What's interesting about acquisitions like this is that the actual value that is being transacted is the userbase and their data, along with the inability for either of those to easily move elsewhere.
No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own. But users are locked into platforms so heavily and for such long time periods that they themselves give the platform almost the entirety of its value (not to single out Discord, since we all know this is how a lot of acquisitions work in practice). [As an additional caveat, I will add that Discord has definitely built something that its users love, and I don't want to undermine the absurd amount of UI, feature refinement, and scaling work they've done successfully. It isn't negligible, but it is also not >$10B of software engineering.]
I've read many discussions where someone says something of the form "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to", and I think upon consideration of this statement that there is something deeply wrong with the way network effects and protocols function on our Internet such that this can even be a common scenario. We really do have quite a crisis of non-interoperability that generalizes towards a complete lack of user control, be it software, hardware, data, or anything in between.
With that said, if Microsoft does purchase Discord, it might not be as bad as some foretell. While we can point to something like Skype as a failure, we can also point to something like Github, which has been doing very well post-acquisition, and in my opinion hasn't gotten worse at all. It's quite possible they wouldn't want to profit off of Discord individually, but rather use it as another tool to expand their general ecosystem horizontally. On the other hand, they could also do the exact opposite and start harvesting data and maximizing advertisements en masse, lest my post become too optimistic in tone, since this is still HN. Lastly, remember that this is still just a rumor that various news outlets have picked up on and is nowhere near guaranteed.
For those looking for alternatives due to this, or just because they'd like to own their own data for once, I think Matrix is likely to be the best general solution in this product space, both with respect to similar app functionality as well as quality constraints (real encryption, decentralization, FOSS, etc).
>No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own.
I'd hard argue
I've been using various VoIPs / Voice apps over last 15 years almost everyday - ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, skype and I must say that Discord is unparalleled.
It fucking eats competition by it's quality, design and technology (API, BOTS). It offers also some kind of innovation because none of those most popular VoIPs / Voice apps combined Voice+Chat+Screen Streaming!
Things like Skype, MS Teams and probably similar CANNOT EVEN IMPLEMENT BASIC FEATURE LIKE PUSH 2 TALK THAT VENTRILO (or software that's aware of gaming users) HAD LIKE 15 OR MORE YEARS AGO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429842
So how is it that "No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own." yet nobody can some with something that's even cloes to Discord?
I'm frequently on a mumble server that can have 1000 people on it at the same time. A channel hierarchy is vital to global broadcasts from command, allowing foot soldiers to shout important information to command, allowing platoon leaders to communicate to their subordinates, allowing squad leaders to communicate to just their subordinates, and allowing the foot soldiers to chit chat to just their squads.
Discord is fine for playing video games with friends, but its voip is a nightmare for actually organized groups who are voip power users.
Mumble generally has better voice quality and it's more straightforward to maintain good server performance than it is with Discord with its relatively opaque and game-ish 'server boost' feature.
I would love something like this for wow raiding, sometimes I want to say something thats relevant only to my fellow class/role but the raid leader is saying something important. We ended up just having a teamspeak server running in parallel with discord for my class, which worked but is understandably not optimal.
I have a vastly different experience regarding quality in comparison to e.g. TeamSpeak.
Maybe it's because I mostly use free Discord servers, but the sound quality is much worse and, more crucially, Discord is apparently completely unable to automatically filter out any system sounds that get picked up by my microphone. My headset is really not the best, but in many years of TeamSpeak use I never once had a problem with my sounds playing back to other users, even on default settings.
In Discord, if I use automatic voice activation levels, other users can hear practically my entire system sound and I have to crank the activation threshold up so high that apparently sometimes my voice will cut off. Even then, particularly loud sounds on my headset still get picked up by Discord.
Teamspeak, Mumble, Discord have one advantage: They don't treat their users as idiots. You are expected to setup your microphone properly, no speakers, no adjusting your mic levels automatically. While there might be sane defaults, if you have a shitty microphone you will get less interaction.
In MS Teams, Zoom ... you are probably paid to use that software. So it unforunateley is made to be noob compatible.
I think you're lumping Discord in with the wrong crowd. Discord is insanely easy to use compared to the alternative, that's why nobody uses the alternatives anymore. I'd still prefer Mumble myself but I'd have nobody to speak to
As soon as it gets Microsoft all over it we'll all move on to the next Discord
The alternatives are just as easy to use as Discord. The audio part is still the same. What Discord makes better is the persistant chat with various "servers", which the others don't have.
You are expected (maybe it's a "gamer" thing) to setup properly. No echo, no loopback, no shitty microphone. Which in turn makes using audio communication a joy to use. MS Teams on the other hand is a pure shitshow because of all the people who can't setup their stuff.
The only Thing I don't like about discord is that it's not e2ee, so I guess with regards to talking in huge groups or video chatting it has a performance advantage in that sense.
Is end-to-end encryption in Discord even feasable? Discord is massively multipler text, audio, and video chat - end to end encrypting that is very hard, no?
It could be. The simple approach is generating a key when the server/channel starts and sharing that between clients. Of course there are downsides to this, but you can make improvements to this system to get aspects that you want (such as rotating the key when someone leaves and giving all keys to new members).
Well, the last time I tried, Discord was the worst. It requires to install stupid software which is essentially embedded web browser to fully working.
Competitors are plentiful. Remember Digg had the largest user base among news aggregators? People moves when there is a better service available... or more like existing service is getting worse.
>No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own.
Not sure about that one. Teams is an absolute failure of a chat and audio/video calls app. I think, even if Microsoft tried they could not get it worse than it is currently.
I think I have to agree with OP here. To me, Teams is more of a failure of product management/design and corporate culture. It was more of a move to add value and subscribers to the Office365 platform than an attempt to build a world beating chat/conferencing platform. So many of its users simply use it because it's included in their Office365 subscription, whereas with Slack, Zoom, etc they'd be paying $8+ a month per user.
While the development effort, skill, and time, that goes into building something like Discord is certainly significant, I feel it's certainly something Microsoft could have built given their resources and technical aptitude. What you can't buy is the inspiration, ideas, and culture that make something like Discord happen.
If it follows the inspiration and ethos of tools like Github and VSCode, I'll be really happy. Given Microsoft's shift in attitude over the past few years, I really hope that's the case.
My biggest fear is to get all those office365 integrations teams runs slow and is quite the memory hog whereas discord has a nice a svelte memory and cpu footprint. If they were to buy it and give it the traditional microsoft features bloat then that would not encourage many gamers to stay on the platform
This always come first over user's convenience.
But the user experience of this tech is abhorrent, so I could see that Microsoft would like to fortify Discord with security features and sell it as Teams 2.0.
This actually could work if done right...
Teams have integrations with other MS products (Outlook, Sharepoint). They are clunky and look like they were bolted on, but they're there which is better than not having them at all.
> they're there which is better than not having them at all
I disagree fervently. At my current job the department has strong pushes to use these features amongst the teams and if they weren't there we could explore real solutions.
As it stands we're doing things like task tracking and taking meeting notes in teams and it's a terrible experience. I can't help but wonder what happens to that corporate data when teams eventually gets the axe
You’re spot on there. It’s all the little things that Slack and Discord get right but Teams gets wrong. For example, searching for messages, navigating between channels, showing which channels have unread messages. Also, Teams frequently has issues on Mac in a way that Slack and Discord don’t.
Much better. It's not perfect, but without mind-reading, I'm not sure what you would do to improve Slack's search. Teams, on the other hand... messages just seem to disappear entirely.
Is Discord better than Teams? I can't tell, I'm still waiting for it to finish swapping and processing my input. Okay, this might be a (slight) exaggeration, but I just don't think a chat app should run much slower than any IDE. What is that thing doing all the time?
Please elaborate. Teams is the Microsoft product I hate the least. UI glitches and Electron problems aside, I find that at least some UX work has gone into it, there are relatively few things preventing me from working - the calls are pretty reliable too in my experience.
