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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

Discord has been immensely hostile to the public in general since forever, and people love to flock to it and throw money at the company behind it.

I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.

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It's not incomprehensible. Discord makes it so much easier to organize communities than most other platforms.

Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe, nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does.

> nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does

Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for voice channels much of the time)

Most importantly, Slack limits the amount of message history you get to keep if you’re not paying. And the payment plans are per-user fees which quickly becomes non-viable for non-commercial use.

This doesn't feel like a real question... Slack free tier is basically crappy Discord, limited message history, no voice channels, huddles are also behind the paying tiers. It is basically worse on all aspects unless you start paying

A nonprofit I help out just moved from Slack to Discord for a very simple reason: Slack pricing was too expensive, and as the amount of people increased, the price continues to climb. Discord is free

It is not, you just aren't the customer but the product sold.

free as in beer is clearly what they mean. They are a non-profit talking about pricing.

For large communities, the very granular role-based permission system of Discord can be put to some good use, I don't think Slack has a trivially equivalent feature.

The biggest one for me is that Discord will keep all history for free servers, whereas Slack only gives you access to 3 months iirc (and as of a year or two ago, has started permanently deleting older content).

Dude, Slack deletes everything almost immediately unless you have a paid version which isn't cheap.

reliable message delivery, lol. slack drops messages silently. it is not fit for purpose.

How many of them let me turn up/down or mute individual participants in a group voice call?

"easier" - what really matters is end user freedom, the rest is just decoration

Apparently not because they have 200mill users.

I also value end user freedom, but I also accept reality. And I guarantee you you have compromised on your freedom/anonymity for convenience online. We all have. And ultimately discord is so turnkey that most people just don’t care

I'm in a Signal chat for a bar trivia group for some reason. I've missed invitations a few times cause it silently got out of date. But at least Obama can't read my messages.

You compromised your freedom, then. Signal is a central–server network with a license that means you can't legally modify the client and use it on the network, and it identifies people by their phone numbers.

The two nice features it has. I don't need bots to exist.

There is no binary version of how everyone is compromised. Because I refuse a bunch of applications like Discord I can assure you my footprint is lesser than those who use it.

I agree completely. My point is that people simply will do that though, so instead of approaching it with hostility and judgment you should approach it with understanding and, if they’re willing to hear it, maybe as an opportunity to educate. Proud proclamations and judgment won’t get people to see how important this is.

It’s not just “window dressing.” UX matters. So you need to talk to people in a way that acknowledges why they want those conveniences in the first place. It’s the same reason I recommend Plex to some people and Jellyfin to others.

Wrong. What really matters is delivering dopamine reward signals in the user's brain. Everything else is just a mechanism.

No, Discord/Slack is a mess. Interesting topics got buried in an IRC-style chat. Threaded BBS are much better for organizing communities, like Discourse. And it is open source, so no vendor lock-in with stupid age verification.

Honestly... People deserve this. They deserve the consequences. They were warned. They chose this.

Ok, do your worst. I got on Discord cause they offered the best free service, I'll just as easily leave if that ever stops being the case. "Teen mode" seems not bad, I need something worse.

You will not leave easily. There's no point to you leaving if all your friends remain. Chances are they could not care less about these issues and would rather leave you instead of mass switching to a less convenient alternative.

Ha ha joke’s on you! I’d need to have friends in the first place!

Yeah, we've seen time and time again that the network effect of social media makes it next to impossible to actually move to a different service. The Discord feature set is great and all, but it's the fact that your communities are there that keeps everyone on it. I'm hoping they get enough backlash / canceled Nitro from this because I don't want to lose the communities I'm in. Already did that with Facebook/Instagram/etc and it sucks.

I'd leave with or without them if it sucked. They can and will text me instead, just like they do since I left WhatsApp (because it sucked). The communities of randoms I don't even know irl can't, but that's exactly why it doesn't matter so much.

That and my friends probably care the same or more than me about privacy.

They also don't care. But I do care, chose the opposite, and will still bear the consequences, once a sizable population does certain things.

Y’all forgot that the only reason we’re on Discord was because MS actively killed Skype. Skype was much better software circa 2012 before MS let vulnerabilities run rampant, degraded the UI, and moved off the remarkably robust P2P calling system.

I never had a Skype call work properly on the first try, even before Microsoft broke it

I too remember Skype's universal salute: "do you hear me?"

That's known as the millennial pause. Older generations like millennials want to ensure a communication is working before committing information, while GenZ and Alpha just start talking.

It's named after the pause after pressing the record button while you check it changes shape, but "can you hear me?" is the same thing.

I'm gen Z. You had to start Skype with "can you hear me" because the answer was usually no (via text). I now do that with phone calls because forced bluetooth has made headsets less reliable than before.

On the contrary, older people properly announce themself on the phone, while younger people often don't answer at all, and let there be silence, until the other gives up, and asks who has picked up the phone.

I hear people saying that every day in Slack and Teams

Teams is broken too

I must be a lucky one because calls always worked for me on teams. On the other hand, everything else is a dumpster fire.

Discord used to be better, but then they got popular, got incredibly picked up and now are probably being controlled by some very shady people.

If you look up the founder he has a bit of history of shady shiz with his past companies.

It isn't surprising to me they are going scorched earth now bending to the will of the fascist government.

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