I thought the main value of discord was quick and solid voice / game stream integration.

I rarely feel any connection between servers, but that might just be me.

It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:

1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.

2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.

3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.

4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.

Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.

Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?

Discord's killer feature for my money has always been that ever user in a call gets a slider bar (and mute button) to control the volume they hear ever other individual user in the call

Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.

We had that in Teamspeak/mumble/vent, but the chat functionality on those platforms were definitely an afterthought. Not a place you'd cultivate a community.

Hilarious how in The Year of Our Lord 2025, so many video conferencing apps have not figured out how to implement something similar to the Dugan automatic microphone mixing algorithm. http://www.protechaudio.com/products/PDFFiles/DuganMixing.pd...

I mean, what do you want, it's only been around for 50 years.

Teamspeak had a ton of friction. When I was playing FFXIV and made my discord account, someone literally just sent a link in the text chat of our Free Company, I opened it in browser, made an account and used it right there immediately. To timestamp this, it was the summer of 2015, a little under a decade ago, iirc.

Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.

Its killer feature was how frictionless it was to adopt initially. If I sent you a Discord link, back then you could just click it and be going in under a minute.

Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.

You did have to sign up and login, right? I believe this is one of the major things that make it much less frictionless for people.

If I recall correctly, yes, but it was like, enter your email and username BAM now you have an account.

It's not quite so easy anymore, partly because when you reach a certain size, it's all about controlling bots and whatnot.

Agreed. You now have to verify your phone number to have access to many guilds.

Yeah, didn't even verify emails. I got a surprise discord account back in 2015 because someone else used my email. I guess this xkcd[1] applies to younger people too.

1: https://xkcd.com/1279/

I’ll never cease to be amazed that there’s an XKCD for literally everything.

I bet there’s even one related to using the word literally as hyperbole…

Those tools were all, comparatively, trash. Literally ALL of the gamer groups I was familiar with switched en masse. You can’t compare Mumble and Discord IMO. There was so much setup friction that anything was better than what we had at the time.

Gaming was becoming less and less the ___domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.

Every action had more friction and the ability to post images was game changing.

The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use.

Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.

I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.

I don't remember marketing, though.

Weird, I have never noticed a single one of the issues you mention. There really isn't much I don't like about discord, though I wished threads worked more like Slack.

Funny. Every day at work, I lament that Slack's threads don't work like Discord's. What do you like about them?

You cannot search in discord threads. Until recently, there wasn't even a way to go to the first message in a discord thread without scrolling up manually.

I like that they are unobtrusive and low cost. Easy to spin off a small discussion without bothering others.

In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.

If I haven't used discord in a while I will get stuck in a voice chat and cannot for the life of me figure out how to exit. I clicked on the channel name to enter, but I can't exit from there. Clicking on other channels doesn't get me out etc etc.

Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them

If you can handle a ton of users on not much hardware it’s quite easy to offer a generous free tier. The more “high touch” (resources per interaction) your SaaS is the more VC money you’re setting on fire trying to achieve a network effect.

And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.

For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.

I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.

Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.

Users are worryingly hostile to developers.

If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?

Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.

My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.

> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.

I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.

Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.

I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers

Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)

There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P

As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.

Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to use commands & embeds for common things

Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.

I'm gonna give it up for that one. Nicely done.

oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)

Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.

Am I the only person who sees this as a negative? I don't want everything I do to be in the same place.

This isn't a stance driven primarily by privacy/security requirements, although making e.g. compartmentalisation possible is generally a positive thing. Rather, my issue is with mixing business and pleasure, or even business A with business B, so to speak.

It's common for users to have multiple accounts and use the built-in account switcher.

While useful, I don't think that addresses much of anything in this context.

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc.

It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked messages and frustration at realizing how I didn't care for 95% of them, but I was unwilling to completely separate myself from that community (e.g. quitting or muting the discord)

It becomes a question of which friends you want to implicitly abandon and I ultimately decided to just abandon them all.

If the competitor even has a slightly more unified product it could easily displace discord.