In no particular order (top of my head and mostly considering the desktop Windows one)
- The history (scroll up) takes a lot to load (this is on 300mbit up/down and fast processor)
- html content in the chat totally hogs the processor
- Attachments takes forever to open internally. Not so large files like 4-5MB of log pretty much wreck it
- upload is hilariously slow (again 300mbit up/down)
- loading in browser requires an explicit login to microsoft account to open, instead of a generated link that actually works (to add some salt, my company requires 2FA for the MS login)
- audio quality issues, 'intelligent' (echo blocking algorithm kicks in wherever it wants), call drops. Esp. bad in group calls
- 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product
- Video sharing has a massive lag on screen sharing both on visual and startup time
- Blurred background algorithm is a massive flicker and it really resents people with green (t-)shirts
- Calling the phone, instead the desktop while working on the desktop. (Half of my team uses phone version as it's less buggy)
- One more: if you don't login the phone app, it will remind you to login every 3hours - until it gets uninstalled....
I can rant for at least 45minutes about it... and it's the 'default' chat application the company uses for years (along with Lync/Skype for business before) and I use it as my 'main' chat application.
- As soon as I start a Videocall, the rest of the Application is almost completely unusable
- The Application uses 500MB of RAM after it has been idling with one message received in the last hour
I've never understood this either. What is the purpose of the Teams tab? Why doesn't it show up where all the other conversations happen? It doesn't make any sense to me.
> The history (scroll up) takes a lot to load (this is on 300mbit up/down and fast processor)
that's not my experience, especially with a much worse connection. Maybe I live closer to the server?
> 'teams' chat gotta be a joke with each post forming its own thread, and you'd need to click to answer the proper one. Close to unusable feature that bears the name of the product
Interestingly, I like this feature: it's different from a group chat where all discussion are mixed together, each subject has its own thread, so it's easier to follow. And each thread can be ignored
On a lower-end "business" laptop, every interaction is painfully slow. For example, it takes 2 seconds just to switch to a different chat, you can see the redraw happening in real-time...
What about Teams running against a Lync server where you can only establish chats with internal users, and chat with external users is available only through a fake meeting set up in outlook? And where the 1to1 video calls start in skype 4 business instead of teams.
Plus when running multiple instances the call goes to the first instance
What about hiding previous communiques? I have a long list of psuedo-named meeting chats (5 months worth) that are just aggregating on the left hand side. Hide doesn't work. Thanks teams.
Yes, but that doesn't change the point. The fact that MSFT has been able to build a product as good as slack is an anomaly. (and they apparently didnt succeed on the video/audio part as you said). Usually big corp like MSFT are not able to build an equivalent technology to someone else. Look at Google who tried in so many fields and never succeed, except mayble Hangout compared to zoom. So I agree with you on that.
Nevertheless we know that the product is not that important. If all slack/zoom customers are migrated to Teams over night. The Teams product will keep most of its new users and will have a value for an acquisition, not because of its product, but because of its users.
So even though I disagree that MSFT could build the chat application itself, I agree with OP that what is bought is not linked to the actual product
Keep in mind that before Microsoft bought it, Skype could make direct P2P connections with outstanding fidelity. If they buy Discord, I wouldn't expect it to stay great.
>Skype could make direct P2P connections with outstanding fidelity
I used to be absolutely in awe of the technology Skype had... got bought for $8+B back then and Microsoft managed to ruin the p2p part and stability/latency of the calls
While the CTO enjoys his expensive scotch and big bonus for reducing his companies IT expenditure and modernizing their software offering to employees ;)
To second that I think Discord's been publishing stuff about high scale concurrency so I'd think they spent quite some time and intelligence getting that right, and it's not trivial.
Everytime an engineer tries to push slack on a consultant all they see is a new interface, shit loads of noise, gifs etc (cultural issue rather than tech stack obviously) and no real extra benefit vs the cost of learning something new when what you have today ticks all the boxes.
I also use both as I'm a partner on the engineering side of the business but also run a large consulting pod - I really don't care which one anyone uses. I don't personally see Slack being better 'enough' to justify the effort of switching for those that are already on teams.
Very true. I know a couple of people who like Teams, they work in healthcare and education. I think that mostly just speaks about the horrid quality of the software they usually have to face.
Each and every tech worker I know loathes Teams with passion. On the upside it's like a common enemy so there's a small team building aspect to using it.
Are you American? I tend to find tastes in tech differ across the pond. An American literally sent me a link to a google doc the other week - I couldn't believe anyone would send a final professional doc in anything other than Word - you can't even get proper section numbers without a poor plugin....
Every organisation in Poland I've worked at has used google docs and GSuite.
On the other hand, we're mostly using it for few page design doc, and have no idea what "final professional doc" or what "proper section numbers" are and why would anyone care.
> but it is also not >$10B of software engineering
Really? How did you come to this conclusion?
Discord is, without a doubt, 10x better than Slack, Teams, or Zoom combined. They've solved the problem of a communication in the non-business space. That's huge.
For comparison, look at Coinbase, who has a 100B valuation. What they're doing is relatively trivial. Is that >10x the value of Discord?
I don't even think Coinbase is overvalued. 10B for Discord is just a steal.
Suppose you have seven dev teams of ten, plus a manager, tester, and a pm for each, plus an executive team of 9 people. 100 total people on the team. They each make an average of 200k a year. How many years will it take this team to recreate Discord?
If it would take them less than 500 years, then, in some sense, Discord isn't 10 billion dollars worth of software.
I think the point is that almost all of the value of Discord comes from the network effect of people locked in to using it. On the one hand, that's kind of a trivial observation, of course the users are value comes from. But, if you don't realize this, it's important to know. It means you that if even if you build something identical to Discord you're not going to be worth anything like as much - unless you also happen to get users. Or, put another way, you could build something technically worse, but if people adopted it for some reason, you'd be worth more.
Complexity of software is not necessarily the only important dimension of determining value.
The game industry is larger than both music and movies combined. Discord is behind almost every gaming community I've run into the last five years, from Eve Online to Valheim and Smash Bros. Looking for a Discord community is one of the first things I do when playing a new multiplayer game. Same with hundreds of millions of other gamers. You can't program your way into that kind of market adoption.
Right, so it has nothing to do with the software and its value is entirely the network momentum. Reddit is a perfect example of how software can be made worse and worse while maintaining user growth.
Discord is 5 years old. The reason more and more people and projects use it over competition is that it offers better experience. It's not about some magic momentum they luckily got. I use it and moved my project to it. Last time I played a video game was about 20 years ago. Quoting one other commenter here: it's much better than Zoom, Slack and Teams combined and it's not a small margin. They delivered while everyone else failed. That's why people love it.
Yeah, the open-source project I'm on moved all of our dev communications (†all of them) to discord, several years ago, and gladly left IRC without the dignity of a burial.
† Email and mailing lists were something we forbade from day 1. There are a variety of sociological reasons why they're vile, but I think a lot of it has to do with bikeshedding, via "low-cost involvement" - people who care more about potstirring than actually getting work done have a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on big announcement and pick fights. I've experienced a huge number of people who've earned a 'stake in the discussion' by making some small contribution, and then jumped in on every discussion trying to exercise some informal kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto (insofar as such a thing arises naturally from the basic human decency of giving people the benefit of the doubt). What I like about realtime comms - especially ones with nice, logged discussions in multiple, visible rooms, is you don't have to be plugged-in 24/7 to keep up with stuff like you would on IRC (without a bouncer), but at least you have to have some real "skin in the game" of paying attention and being involved - which generally biases towards the folks doing the real work. Decisions get made without the armchair generals; occasionally they'll show up after some big decision got executed on and something was built, with an angry assertion of "Why wasn't I consulted?!?"††, but usually the existence of the actual finished work, fait accompli, tends to to stifle that nonsense real fast.
After multiple decades of dealing with that petty squabbling on email, I don't miss it at all. It was a huge source of burnout.
