectively ditched it as a platform after the user name fiasco. I don't know if I can drop the way the file transfer size limit made me feel. I think you can tell a lot about a company by the way they want to monetize. If they were willing to force a subscription in order to share screenshots what else are they willing to do.

> If they were willing to force a subscription in order to share screenshots what else are they willing to do.

I think this is a slippery slope argument. I also don't think there's something inherently wrong with charging money for a premium feature (large files) on a free service. You could crop your screenshot, for example.

I'm not sure what the username problem is either -- I think having unique names will help them to combat fraud and deception, which is a major benefit at a minor cost.

There's nothing wrong with them wanting to make money. Granted, I think they're going about it in a hilariously stupid way. Their product is miles better than Slack. Regardless, I'm no longer willing to rely on them.

Somewhere in here is the potential for Discord to become a big game/app platform by itself. It may prove to be a bit like the Facebook games explosion.

It’s kind of surprising that turn based games within discord aren’t really a thing.

It is, they rolled it out to everyone over the past month.

https://discord.com/blog/server-activities-games-voice-watch...

Those are are basically party games. They actually tried to become a Steam competitor before but gave up:

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-discord-store-launches-globall...

Facebook took off with social games, like FarmVille, but Discord was going after something like Steam. These party games are good for a lot of friend groups, and third-party activities are coming online soon enough.

I kinda wish Discord had a social feed where you could post to your friends, as long as there weren't any ads, or temporary Stories, but I feel like this is an uncommon opinion.

Discord is becoming intolerable, I guess we should all go back to forums and IRC.

This, unironically (if you meant it as such).

Discord has been a buggy mess lately since they keep pushing all these updates to add further monetisation and breaking core features.

The Mac version is handling calls horribly, often doesn't show connection strength on calls (greyed out), often completely kills Microphone and bluetooth headphones (starts working as soon as you close discord) or slows the entire machine down to a crawl unless you quit out of it.

I had an issue for months with every update, I would need to go into the library and delete the discord folder and reinstall, hasn't happened for awhile now.

What happened to their game store? They launched this big Steam competitor, and quietly and unceremoniously shut it down. You guys remember right?

Epic Games Store happened.

I'd wager it wasn't worth the hassle. Steam isn't just a monopoly, it's a monopoly that's not actively committed to being terrible. People, on the whole, like Steam. And that's a huge moat. When going toe-to-toe with a monopoly, normally your snowball's-chance-in-hell chance comes from the fact that people aren't happy about the monopoly, because the monopoly got complacent, started squeezing people for everything they can get, and just generally being awful, because hey, where else will you go? But Steam hasn't done that, so on top of overcoming the market momentum in their favor, you also have to go above and beyond to make a better product.

Seems the era of free money is over for all the growth at any cost companies

Not sure why the writer of this article is concerned about paywalling. That's already a thing. If you support someone on Patreon, it can come with the benefit of being able to join a subscriber-only Discord server. And you can have roles assigned based on the selected tier of support, which allows the creators to set up channels so only people above a certain tier can access them.

yeah it sucks that the best voip and messaging platform is trying to find ways to continue to operate. /s

The product is the same and you don't have to use any of these new features if you don't want to. Like, what are we actually complaining about here.

It's hard to be too upset about this stuff in a competitive landscape that includes Reddit and Twitter.

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