Transferring a bot from one chat format to another chat format isn't some kind of insurmountable moat, and I think it's likely this project could make a few changes to support them with no modification required.

discord needs to abandon the notion that every message in every channel deserves to be read by every user. it’s absurd in servers with >50 users

I don't think that's an inherent notion of Discord at all, although it is a case of poor defaults. I turn on most of the muting settings immediately when I join a new server (notify for: nothing, suppress @everyone and all role @mentions, etc). Throughout the day, I'll mainly click between the 2-3 servers I actually care about, and every few days I'll go through some of the others. New messages are still marked once I click in so I know where I left off, pings are still highlighted so they catch my eye as I'm scrolling through, but if I don't care about a conversation in a channel, I can just scroll to the bottom and it's all immediately marked as "read."

It's annoying UX, but unfortunately I've come to the conclusion that the alternative is worse. When channels are opt-in, it makes discoverability effectively infeasible in practice. This is what the Element clients that I've seen do (following the IRC convention), and it just means that everyone clusters in the default channel and the others all wither on the vine.

That said, maybe there's a middle ground. If a server could mark, say up to 20 channels as default/opt-out, and the rest as backrooms/opt-in, that might suffice for 80% of servers while avoiding the long-tail worst-case UX of manually muting 100 channels in a server because there's only one you care about.

Another alternative would be to use threads more. But they are terrible in Discord, even worse than in Slack. When two Discord users are chit-chatting about their dogs all through the night, a mod should just drag-select all of these messages and put them in a "dog chat" thread.

I still want to try Zulip to see how well it works.

Note: Discord has given servers the ability to make channels opt-in/opt-out - 'Browse Channels' in the channel sidebar.

There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control.

The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge,

But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old girl to hang herself in a live discord call. [0]

There is a problem with too much protection of freedom and secrecy.

[0] https://youtu.be/GgfGhzkq8FE?si=nFahQlTUTsY5WEuI

I don't think Discord has anymore shady activities than any other large scale social media platform. When I helped moderate a very large server, we had access to Discord Trust and Safety team and they were trying against what is a massive flood. Automated moderation is extremely difficult even with all AI tools unless you 100% block any NSFW content and sexual messaging and even then, you will get false positives.

I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service. If this doctor had called this girl on her cell phone, no one would be mad at Verizon.

Part of the problem is most parents have no clue about social media/communication tools outside what they use. At my church, I gave presentation about Discord and it was shocking to see how clueless parents were.

Disboard is the biggest Discord search engine.

It is trivial to find servers with adult topics (BDSM) targeted at minors. It is trivial to find servers that combine those topics with problematic age ranges (like BDSM-themed servers with no ID verification, 'ages 14-28 welcome'). It is trivial to find servers with minors openly selling "content".

Disboard isn't Discord but these things aren't even being remotely "hidden", it is these servers' sole 'purpose'.

> I do find it interesting that we hold these platforms liable but not the phone/pager/mail service.

Phone and mail networks in letter and spirit obey the law: they don't listen to people's private conversations and they give up complete user info on request by law enforcement. There is nothing more they can do.

Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends. So they are ethically obligated to stop bad things happening on their platform. Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform, beyond banning users in response to legal orders.

> Whatsapp/Signal have built their platforms so they can't read user private messages, so they have no ethical obligations to stop bad things happening on their platform

Why draw the line there? Why don't those platforms have an ethical obligation to build the features that would allow them to stop bad things happening on their platform? Especially if they knowingly developed the current implementation specifically to avoid ethical culpability?

That's a political statement. The position is that one should have the right and ability to communicate with other people in a secure fashion. If you deny this right, and build structures to monitor all communication, when "bad" people take over the government, you end up in a dystopia. Then building any sort of anti-government political movement become very difficult because they can hear whatever you say.

So I am glad that software like Signal/Whatsapp exist that allow secure communication [1]. And I would take the harms causes by them being unmonitored rather than the harm of future dystopian governments. Due to how crypto works, I don't think there is much middle ground here.

[1] I would prefer open source, more community owned platforms take over than these two.

Sorry but you were arguing that Discord should snoop even more into what we're doing for ethical reasons, and now you're saying privacy is a virtue. Do you have a reason to think Discord doesn't already do these things and just doesn't get it right every time?

Phone and email aren't more private than Discord either. Arguably less. Difficult to get a phone these days without buying it on camera. And a phone company will give up all your messages.

There are two competing principles here: (1) Privacy for individuals (from government and non-government entities), and (2) generally do things in a way that minimize crime. Both are good, and generally I want communication platforms to conform to (1) rather than (2).