Of course it does, because software is part of the overall customer experience that built that network momentum and is inexorably linked. Users would not have tolerated, promoted, and evangelized otherwise. It may not be the primary ingredient, but in Discord's case I think it helped.
You say that like that's not an interesting observation. On the contrary -- that is a common observation that people frequently make about Coke in particular. It doesn't taste good, but people buy it anyway because it's Coke.
The actual form of the saying is something like "if every Coke factory burned down, Coke would be back in business the next day. If you hit every Coke customer on the head, Coke would be out of business the next day". (The idea being that if Coke's customers all forgot they were Coke customers, Coca-Cola wouldn't be able to grow a new customer base on the strength of their product.)
Coke was a business success because they're probably the best-tasting cola when you've already drank at least half of a can.
Lots of other soda makers, especially the bargain-bin "generic store brand" stuff, taste pretty gross after a can or two, by comparison. Pepsi's alright in that department, but this is a huge market differentiator for Coke.
I never said it was profound, in fact, I said it was obvious. I called it a "trivial observation" - but it matters if you don't realize it. The Discord software isn't being bought and isn't worth 10 billion, probably not even 1 billion, but rather the totality of what Discord is (brand, users, data, etc).
That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain).
"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)
> You don't get a userbase if you have shitty software.
You're moving the goalpost. Your assertion is wrong. Revise it, because I really can't understand what you're trying to say other than "you aren't popular unless you're good, because popular means good!" or some other tautology.
Well, Microsoft has more engineers, money and can hire top talent. They also had a huge headstart in user base and adoption. What did they manage to come up with in a chat/collaboration space? Right - a total mess.
Discord didn't "happen to get users". It made a platform people started using despite huge network/entrenchment effect of other players because it's so much better than everything else. I've learnt about Discord following open source projects and moved mine to it as well. It's fantastic, much much better than anything else on the market.
Zoom is valued at 100b. Discord for 10 is just a steal.
Coming back to your question: even if you multiply it by 10 and add infinite acquisition resources the team would most likely never be able to recreate Discord.
Yeah, what I'm saying is that companies are valuable or not based on their users (or what they earn) and not their software. Purchasing companies aren't paying X billion dollars for the code and assets. They are paying for the users. (Which, I also think is kind of obvious).
As proven by among others Zoom, Whatsapp and now Discord if you build good software people will switch to it. I think you're undervaluing how good the software is. They are 5 years old, started from 0 user base and now they are a huge player and getting bigger by the day. You would have a point if there was something remotely close in quality on the market but not as popular but there just isn't. Discord is the first communication platform which doesn't suck in some obvious way. If Microsoft manage to buy it for 10B and not mess it up it will be one of their best acquisitions.
History shows that Large Companies tend to fail when recreating products because of internal politics and initiatives (outside of the core goal), not because they physically can't.
I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology.
No amount of dev + test + management can get that technology in 500 or 5000 years. You need researchers, and they need to be smart or lucky enough to give you a competitive result.
>I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology.
Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc.
The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.
If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom.
The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.
I did exactly this: initially I was going to go with Slack because the bots API was nicer and they had slash commands, but in the end Discord is just so much more pleasant to use, and it even started adding slash commands now.
My one wish would be an easy way to handle multiple accounts.
There is an optional feature that let's you share what game you are currently playing to other people. It works by listing the current processes and matching against a preexisting list of games. If it finds a match it will set that as your current game assuming the setting for that is enabled.
What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community.
Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.
The next best thing IMO - Element - takes a few seconds to send and deliver a message and up to 10 seconds to initiate a voice call. Has no voice sub-rooms with auto voice detection, either.
It’s a free beer carbon copy of Slack except it uses single account for all instances. And they have the voice channel feature, but that’s kind of an aside.
I wouldn't call it carbon copy. Slack's performance is abysmal (while Discord is relatively snappy), and this is, interestingly, toxic to Electron, as Slack is frequently used as reference to assert that Electron applications perform poorly.
Discord hasn’t solved it anymore than slack, iMessage, teams, etc. The experience is more polished but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally special.
If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio.
The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there.
> Really? How did you come to this conclusion?
Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts?
If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.
My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.
Try following some projects on Discord. Maybe a small one like Leela Chess Zero. It's a completely different experience than Slack. Maybe you and your friends could be happy there but for projects with hundred/thousands of fans/developers/contributors it's in league of its own. It got it users because of it. It didn't luckily stumble into a userbase.
If it disappeared today people would be sad and switch to something else if it would reappear in 2 years everyone would be switching back ASAP.
Discord nailed reliability, quality, and usability. Its tech is still not worth $10B, though, even if the tech needs to be as good as it is to keep attracting users.
Tangential: I really do fear for them if they get acquired, though. Their tech is built on the actor model, which almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on. It feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally (probably to use Azure) or have their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.
Microsoft is surprisingly open to the actor model.
They’ve had various implementations of virtual actors after publishing the research, e.g Project Orleans for .NET and Durable ~Functions~ Entities on Azure.
> almost nobody else uses or understands enough to build on
Tools like Akka are very much alive and well.
> t feels like it's likely that if they merge with Microsoft they'll get rebuilt internally
I doubt that, unless they're using a lot of proprietary GCP tech. A Microsoft-owned business using Azure to (most likely) save money is kind of an obvious move, and I don't consider it a bad thing.
> their infrastructure replaced with Teams' infrastructure.
Or maybe even the other way around? Discord's tech is no slouch.
Imagine how much Microsoft would pay Discord for just a hosted version of the Discord service, or even an on-prem version that includes maintenance. Do you think they would still pay $10B for that, with none of the accounts, account data, brand reputation, etc.? Do you think they’d pay even 1% of $10B?
Well, imagine how much someone would pay for NVidia if the only thing you could do with their GPUs was to watch videos. Surely not 300B. Yet you can do so much more with the GPUs and you can do so much more with Discord then keeping it as in house tool.
Could you expand on how it's better? Genuinely curious. I love Slack and tried Discord but found the UI pretty clunky, and the lack of threads annoying, but didn't probe it much further so I'm wondering if I'm missing something...
Well it has started has voice chat for gamers. Their latency and sound quality is top notch. You can have voice call with 5000 people. You can finetune sound of each individual. They have mass moderation tools... it surprises me with something in a good ways.
I've personally been in voice calls on discord with thousands of people. Obviously it's impossible to pick out anything discernable with that many people but discord handles it well.
FWIW, I probably hate Slack more than anyone else on Hackernews (because everyone somehow seems to like it). Keep in mind I also don't use the Slack desktop app but I do use the Discord desktop app, so right away this isn't a fair comparison but I'll continue with my rant anyway.
I mainly just find the user-experience to be terrible. I hate how each server is separated as if it is it's own isolated website or something. On Discord, I can switch from server to server in a click easily.
Playing GTA? I can join the GTA Discord server. Playing League? I can join that one. It's all right there.
It's also the weird SSO Slack has going on that just seems broken. When I open up Discord, I have one account, I log in and have access to all other things in the account. Basic software behavior we're all used to.
When I open up Slack, it does or does not want me to login again based on if I've been on this server before. It may or may not want me to make a new account depending on if I've made one on this server before. I try all of my emails with all of my potential passwords to see if login works, if not new account time I guess? I'm never sure weather to use my work account or not. Sometimes the @domain matters, so this creates even more of a mess.
Then don't even get me started with a lack of usernames and having intentionally hard-to-find ID. Again, why not do what Discord does and do Username#6789? Instead I have to search my friend 'John Doe' and hope it's the John I'm thinking of and not some random other John that I just invited to see all my business's internal discussions.
Discord will forever be behind Slack in usability as long as it doesn’t have threads. Nothing quite like having three different conversations going on at once in the same channel.
It is a great payout to its owners. This is a sad end for Discord if history if any indicator. It was very useful, but I doubt it will remain so for much longer. And this does not even take privacy, or lack thereof, into consideration.
