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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

Seeing all the defense of Electron in this page is a grim reminder that software developers so often lack the requisite empathy to actually be qualified to design software.

Anything with a UI is by definition made for the purpose of being used by a human. The use of Electron only makes sense from the perspective of preserving programmer man-hours, and it led to another generation of newer, faster computers dragged down to the speed of older, slower computers, and a wretched user experience.

Regardless: this is great news, I never thought Discord in particular would ever make a move like this.

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Electron is used because it allows near-free portability

the web and "native app" are the same, the UI is the same, there is zero extra cost and new features can be deployed to both with the same code

Of course there are tradeoffs.

Like everything else, stuff gets worse and cheaper because no one will pay for the better version. How many $300 knives does the average person own? How many shirts made of quality fabric? How much of your software is really fine-tuned for performance?

Electron is Good Enough for the purpose: getting working software to users.

We may hate it, but it also makes sense given the constraints.

> Electron is Good Enough for the purpose: getting working software to users.

Define "working".

As in, at least it boots on your computer, despite the fact it takes a whole business day to finish loading?

Is that really good enough for you?

Good enough is what the users will pay for.

If the users won't pay extra to get it to go faster, it won't go faster, because going faster takes more (unpaid) work.

"near-free", I would not call hogging gigabyte of RAM a "near free" experience.

near free to the developer. That's a very important part of "can we afford to produce this software?"

Will you pay $100 or more extra to get a true native version instead of electron? If not, why would they go to the extra work of developing one?

Its dirt cheap. We've all been running discord in the background for how long now.

> requisite empathy to actually be qualified to design software

This comes across as a very absolutist ideology, but it is presented as if it was empirical fact.

One counter example is slack, which revolutionized business communication - an existing software category - through better design and experience. It’s built on electron

Edit: even more, this is a comment on news about discord, an electron app that revolutionized consumer chat

Slack certainly didn't win by having a good UI.

It has a good enterprise sales approach and integration features with enterprise systems.

You’re saying slack beat lync/communicator, forcing microsoft to build a competing product from scratch…because their enterprise sales was better?

If you ignore half the statement.

Also before Slack the competition was less Lync or such, but Mail, jabber and non-sanctioned chat (Whatsapp etc.)

I’m not even sure who you’re arguing with at this point, you’re the one who brought up the slack ui

The silliest part is you actually have the cause and effect exactly backwards in two different ways (nobody cares about integrations if they don’t want to use your product in the first place, and slack’s early momentum was specifically due to being freemium + product-led rather than enterprise sales)

bait comment or xmpp fanatic?

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