Whatsapp/Signal are as close to (1) as possible by design, can't actually do (2) at all. Phone/Mail are somewhere in the middle, but quite close to (1). In most countries in the world, there is no mass recording of phone calls or mail, despite it trivially easy to do so. Moreover, due to long long historical legal precedent, I don't think phone/mail companies have any freedom to do things differently. They are pretty much constrained to do exactly what the government tells them to do.

Discord on the other hand, does not respect (1) at all. In fact, it very intentionally records and reads everything for profit. And it hands over any info requested by law enforcement. So, ethically, either they rewrite Discord to respect (1) or they should do (2). I don't think they are. As others have noted in this thread, it is trivial to find servers that are clearly criminal.

One might argue that it is impossible to do so because there are so many servers. My second political position is that if your public platform is so large that you can't effectively moderate it, that is not an excuse. You are culpable. Simply stop your platform from growing past the point where you can't effectively stop bad things happening. You don't have the right to profit while enabling bad things.

>Discord has built the capability to read every message, public or private, that any user sends

So they need to get rid of that capability

This isn’t fair to say.

Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.

Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)

Haven't heard of any other platforms that use cartoons in the UI, actively associate with kids hobbies, and also make it one click to join active pedo grooming communities.

"very good moderation" makes me believe you work for them because that is a laughable notion.

I would bet that Big Balls swatting/SIM swapping/ddos community "the comm" still has dozens of discords that have been up for years

Any social app with one click to join communities (all of them) will fall under this.

And how out of touch with teenagers are you that you think cartoons in the UI (whatever that means) are why they use it. What is a kids hobby? Gaming? You cannot call that a kids hobby.

Nah Facebook doesn't have swatting and pedo communities.

Source?

Telegram is the undisputed king of shady shit, at least insofar as centralized services go.

Yea but how many children's games use telegram to manage their community?

I guess my point is, do we as a society want our children's Roblox communities to share a platform with virtually every cyber criminal, behind security and secrecy measures completely at the will of arbitrary discord owners?

I hate discord, it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy. Plus, it's an information black hole.

> it is where enthusiasm is met with "bad girls" energy.

What does that mean?

Group mentality that picks and chooses who is "cool" and then bullies everyone else.

But I assume that is because of the people on that specific server, not because of the software? Or is there something about discord that enables it, that IRC etc. does not have?

I hang out with friends that predate discord, on discord and can't see it. Same with new servers.

happens on irc constantly too

chat rooms are cliques, almost always

choose any sufficiently populated room on libera chat, join, and start talking a lot without lurking first for awhile and see how the inhabitants react

try going to a pub on a Saturday night, walking up to a group of people you’ve never met, having a conversation, and start talking about something completely unrelated, and see how they react.

what you’re seeing in online chat communities is just basic social interaction reflected online

i'm on a number of discord servers. yes, some have that 'mean girls' vibe but considering the content, i expect that. the more tech oriented ones i'm on...that's not an issue at all.

to me, in general the vibe of a given discord is similar to the general vibe of that topic (i.e some games have terrible, vitriolic cesspools for communities and those discords reflect that. other things, such as one of the rust ones i'm on, reflects that community's vibe which is a lot more wholesome imo).

I've never been in a Discord server and thought "Wow this server doesn't do the moderator LARP-ing thing".

My dream is to be invited into a mildly popular server (more than 15 users), than doesn't have 50 channels, 8 separate roles and T&C to agree to. It hasn't happened yet.

An entire generation of bureaucrats and bean counters is learning the ropes on Discord.

This shows Discord is a genuine successor to Web 1.0 forums. :-)

Unnecessary channels are unnecessary subforums. User roles are user ranks (https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3.1/kb/article/everyth...), indicating both software permissions and social status. T&C—well, forum engines like phpBB, MyBB, and SMF come with a standard user agreement they show before registration. There is more concern with it now because the Internet is real life.

As for training an entire generation of bureaucrats and bean-counters, I leave it to the reader to judge.

I like this take. There was something unique how each bulletin board was customized to the administrator's taste.

And it was up to them to provide plenty onboarding to new users, so they're not overwhelmed by the hundreds of subcategories, and thousands of threads in each.

We used to be part of no more than a handful of forum communities. Maybe that changed.

I'd consider beancounter to be best case. At least a beancounter works for the company and gets paid. It's like they know they're Koolaid drinkers but every server is riced up with Discord's product pipeline like an aftermarket Honda.