If you're concerned about the current state of privacy at Discord, request a download of all data collected from you, and watch them stalking how you interact with the app, the servers you've visited, buttons pressed...
They have a switch to turn this off, but then they say this:
> The nitty gritty: when you turn the flag off, the events are sent, but we tell our servers to not store these events. They're dropped immediately — they're not stored or processed at all. The reason that we chose to do it this way is so that when you turn it off on your desktop app it also turns off automatically on your phone - and vice-versa. This allows us to keep things the same across all of our apps and clients, across upgrades.
This is the bigger concern. Their efforts at privacy between users is basically a joke and between users and bots its basically non-existent.
Lots of talk with respect to user privacy and discord, overlooks the distinction between a users privacy as a discord user (User <-> Discord) as opposed to the users privacy when communicating on discord (Discord User <-> Discord User or Discord User <-> Discord Bot)
They do Bluetooth, which by proxy gives location access, block VPNs and ban your accounts if you ever try to sign in with one or anonymisers, require a phone number non-VOIP, collect virtually every interaction way past what normal analytics would do and send them via the same or a similar route to prevent route-based adblock.
Desktop client also continually scans running processes.
That rather depends on your usage pattern, I expect. Twitter has similar inconsistent reports, and I can confirm personally that I was suddenly asked for one as soon as I tried to post anything; I believe I also had something like that happen with Discord, but I don't remember as clearly.
Not that it's necessarily malicious in intent—requiring “extra verification” only on suspected misuse isn't entirely unreasonable, and that's awfully hard to distinguish from things like targeted privacy attacks—but it would be nice to establish this sort of thing as common knowledge, especially since I imagine the chaff of “huh? no they don't” is only to their benefit.
Every major discord server (if you are not just strictly in DM with friends or make your own with friends) requires phone verification with virtually no exceptions.
Using any form of datacentre IP or anonymiser requires phone verification randomly within a few minutes or hours of starting interaction [regardless of server].
We do not record all your processes and send them to our servers.
We watch the process list for 3 reasons.
Detect games to show on your status message. You can turn this off anytime in the privacy tab of settings.
Detect games to hook the overlay into if it is enabled.
Detect games run as administrator to warn that Push to talk won't work.
You cannot disable the scanning as the 3rd reason is always required.
If you use the overlay we send information about your DirectX and GPU to our metrics server to track success rate of the overlay as we test it and improve it. We will probably stop sending this to our server as soon as overlay moves out of the experimental phase.
Nothing else is ever saved to disk or sent over the network.
Also the IP address you listed is an address of one of our US East voice servers which has no relation to our primary data center. Nothing is sent over it that would involve games. Our primary IPs (where we send your status) would be something else. Whatever data you saw being sent continuously was probably related to voice chat."
since Discord is very popular in the gaming world, one can only wonder what the future would bring seeing how another acquisition of Microsoft in this space ended, namely Mixer (Twitch-like service).
Skype was the previous home of many of the communities that were the early adopters of discord, and they left after years of MS running the show, which seems like a better comparison to me
> I've read many discussions where someone says something of the form "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to",
I know a person who keeps an entire virtualbox guest virtual machine that only has access to the internet through a VPN service, for the purpose of logging into Facebook in a browser interface. For the unavoidable purpose of keeping in touch with non technical family members who refuse to use anything else.
As it was explained to me, he finds the risk to his main desktop environment of browser fingerprinting/tracking by fb and its tracking-pixel using "partners" to be unacceptably high. By only using the browser in the vm to login to facebook and never anything else, this diminishes the risk.
uBlock is not bulletproof as it relies on signatures. Not to mention, the absence of data is data by itself, so maybe it's actually better to provide data, just that said data is fake and dissociated from your primary identity.
I strongly agree with your comment about network effects and something being deeply wrong with the state of things. It's one of the topics that gets me righteously angry these days...
I also have big hopes for Matrix, and run my own homeserver with a bridge or two. Here's to decentralized, encrypted, community based communication for everybody!
> Here's to decentralized, encrypted, community based communication for everybody!
Here's to decentralized, encrypted, community based communication for [people who are interested in decentralized, encrypted, community based communication]!
That's the challenge, got to make the implementation so slick and solid that it can win over people who don't care! Some friends and I are working on a Matrix client and we want to put in some features we've always wanted in a chat system (count-down to events, sophisticated ordered spoiler tags, themes, alert words, mute levels, etc). Some exist in others, some don't, but I think there's lots room for improvement in the messaging space in addition to the (for me) non-negotiables of encryption and decentralization.
> We really do have quite a crisis of non-interoperability
Interoperability in communication software is impossible. I know this will upset a lot of people here but its just what we have seen time and time again.
Interoperable and standard software can not innovate because it is impossible to innovate since you need all vendors to agree and move in the same direction as you. Look at how ircv3 went. They promised the absolute bare minimum change to make irc slightly more modern and they weren't able to pull it off in time.
Discord could not be interoperable with other systems because most of its features did not exist at the time it added them. Interoperability means catering to the lowest common denominator of feature sets.
As discord has shown, siloed platforms are not the end, people will move to a new platform if it is clearly better. Discord was much much better than the rest so everyone moved. If someone else makes something much much better again they will move again.
> Interoperability in communication software is impossible
emails have been interoperable since the beginning of time!
It's only impossible because the business models formed after the explosion of the internet required that they own the platform for profit. And doing so requires that other platforms not intrude. Hence, the failure of interoperability.
Which is why email is an absolute nightmare and missing so many features and takes so long to implement the most basic security and privacy. Outside of business use, email has become the newsletter and password reset center because it doesn't work well enough and hasn't kept up.
The IMAP protocol is a known dumpster fire but getting jmap implemented over every email client and server is basically impossible. Gmail avoids this by just implementing their own proprietary protocol which only works with gmail and the web ui/apps.
> email has become the newsletter and password reset center because it doesn't work well enough
Have you considered that it’s the password reset center because it’s the only thing that works well enough?
Anything completely proprietary is a joke for security from a business continuity perspective. It’s the same reason serious companies don’t depend on “sign in with Facebook” as their only login method.
Well that’s a clause doing a lot of work. I guess email could have been the permanent contact repository a la Facebook if it had been easier for people to own their own addresses
Emails aren't encrypted, because there is no good way to manage trust between users at this point. PGP exists, but it's key management sucks in many ways. But look at a lot of large corporations where the trust can be bound to one service and encryption will be just one click away. S/MIME is a widely adopted standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/MIME) in email and works well.
There's no good way to manage trust between users because the services have to be interoperable. Look at messaging services like Telegram or Signal; end-to-end encryption is easy because they're single entities who decide how all messages are sent and received on their platforms.
I don't think communication services themselves have to be interpretable to manage trust correctly. See PGP used in email, git, package signing, etc. - completely unrelated actions, same trust network.
Not an expert in this, but if I can access any website using HTTPS, so should be possible for email? Do we have any technical blocker or is it simply that biggest players don't want it?
Email does use TLS for encryption to the server but once it hits the server (usually owned by a mega corp like google) it gets decrypted so they can read it.
Email encryption is different because HTTPS certifies that you are connected to the owner of that domain name. How do I certify to you that the email you just received came from me and not someone pretending to be me?
The only bullet proof secure way is if I visit you in person and hand you a copy of my public key and then you use that key to verify my emails. We have had tools to do this with email for over a decade but they are so inconvenient that no one uses it outside of a few privacy nuts.
I use PGP quite often. And I know how hard it is and how much it lacks.
But I'm no 'privacy nut'.
A legitimate easy and underused option is how kraken employs it. I've uploaded my public key. They now send all transactional, security and other mail signed and encrypted.
This is a solid solution to phishing.
The only part 'missing' is how I get my pub key on my kraken account. For me it was an export+copy+paste. But it should probably as easy as an OAUTH alike flow between kraken and my mailprovider. 'Kraken wants to import your public key to sign and encrypt it's emails to you'. An UI thing.
