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Comment by scoopr | Hacker News Reader

I just recently started up zulip after a long break, to check some particular community discussions. Before it had felt a bit hacky/nerdy. But now, I was pleasantly surprised. The app and the service feels really fast and to the point, and I think it looks OK to.

But also that jumping in to random community, and browsing through it made sense to me, I was able to read discussions that kinda seemed interesting and skip the rest, with pretty good confidence!

Contrasting to say Discord, where I'm always overwhelmed by the number of channels in big communities, with very little way to efficiently check "whats going on lately", without just browsing through. (I'm sure sizes of communities matters here though)

Or Matrix, where everything just seems so slow and janky. Though I think it is trying to solve a harder problem being so distributed. It has real potential bringing related communities closer by having a well curated spaces that organise them neatly.

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It sounds like Zulip is optimising for productivity (and I've read similar from the team in the past), where Discord and Matrix certainly aren't. Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why.

Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities – moderation, having distinctive "servers" with their own personalities but within one "service". In many ways Discord is trying to replace phpBB, and no one ran internal company comms on phpBB (I hope).

What's interesting to me is that many new companies are choosing Discord despite it clearly not being designed for internal company comms. I suspect some choose it on the basis of being "open source" companies who are trying to grow a community using their stuff, but I'm not sure how true that is in practice for most. I suspect the real reason is that most of these people starting companies already hang out in a bunch of Discord servers in their personal lives, and so there's a (small) network effect and they just default to Discord for their professional lives.

> Discord is an interesting one, as I think they're optimising for communities

Are they? It seems to me, with their desperate focus on monetisation and gaming (didn't they try to build their app store?) that all their focus is to optimise for "engagement" and keep "gamers" using their platform 24/7

Discord has become like many companies in the space a behemoth that has conquered a niche with a decent product and now are looking to extract as much revenue from each free user. What is the last genuinely killer or novel feature that Discord has released? How are they trying to make online communities better? They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.

Companies like Discord are lucky open-source projects do not have any high-level coordination, but operate like headless chickens, because Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.

> They are just making their silo prettier and hoping you are interested in animated emojis to make bank.

You can now buy animated frames for your profile picture for 10 USD.

I guess I'm trying to give them a charitable viewpoint. Discord is far more community focused than, say, Slack. You're right that they do seem to be going all in on monetisation now, but I see that less on the few open source project Discord servers I'm on.

> Discord isn't doing anything that is technologically ground breaking by any stretch and are around "solely" because of network effects.

Discord is handling identity management and anti-spam. Both of those are a gigantic PITA.

Until open source gets a good answer for both of those problems, the federated solutions will always be also-rans.

> Matrix is optimising for security/privacy at the cost of UX in other ways, and I get why.

I wouldn't say so. Have you used Element Messenger? The default trust policy is certainly optimised for something else. Similarly to default and encouraged synapse configuration. Not saying it's the wrong tradeoff but Matrix/Element are certainly not fundamentally putting privacy above their other goals.

I don't understand how discord dev don't know about the multitasking hell they allow.

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