I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and add features just because Discord offers them has been a point of contention. They seem to think we mods don’t understand Discord. We are having trouble getting them to understand that we are aware of what other servers are like and that we’re deliberately choosing not go that route.

My experience is that discords that arent properly moderated go through a boom/bust cycle.

And that whether in the ascendency or the fall, the moderators trying to maintain complete opaque control will fight to the death to keep it that way.

And where moderation is done more by feel than by rules people start self censoring and then disengage entirely.

But then you go to a discord that has moderation figured out, and its just... a nice place to be?

That rings true to me and probably has some truth on other platforms as well. We’re trying for transparency but it does feel like there’s a gap in perspective and goals that could only be reconciled by making space for two really different objectives or, as we’ve been doing, remain focused on the original goal and hope that users who want to pursue other activities in the space do it on one of the other forums for the community, like FB or Reddit.

Can you elaborate on what features they were demanding?

Are you a partnered server? Are they even still doing those?

I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.

No just a community server.

What features are you talking about? I admin a server of 9k. The new onboarding stuff, automod, opt-in roles?

I’ll assume it was pronoun roles unless we hear back

Not sure why you would assume that.

GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.

They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.

They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc

The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.

As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.

Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.

I'll bite. What's the moderator LARP-ing thing?

I've tried looking it up but among irrelevant results (general LARP info) I just found this comment again as the third result...

A more accurate phrasing would be "moderator power-tripping."

The moderators pretend they are vastly more important and significant than they are.

I can't piece together what you're trying to say. There's something to do with disdain (the remark about putting a child in a position with lots of responsibility) but being a "moderation simulator" makes little sense in the context of chat software (you don't go to a chat to be a moderator but to... chat). For that to make sense, they'd have to generate fake messages for you to moderate or something?! Then the LARP reference, does that also have a negative connotation in your head? Eyeing the pilot comment, should one read it as "childishly playing at"? And then something in the last sentence about everything being a simulation... is that a theory of life or are we still on the topic of Discord? You'll have to give more context for this to make any sense (the linked source didn't provide any I didn't already have/know), although the shards I'm piecing together so far make it seem like it's a destructive personal campaign that I'm not sure I should be interested in being recruited into

I'm frankly wondering whether I should ask if you're okay. Idk if you have a legitimate dispute with Discord or some people on there (I dislike Discord as much as the next self hosting open source non walled garden fan, but this is next level), or if it's something else. Wild guess / legitimately concerned: do you have a heater that can leak carbon monoxide? Or maybe I am just extremely bad at understanding what I've just read

Sounds to me like you're hanging out with the wrong people.

So basically Hacker News.

I think they might've meant "mean girls" energy... :)

I started a channel with some friends last year for game servers we started running. It's been so much fun. We were worried about what you're describing, but we've had the exact opposite experience. People are friendly, they go out of their ways to help others especially new joins or people asking questions, and they try to protect the channel from the few people who break the rules.

The deceptive nature of Discord's "servers" has always made me wary. You're trusting one service with everything, it's Reddit all over again.

The nature of Discord "servers" is exactly why they won.

For now, until they inevitably enshittify their service to increase profits, and a competitor swoops up most of their market.

> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.

Ease of use is also up there. (Compared to IRC)

The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.

It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.

IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.

Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.

Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.

Do you though? Do you drop everything to answer notifications as they pop up, or do you answer them at your convenience?

discord as opensource support forums compete with irc (the ultimate underdog) and discourse et al (all which require a ___domain)

the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.

I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.

I noticed that, but I also noticed the quality in those "servers" (really groups) is kind of shit? There's way more random off-topic discussion than about the thing you're looking for, and you still have to search through it. And when there isn't, there's nothing (due to fragmentation) and you stop checking.

I think the biggest selling point is clearly the community.

Without the community revolt.chat is just another Mattermost or Matrix.

Discord is popular for one reason and one reason only, all the young people are there. The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.

I've been trying to explain this to a friend recently. You're only on Discord because they took a huge loss for many years with the hopes of building up a massive database of users.

Yeah, it is the chat program treadmill. Spend investor money to host a completely commoditized program. Of course it is better than the version that costs money by virtue of being free. Eventually run out of investor money and do something unpopular to raise revenue, leaving the opportunity for the next iteration to come in for free and take your spot.

The only thing I don’t really understand is why investors keep falling for this? The only real business model is giving their money away. Maybe they get some good ad network profile data in the time between the heel turn and the point where everybody ditches the service.