When you access any website using HTTPS the parties involved are You and the Webserver, and the data is encrypted in transit over the open internet. When you request a page, the webserver needs to know what page you request in plain text, so it makes sense for the webserver to have access to the request. With email, the parties who want to communicate are (e.g.) You and Me, and the parties involved are (You, Your company email server) and (Your company's email relay server, My company's spam-filter and DR email clone server), (that and My company's email server) and (My company's email server, Me).
There isn't anything quite like the Browser - Webserver simple connection to encrypt. I would like my connection encrypted to my mailserver using SMTP/POP3/IMAP/HTTP + TLS, which it can be. I would like my email server to talk to your email server using TLS which it can do, but isn't guaranteed, there are several approaches to it (STARTTLS and others). I would like incoming mail to be spam-filtered which means a service that can read the content. My company would like incoming email to be malware and phishing filtered, which means accessing the content. My company would like outgoing email to be signatured and branded, same again. My company requires email to be archived for legal reasons and cloned off-site for DR reasons. The design of SMTP involves store-and-forward, failover and fallback options, multiple MX records, so there's not a trivial path email always takes from sender to recipient. Attackers will try to intercept SSL connections and force fallback to plain text SMTP and people would rather email arrives than doesn't arrive. Tons of companies are using ancient not-updated network equipment which proxies and edits SMTP traffic as it goes through. Coworkers would like Webmail which almost necessarily requires the server having access to unencrypted email to show it to you in a browser.
Trying to put some kind of "secure" on top of that pile of entrenched systems is much harder than saying "the biggest players don't want it", what would it be, which layers would it go in, which sides would manage it, how would it interact, who would standardise on it, how much bother is it for users and for people who forgot their password? The main approach is to public/private key outside email and send encrypted blobs to each other, which is full of key management problems, or a service which intercepts email and pulls the text out and sends on a HTTPS link and a blank "someone sent you an encrypted message. Sign up and login to view it" which sucks, but is a lot more practical and does actually work.
The way I generally imagine interoperability with larger and more complex applications is that providers can implement their own extensions and optional features, but that the most basic data elements are generally isomorphic. Would I expect Discord server permissions to be a shared protocol with ease, perhaps not. But every chat app we use has the same basic fields for a message such as 'id', 'timestamp', and 'text'.
Our entire ecosystem under the chat application is based upon interoperability, from Ethernet to IP to TCP to HTTP to even HTML (note how you use a single web browser to use all of your favorite websites!), so I don't want to be too quick to rule out that it's impossible just because it is difficult.
I would, however, agree that the incentives for it rarely exist. But with proper incentives, I'd say we could achieve some pretty amazing protocols for a lot of modern use cases.
The problem is, this kind of thing becomes annoying for users very quickly. When you use Discord, you expect that everyone has all of the features available and that moderation tools work properly everywhere. Lets say your friend is using telegram which is bridged to discord, now you want to invite them to a private group in the discord server, oh but you can't because telegram doesn't support discord roles.
And then on telegram you try to open an encrypted chat with someone on IRC, but their irc client doesn't support that.
Users don't care about talking to people cross platform as much as they care about everything working properly. Its easy enough to have 3 messaging apps on your phone.
You can use OTR [1] with some IRC clients to get E2EE. That said, you can also get E2EE on Discord if willing to violate their AUP using BetterDiscord [2] + DiscordCrypt [3]. That it violates their terms should be a signal they need your data to have value.
Mostly agree, although I do still think it's solvable in theory, e.g. if chat platforms had strong incentives to implement the same popular feature sets (for example, think of how many websites implement various optional HTML features such as metadata tags, since it helps them on social media, chat applications, search engine results, and so on).
I think a federated system is probably possible. If Matrix comes out with a killer server and client combo in the next few years, it could take off and really work. But I think if too many server implementations are created, they will end up in a state where its not possible to add new features anymore because a large percent of the user base won't be able to use them because their server implementation does not support them.
Having compatibility between systems like between discord and telegram is just going to be a nightmare no matter what you do since they both want to decide on their own what the features should be.
We have plenty of other successful interoperable standards. HEVC. Wifi. Even Javascript. Sure, perhaps bureaucracy has caused them to move more slowly than they could, but on the whole these forums produce good technologies.
I'd offer an alternative explanation for why we haven't seen interoperable communication software—because proprietary systems make more money.
Wifi, HEVC, and to some extent JS have a single owner or group which is able to make authoritative decisions which improves things.
Its easy for the MPEG group to say, this is our new standard. Thats what it is, not debate. But imagine trying to come out with Email 2 and getting that to work on every email server and client.
Not being the most popular at any given time does not mean it's impossible. IRC (and XMPP for that matter) has been around for a long time and it's still possible to run your own server or connect to someone elses, usually with a choice of multiple clients.
How many "innovators" have been born and died in the time that IRC has been around? It seems to be that proprietary stacks are impossible long term, while IRC and open standards continue to exist and evolve, even if they aren't popular right now.
IRC still exists but the age or IRC is long over. Sure, people still use it, but some people still use myspace. IRC is lacking most of the features that the average person considers the bare minimum level of features.
Being able to see messages while your computer was turned off is bare minimum. Being able to use your phone to connect and receive push notifications is bare minimum. Being able to share a photo is bare minimum. Having a profile picture is bare minimum.
Some of these features can be sort of had with client extensions or middle steps like irc bouncers but the average user does not care for this. It should just work and every other platform just works.
The average user also doesn't care if the proprietary messaging platform of the day dies and is replaced with a new one because its easy to sign up again on the next platform
Not sure if it's a counterpoint or an agreement, but Communication softwares are already not interoperable with themselves:
* In discord, you need to install the "native" client to be able to share your screen or see other peoples' shared screen. The web client cannot.
* Microsoft Teams in Firefox does not do Calls; "Native" Microsoft Teams in Linux cannot "raise hand"; Microsoft Teams in Chromium on Linux cannot do the background thing.
Some of those may have evolved, I have only used Teams in chromium recently.
Lots of software does not do calls on Firefox because they rely on a broken alpha WebRTC implementation in chromium and don't work with the proper implementation in Firefox. Chromium is the new IE6 (and Safari is IE5.5)
Could MS really build the Discord tech stack themselves though? At first blush it might be possible in theory if you look at only the key algorithms, architecture, and compute needed.
But what about actually getting the engineering headcount to execute? And to build it with enough flexibility to experiment and adapt to users? And to pick technical challenges that will actually keep the headcount engaged?
Google Plus seems to be a pretty good example of a competitor doing a copycat, doing a decent job technically, but then the product fell apart. Plus didn’t hit Facebook-scale growth, but it was wildly popular with certain niches like the CS academic community. Imagine if Plus had channels (in addition to circles), less corporate emojis, and 100% private circles. Then you’d have most of Discord, no?
But Google didn’t build into Plus that ability to iterate. And the headcount got interested in other things like AI. And Alphabet got to join cookies through unified auth to get their ad targeting more competitive with FB. So the Googlers had their giant offsite in Maui and then let Plus die.
So I don’t know if the tech stack in this Discord deal is necessarily worthless. The user engagement is probably worth more, but the software is part of the whole organism.
Theyve already solved the engineering part with Microsoft Teams. Even the UX is similar.
If they wanted to make a discord alternative, they'd just repaint MS Teams to have a more gamer-like UI.
Are you talking about their backend tech specifically? Because the MS Teams frontend is lacking far behind Discord in terms of polish. It has 5% of the features and already performs like a bloated mess. It's hard to tell how robust their backend tech is but given that opening new voice channels takes 5-10 seconds, or that they had to update the client to have more inaccurate online statuses to fix backend performance issues does not give me much confidence either.
