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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I worked in e-commerce SaaS in 2011~ and this was true then but I find it less true these days.

Are you sure that you’re not the driving force behind those metrics; or that you’re not self-selecting for like-minded individuals?

I find it really difficult to convince myself that even large players (Discord) are measuring startup time. Every time I start the thing I’m greeted by a 25s wait and a `RAND()%9` number of updates that each take about 5-10s.

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Discord’s user base is 99% people who leave it running 100% of the time, it’s not a typical situation

I think that they make the startup so horrible that people are more likely to leave it running.

As a discord user, it's the kind of platform that I would want to have running to receive notifications, sort of like the SMS of gaming.

A large part of my friend group use discord as the primary method of communication, even in an in person context (was at a festival a few months ago with a friend, and we would send texts over discord if we got split up) so maybe its not a common use case.

I strongly doubt that!

Hikacking my own comment to mention that the normal thing on forums when a reasonable person reads an unreasonable comment is they move on, which can make the comment stand unopposed which gives it credence it doesn’t deserve. I believe if more of us actually showed our disagreement out loud as I have here, it could change things sometimes.

It leads to me dreading having to start it (or accidentally starting it - remember IE?) and opting for the browser instead.

I have the same experience on windows. On the other hand, starting up discord on my cachyos install is virtually instant. So maybe there is also a difference between the platform the developers use and that their users use.

I have plenty of responses to an angry comment I made several months ago that supports your point.

I made a slight at Word taking like 10 seconds to start and some people came back saying it only takes 2, as if that still isn't 2s too long.

Then again, look at how Microsoft is handling slow File Explorer speeds...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944352

I never said that 2s wasn’t too long. I just said your environment was broken if it took 10.

There is a high chance the extra nuts and bolts added to Windows, which slow it down, are IT required softwoods, settings, and security enhancements.

Took me almost a year to get a separate laptop laptop for office and development. Their Enhanced Security prevented me from testing administrative code features and broke Visual Studios bug submission system, which Microsoft requires you to use for posting software bugs.

By the way, I can brake Windows simply by running their PowerShell utilities to configure NICs. Windows is not the stable product people think it is.

This was on macOS

Wild. How'd you even find me

I read the comments on this post

Yep, indeed. Which is the main reason I don’t run Discord.

I strongly doubt that. The main reason you don’t run it is likely because you don’t have strong motivation to do so, or you’d push through the odd start up time.

Just going to throw out an anecdote that I don’t use it for the same reason.

It’s closed unless I get a DM on my phone and then I suffer the 2-3 minute startup/failed update process and quit it again. Not a fan of leaving their broken, resource hogging app running at all times.

It would fail to auto update as a system installed package, because that requires a system level package install.

It would not fail to update if installed as a user installed flatpak.

Many apps are this way now.

Why not just respond to the dm on your phone?

For me, I really dislike the fact Discord is completely closed off to the wider internet, and Discord, the company, has absolute control: from a privacy and freedom of speech point of view. This goes against the core ideas of a free and open internet.

I'll admit that the Discord service is really good from a UX point of view.

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