Investors aren't falling for it. Users are falling for it.

Leaking millions for years pays off in the end, or even half way through. Some investors would exit at some stage. Taking profit due to valuation going up, despite no revenue/profit.

At the end of the tunnel is acquisition by a major player who is basically buying the users.

Typical examples: Skype, whatsapp.

But also LinkedIn. GitHub.

Businesses that offered some (basically) free offering for over a decade until reaching critical user base, then sold off for billions. Reason being precious data along with millions of daily active eyeballs.

Skype is ending this year. Some founders and investors won but only thanks to greater fools.

(notable that three of the four greater fools in your post are Microsoft)

May not be clear, even to finops at Microsoft. Skype tech ended up in Lync subsequent versions, aka Skype for enterprise. The user base also became a free ad target (to buy the entire consumers tool suite) I remember being constantly nudged to sign up for the free 30 days One Drive to backup Skype pictures and the jazz. So creative these heads of sales at MS.

Cheaper and harder to end up in spam folder.

It's shocking really that Microsoft didn't buy Slack and drive that into the ground too.

I'm glad to see WhatsApp is proceeding relatively slowly down the Shit-en-slide, since it's completely entrenched in some countries. I've had companies who just assume that I have WhatsApp and it's cool to message me on it instead of sending a text or email.

you can make something free and still profitable. Google search for example. I've been waiting for years to see something replacing it

I haven't used Google search in over a decade.

> they took

They are more than likely still taking, based on the 17% layoff a few months ago

As is Snapchat, miraculously (Snapchat is the most wildly mismanaged social media company from a fiscal perspective it’s wild)

> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.

In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.

They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.

It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.

Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from.

These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.

What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.

I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.

Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.

TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.

Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.

> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects

True. As it also hits a local minimum in terms of user experience (to the point that the average user does not care), I don't think it is possible to make a new centralized (even self-hosted) alternative on technical merits alone, since you necessarily incur a cost in the form of signing up to every server.

The only hope is a decentralized alternative like Matrix which is enshittification-resistant. I actually think the server part of matrix is more or less ready for a good Discord-like client, but the client side is lacking.

Cinny exists as a discord-like client, thing is, Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything. Also, the space/room system works differently to discord server/channel

> Matrix is mostly the text chat part, it doesn't implement voice chats or anything.

It's in progress. Keywords: MatrixRTC, Element Call

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-nat...

fwiw, Matrix has had video rooms since 2022: https://element.io/blog/drop-in-drop-out-chats-with-video-ro... - and VoIP calling since day one in 2014.

Does it have persistent voice channels with simple app/game streaming for free?

I've never used it but Matrix does seem to support conference calls, if not natively then via Jitsi. I'm sure a good app can paper over the differences to get a voice-chanel out of it if this is what people are after, though I've never really used this much on Discord.

The same can be said of space-room vs server-channel. Of course a space has different semantics, the space doesn't own the rooms, etc. But they can be made to be nearly the same for an end user. In general organization of resources is much looser and less opinionated on Matrix. But an opinionated app can also paper over this to force a stricter hierarchy, while offering advanced users the ability to make their own spaces, etc.

If it only works per-client, then it almost doesn't exist. That's one of Discord's strengths.

I mean from what I can tell a lot of its recent success is simply because Slack is terrible. Most of the discord "servers" I use which aren't actually gaming related would be almost the same on slack, but slack has a less generous free tier.

I don't think discord has much of a real network effect, it's just a good value proposition. When the screws tighten that may change.

Slack's UI sucks for multiple different "server"s. Good for work, but no gamer wants to juggle around the Slack UI for 2/3 different game servers, not to mention DMs being isolated. Imagine DMing the same person with 2 or 3 completely separate chat histories, depending on the source server. Many people have multiple servers that share a subset of people, and talking to them would be absolutely insane, not to mention the amount of people that primarily use Discord for DMs that don't care about any server at all.

> The biggest selling point of Discord is its insane network effects.

The biggest selling points of Discord are 1) unified login and 2) phone access.

I, personally, consider these to be negatives. However, the majority of people do not.

"Weary" or "wary"? Or both?

The selling point to me was it's sophistication in handling moderation issues. But they enshittified it to be like Facebook moderation. Maybe that's why they're going public.

I couldn't agree more