I guess I would suggest though that while something like Discord could be recreated by a Microsoft, the culture that grew it can't be replicated. Using Teams, it feels like a product built by committee where it's so disorienting and slow compared to Discord. They're different target markets (gamers vs businesses) but I imagine Teams by a different culture would turn out entirely differently
Welcome, men and ladies of Discord. Rather than incestuously promoting the same faces from within, you represent fresh blood, new ideas. Everything teams was not. It is my honor to personally welcome you all to Microsoft.
Microsoft acquired Forethought, LLC in 1987. PowerPoint is still among the most used applications in the world. Plenty of counter-anecdotes to choose from too, if you want to try to draw conclusions.
You are also assuming that A) Microsoft cannot learn from past mistakes, and B) the blame for Skype falls squarely on Microsoft's shoulders.
Discord is currently at the top of its game (more like PowerPoint was), whereas Skype was suffering from mismanagement under eBay. Microsoft was supposedly hands off on Skype in the first few years post-acquisition and most of the mistakes that killed Skype were some combination of projects already started under eBay management or still all planned "inside the house" at Skype. (Microsoft in 1987 was said to be hands off with PowerPoint for the first few years following acquisition so as not to interfere with the creative efforts already in progress. Microsoft in 2021 is supposedly still remaining pretty hands off in GitHub management, other than replacing the outgoing CEO.) Microsoft's MO seems to be to give acquisitions enough rope to either succeed or hang themselves, and Skype sounds like they took that second option.
No, I'm reserving judgement. I hope Microsoft won't ruin Discord, not least because I use it fairly heavily and I don't want to have to switch (again).
I'm just noting that at least from the outside, the Skype case looks much more relevant to this situation than the PowerPoint one.
Unlike github which is/was relatively "safe-ish", Discord is full of boards for distributing fan porn, real porn, warez, etc.... I'd expect if MS buys it it will be like the Tumblr porn purge.
There are tons of pateron pron creators running discords for their patrons.
I happen to write erotica and be on a number of Discord servers that have adult artwork. Having Microsoft purge all adult content from Discord would destroy entire communities of people who are doing no harm to other people.
American attitudes towards pornography really irk me. It's just as much free speech as any other speech.
As a precaution, you may want to set up fallback servers on either Matrix or set up your own Mumble server and make a web page describing how to use them ahead of time. Such things may prove useful in the event that Microsoft has Discord outages.
Unfortunately, I don't own the servers and it is highly unlikely people will move to either of those services.
Right now, one of the communities I'm in is split between Telegram and Discord. We had a Slack server for many, many years and no one would use it, no matter how hard we pushed. Moving Slack to Discord was a roaring success. We still have more people on Telegram despite moving all official activities to Discord.
For sure, I have had similar experiences. The only time people would use servers I hosted was if Discord/other were down hard. I am only suggesting it as a precaution so you don't lose track of your community. Another option may be a mailing list so that your community can at least stay in touch if MS disband all communities that have adult themes.
This is not true. It gives children a false impression of what sex is like in reality. I don't need a scientific paper to tell me that children looking at this stuff is bad.
The rise in the number of incelibates around the world is dangerous and it must be due to the wide availability of pron. Just take a look at what's happening in Japan.
Parents who don't want their children viewing this kind of thing can't block all the 18+ discord servers. (Although I personally don't think kids should be using Discord given the amount of grooming that goes on).
Yet another think of the children argument here. Should we also purge all graphic gaming content from discord and ban action movies because they give a false impression of what real world is like?
Further it’s the parents job to supervise their children and not the corporation. In addition one would think that your little 10 year old shouldn’t be playing GTA 5 on discord in the first place and that is more disturbing than seeing a naked boob.
American’s attitude towards sexuality and nudity is quite conservative if you ask me.
"Think of the children" is a valid argument. I don't know if there are more in-depth studies, but this study hints that the average age of first exposure to porn is at around 13 years old and the youngest being 5:
We've taught children myths, legends and now cartoons and comic book heroes for centuries, that is fine. What isn't fine is exposing them to pornography at such young age. When you're addicted to pornography you progressively seek more and more hardcore stuff, as anything milder doesn't do the trick anymore. If you want a population full of sex offenders, then go ahead.
In the US, the rates of sexual violence and violence in general has been decreasing year over year despite the estimated reporting percentage of rape increasing.
If anything, the accessibility of pornography is reducing violence.
> It gives children a false impression of what sex is like in reality.
So does every other part of American culture. I'm throughly unmoved that producing adult material in an artistic sense is harmful to society. (None of the communities I'm in allow photo or videos. Or minors. We ban them when we find them.) Such things have always existed and have always been a part of human culture, despite various moral panics.
The assumption that incelibatity is due to pornography is unproven. The Japanese birth rate started dropping in the 1950s, well before this could be a factor.
> American attitudes towards pornography really irk me. It's just as much free speech as any other speech.
First, it's not just Americans. Second, it's not free speech and it never was. People who came up with free speech supported obscenity laws. The main purpose of free speech is to ensure that you can criticize the people in power.
Regardless of moving goal posts, I don't buy this argument.
If we went back in the last century, they'd throw me in an asylum for being bipolar. Heck, I'd probably be forcibly sterilized due to the US being the first country to support and implement eugenics.
Violations of civil liberties in the US have always existed to great extremes.
The problem with this approach is that the value of the acquired products falls dramatically. Think about Facebook and Oculus: many people are simply fed up with spying Behemoths controlling all aspects of their lives. I don't believe it would be as dramatic with Microsoft and Discord, but sure some users will rebel. Good for the landscape - Discord basically monopolized gaming communication market, it's time for some interesting developments, this time preferably with open standards.
The users of Discord use it because it's better designed, marketed, and implemented than alternatives.
If Microsoft was capable of building equivalent technology on their own they had plenty of opportunity to do so.
Maybe in Microsoft's eyes they are paying for the users, but from another perspective the users are only using Discord and not Skype, MSN, Teams, etc, because Microsoft has not built/maintained something as good, and maybe isn't capable of doing so.
Microsoft has an important business reason as to why GitHub needs to retain its quality - they have access to a universe of confidential corporate data - source codes, inventions, product issues, workflows and so on. They can look up what companies are up to and use that to create their own competing products. Something like Amazon does when they ask sellers on the platform to reveal all their leads and suppliers and then introduce their own cheaper version of the product. Only that Microsoft does not have to ask for this, as they already have all this data.
I don't think there is evidence now that Microsoft is doing anything with this data, but it only takes a change in the management.
> No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own.
Surprisingly, they didn’t. I am using Microsoft Teams for work daily, and that is the buggiest and the most poorly designed application I have ever used, not to mention their awful macOS integration or how they synchronise notification statuses between devices.
I read somewhere that the Teams concept came out of a hackathon where someone integrated skype with sharepoint. It still feels like it is a proof-of-concept rather than a production ready application.
That’s a fairly cynical take. A more generous interpretation is that they’re not buying an application, they’re buying a working business — which is more than you can say about many startup acquisitions.
Funny this reversal of network effect. In the decades prior people didn't feel negatively pressured to join, say the landline network. I may be wrong but it felt like an obvious desire and benefit.
Anyone who's familiar with Teams should be well aware that, though Microsoft surely could build a decent chat application, they certainly don't seem motivated to.
"No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own."
MS is actually one of the few companies that could try.
Most companies are unable to innovate even with a clean spec in front of them.
With the 'real time' aspect of Discord, which makes it much harder than MSTeams/Slack .... it's that much riskier.
Look at how s**t Skype is.
So the question then becomes one of risk on the product side.
But the brand and userbase is the valuable thing at the end, 'Mixer' was never able to catch up to Twitch despite having a decent product and XBox lockin.
> "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to"
That is why we need more GDPR, more laws giving you right to see all the data they've gather on you, along with how they connect it to other data they have on you too.
This way people have a chance to educate themselves on all the things they gave up in order to have better emoji (as one friend suggested that the emojis was what Signal lacks awhile back).
Introducing Microsoft Teams for Gamers, a new platform that empowers gamers to get the best out of their gaming sessions. Game, meet, chat, call, and collaborate in just one place.
Discord Meet Now is now available in Windows 10 taskbar so you can meet with a simple click. No sign ups. No downloads required.
Would you like to try Discord in the new Microsoft Edge, "the browser recommended by Microsoft"?
Microsoft software is a clusterfuck. The branding is very clean. It's not the marketing guys' fault that MS bought 3 different solutions to the same problem.
How is the branding clean when you have different, thoroughly incompatible products under the same name and go to great lengths to blur the line between them? I can think of the following instances:
- Visual Studio (the real deal), Visual Studio for Mac (MonoDevelop), Visual Studio Code (Atom clone)
- OneNote (the original, part of Office), OneNote for Windows 10 (nerfed UWP rewrite)
- Skype, Skype for Business (Lync)
My issue is that the same name is slapped onto different products that have significant user-visible differences and lack compatibility with one another. That's why I'm not including Outlook, because every product that is called "Outlook" does at least talk to Exchange and doesn't create its own island.
Very true. It is the years and years of crap needed for backwards compatibility. They really should make a separate Windows without backwards compatibility.
Discord would be crazy to not take this deal. They could go public, but they have no clear monetization path to ever reach that valuation.
For Microsoft, however, it holds incredible strategic importance to their Xbox division. If suddenly the #1 gaming voice and text chat on PC is fully cross-compatible with Xbox and Xbox services it puts Sony at a huge ecosystem disadvantage. When added to the context of Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda and their shift in strategy to Xbox as a service it makes perfect sense.
If they start requiring a Microsoft account to sign in like they did with Mixer then I know a bunch of people will be out, including me.
If they treat it like GitHub and let it be it's own thing then maybe I'll stick around. I doubt they're going to treat it like that though because they don't treat gamers like they do devs.
Maybe now's a good time for somebody to start building an alternative.
I wonder. You are right, they would probably force accounts become Microsoft accounts at some point.
I think there is also going to be higher public expectations of moderating and monitoring of what is discussed on Discord if Microsoft owns them. That may not be a headache that Microsoft even wants to deal with.
The issue is that we are entering a phase where secondary services are adding value on top of discord. Things like Patreon integration for content creators, numerous service specific bots and a growing number of VOIP related integrations (for example https://craig.chat/home/) make it harder to consider alternatives as replacements.
Shouldn't Amazon also be bidding on Discord? Discord and Twitch are already a perfect marriage and any chance of losing that could seriously stunt Twitch.
OBS kind of solved the UX issues of setting up a Twitch stream with a single host in a nice fashion. But there's no simple way to set up shows that need to mux multiple source streams from multiple hosts (e.g. interviews, discussions...). Discord could probably fill that niche with a good integration.
IMHO vertical integrations through acquisitions on such a scale and of such importance ( Microsoft gobbling up studios and gaming tooling such as Discors) should be investigated and stoped on anti-trust grounds, or at least MS should be forced to do interoperability. It will drastically tilt the scales towards Xbox and MS cloud gaming if there's a tight integration with Discord and many Microsoft-owned exclusives.
I know it's tempting to compare Slack and Discord, but they really are different applications for different use cases. Discord makes a terrible Slack. Slack makes an okay Discord.
The permissions models for the two are wildly different because of the different use cases. Discord has a lot more by way of moderating and exposing different defined subsets of your server to different admin defined user groups. Slack has opt in on a per channel basis per user and unlike discord channels, any user can just create one rather than being these things admins have to set out and organise ahead of time. Slack has pinning as a "anyone can pin" default, the thinking being users pin stuff for theirs or others future reference, discord ties it to same permission as deleting other user's messages, thinking pinning is a moderator activity for making announcements.
Server admins control users on slack on the other hand. Your server admin can deactivate your entire account, DMs are tied to a server and your server admin can read them. It's a business tool, the expectation is employers have access to your business communications. The same on discord would be a massive privacy violation. But now as a business, how do you ensure that users aren't sharing passwords in chat, that your departed employee doesnt have a ton of company secrets in their dms etc
The whole channel model is radically different, with Discord having terrible defaults (for any use case imho, but definitely for companies). Discord and Slack are superficially similar, but it breaks down once you get down into the details. Discord is built around having a larger 'untrusted' community, whereas Slack is built for employees at a company who are trusted that little bit more.
You cannot leave a channel in Discord, and by default it will notify you of every message sent in every channel on the server. The best you can do is mute a channel and select 'Hide muted channels'.
Discord has far superior voice comms - in both quality and features (Voice Channels are great), and then there's the whole "roles" system.
What I would do for cross-platform voice chat with Playstation. I held a small amount of hope for Discord coming to Playstation (and Xbox), but I guess that's gone now.
I don't know if it's a huge money maker, but I see a lot of my friends buying their Nitro subscription service at $10 a month, so they should at least be breaking even?
There's a $5/month Classic option which still gives you all the vanity features without the server boost scheme.
If you get value from Discord, would be sad to see it go out of business, and have steady income, consider subscribing at that tier.
$5 feels right to me for cross-server emoji, control over your user hash, and the animated avatar. I never really bought into the server boost thing, myself.
One thing that Microsoft always messes up (especially with its acquisitions) is the Login. Microsoft apps have the worst login flows I've seen - not only is it inconsistent across sites, it is also slow often requiring many redirects.
It may be just me, but the Login experience is an essential one for me.
Yep, Microsoft login experience has been getting worse over the years.
The current one I go through for Office 365 is like this:
- type in email, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- type in password, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- 2FA, click "next"
- wait for next page to load
- click "next"
Well we all wanted "OAuth", "OIDC" and other related stuff...for privacy! Now we wonder why chat apps can't interoperate, we have walled gardens, Google's killing the open web, and numerous other dysfunctional things going on on the internet that I can't enumerate fully without making it all sound like baseless rambling.
Let's not forget the wonderful "we've logged you out, you can close this tab" which doesn't have a way to log back in, without re-opening the link. The flow you mentioned is similar for Google, though, and it's annoying there as well, but at least there you just get asked to type your password/2fa again when your session expires and you can get back to what you were doing.
That first redirect send users to correct URL for login, “ballmer@corp.contoso.com” might have to go “server23.auth.contoso-logins.com” and that first next button works like a mini search engine to make that work.
Perhaps the most contributing factor that kicked off the chains of event that resulted in the mess of that chain of the event is that sometimes the “domain” part of RADIUS or other authentication servers(called “realms”) don’t resolve, because they aren’t FQDN, in the same way com.companyname.myapp1 never is. On top of that, you would want to be able to log in with non-matching realms in ID, such as ballmer1@microsoft.com on contoso.com, so it’s always just a long String with at signs and dots with no discoverability anyway.
They're probably hoping you'll just have to do that once in your lifetime, then as they aquire or embrace, extend and extinguish all competitors you're forever logged in to everything you'll ever need to be.
They still beat the Sony Playstation login experience, which just flat out doesnt even (or didnt for the longest time) work on desktop Safari. Or if you use Chrome, you get infinte Captachas
I suppose this means Discord for Enterprise is never happening, which stinks because it honestly is the most user friendly out of all of these chat applications with the team-> channel setup. Kind of reminiscent of Basecamp in the project management space, in that respect.
Maybe they’ll take some performance and UX cues and add them to Teams (but I’m saying this about the people who decided to make a greenfield chat/collaboration tool and make the file storage backend SharePoint, so, I suppose I’ll just cry)
We used Discord at work for team chat for about a month before upper management found out and dictated that everyone use Teams because it's free as part of Office 365.
Discord worked so well for everyone on different platforms and Teams has got so many problems.
Management never seems to understand anything besides direct dollars. How much time has it cost the company to switch to Teams? It's definitely not zero.
Teams also has an SLA and built in policies for retention, search, and auditing, which Discord does not have because it's a free, consumer service. Which is why I desperately want them to make a enterprise version.
I may be in the minority but Discord has a really confusing UI. It's so different to anything else and all the controls are just sort of thrown somewhere (e.g. user preferences).
Slack is much much better in that regard (though not perfect).
Matrix is comparatively lacking in features, tends to be somewhat slow, and is not a platform that any kid can sign up on for free and be chatting on any device within minutes.
I hope things will improve with Matrix, but for now I also hope that MS doesn't totally fuck up Discord.
Also slightly terrifying are the privacy implications. I never expected privacy with Discord, but now that MS is involved I expect that every interaction with the interface will be tracked, analyzed, and used to target ads at me. And is waiting to be exfiltrated in a data leak.
Matrix won't run forever (they're also burning through cash right now), and neither will Discord.
All these platforms are only "better" than IRC because they're giving investor money away to kids.
By the time the VC money is gone, we'll all be back on IRC. And all the effort spent on integrations with platforms that used predatory pricing to destroy competition, could instead have been spent on open protocols.
>Matrix won't run forever (they're also burning through cash right now)
Matrix is an open protocol; it doesn't need a company behind it to continue existing, unlike Discord.
If you mean Element (formerly New Vector), are they? I'd believe that they're not raking in the dough or anything, but they've gotten some good government contracts in the past few years so I'd assume they have some money.
speaking as CEO for Element, we're doing okay actually. In fact we could be profitable right now, but instead we chose to hire more folks to focus on improving Element's UX and make sure we can be a FOSS alternative to Slack/Teams/Discord which if anything is a step up on UX (just as GitLab more than punches its weight against GitHub).
Sure, but you either continue expanding, never reaching profitability until you're so large you'll have to use creative monetization efforts (as Discord did), or you'll have to stop growth at some point (like IRCCloud did).
I've talked with a few of your devs at the chaos congress in leipzig, and as Quasseldroid dev and contributor to IRCv3 I know the issues too well.
The constant new features, more performance, more storage, etc as Discord offers them is just not possible in a sustainable way. Especially group video calls in massive communities of non-paying users (which is common on Discord) is just almost impossible to do in a profitable way.
That said, you've had the most success in open communication so far, and I sincerely wish you good luck with it in the future :)
Edit: I misread the pricing page, see the reply below. Keeping my post for archival purposes.
One problem with Element is that there's no "individual $5/mo" plan or a "you and your buddies pool your pocket change every month to keep a server up" plan. And the free hosts all have bad performance which leads to a bad experience.
The minimum plan is $20/mo for 10 users. That's a bit steep for a group of kids to pool their money for, compared to old-school Teamspeak hosting.
And I don't know of any company that I can pay for personal Matrix hosting, or any company that offers a Discord Nitro equivalent, where I can pay a few bucks a month and get this or that extra perk. Where is the Fastmail of Matrix?
Also, the UX of Element flat-out sucks. It's like those "we have X at home" memes.
> The minimum plan is $20/mo for 10 users. That's a bit steep for a group of kids to pool their money for, compared to old-school Teamspeak hosting.
I'm not sure where you got that number, as the minimum enterprise plan is Nickel, which is $10 a month.
They also have Element Home[0] now, which is $10 a month for 5 users, plus custom domain.element.io server. Costs $2 a month for additional users, and I believe they're adding more options.
> And I don't know of any company that I can pay for personal Matrix hosting
First google result leads you to matrix.org/hosting which lists Ungleich.ch as a non-Element option. I've seen at least one other place also offering it, but admittedly I do not remember their name and that's still a small number.
> the UX of Element flat-out sucks
Eh, to each their own. I don't mind it too much (the Android app is great for me) and it's getting better over time.
I misread the pricing page, thanks for setting me straight. $10/month for that is actually perfect.
Still, I think the Element desktop client is really lacking compared to Discord and I haven't been able to get any of the alternative ones working smoothly.
The problem with Matrix right now is that it's too difficult to self-host and Matrix-the-organization doesn't have the resources to offer seamless, Discord-like performance on their default/official instance.
I would like to see an easy way to integrate Matrix to existing communities, and i think that is the niche they should be targetting, not standalone matrix servers that come and go.
The federated login thing is really not something that web services should be doing, it should be provided by the browser or some public system.
I currently use mattermost as discord backup/replacement
I'm curious, what features exactly you have in mind? The basic text chat feature is here, in both public and private form (tho, the concept of rooms for private messages is kinda weird) so is audio and video but I haven't tried that yet.
It's the little things. Integrations with Twitch and gaming platforms. Rich support for "bots". Fun custom emotes that you can use across all servers. Change your nickname. Server roles.
Not to mention the default Matrix experience is somewhat slow and clunky. The client ecosystem just isn't great yet, and there's no free-as-in-beer homeserver hosting that also has good performance. Broke teenagers who want to talk about Javascript, anime, and keyboards aren't going to pay for or self-host a homeserver.
Matrix has much better bot support than Discord. Discord bots are nerfed users, you can't mention them (well you can mention their role, but that doesn't relate to the names that they are using in chat). Matrix as an open protocol has full bot support. In fact this is what makes bridging work so well, bots have access to everything that a regular user has.
Microsoft buys communities. From the 20% Facebook investment to LinkedIn, GitHub, Minecraft, etc they are aggregating and integrating massive, generation defining audiences. Discord is most definitely that for gamers, pandemic teens, and frankly any SMB with foresight. It’s a fantastic platform. It has the same moderation issues that all online communities have, but it generally happens at a server level.
It’s very much a fit for their portfolio, and it’s a great time to sell for them. Nitro can’t do that much in sales, but certainly Microsoft will find a way to make money with it.
Please don't do this. Microsoft chat services are the absolute worst. I've had to use Skype for years after Microsoft purchased it and it was bad. I have to use Teams for work and it's just abysmal. I don't know why but everything Microsoft touches in this space turns to absolute trash.
God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff?
I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case.
I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).
Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779):
A series of headlines:
2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1]
2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2]
2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3]
2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4]
1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/
2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/
4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?
Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest of the world. Obviously though, this P2P structure would make interception of message content by Skype corporate rather implausible! There's a pretty good figure and explanation in the ars article above.
Microsoft never really seemed to know what to do with Skype and I suspect because of that they never devoted the resources to build it out and make it better. It checked a box for them when selling to enterprise customers, but they failed to imagine what it could become.
And I agree-Microsoft Teams is solid, but could use a faster and better designed user interface. The video chat feature is also sub standard compared to Zoom, but it largely hits the good enough threshold.
I have had to move from Slack to Teams. Despite what everyone says about Slack, Teams is much, much worse because of the complex and incomprehensible integrations with Active Directory.
I have had invitations to meetings that I can click on and that don't trigger the Teams app. The "Join meeting" button doesn't show up in Firefox, and even in Chrome, I get sucked into a redirect hell.
I even have meetings created without the meeting invitation link - despite the meeting having been created within Teams itself. I have resorted to inviting people to Google meets just to get stuff clarified.
The other thing that sucks about Azure AD and Teams is that if you invite someone from outside your tenant into a meeting and their IT admin has disabled guest login into other tenants (not uncommon in places like banks where they don’t want people leaving credentials everywhere, even if heavily scoped), they will get a cryptic error message and you will never know that they got an error unless they call you out of band and tell you, and by that point you’re probably 15 minutes into the meeting.
This was the reason the last place I worked switched to Zoom, since if you invited someone outside the org it just popped up a box asking them for a name.
Microsoft has bought Linkedin, Skype, Bungie, Bethesda, Github etc. Is this what tech has become? The titans are buying up everything and tech becomes 5 companies in the US and 3 or so in China? Feels better to have a wide breath of companies for healthy competition and innovation.
Then perhaps (SV startup?) companies should start thinking about creating profitable businesses in the first place instead of living on borrowed money?
They have accumulated a cash war chest that is so big it's a liability... their way to deal with that is to acquire and offset costs and taxes which enables them to get bigger faster.
The system is working. but only really for the biggest.
Microsoft acquiring those companies doesn't really hurt competition.
Tech M&A (and particularly the list of examples you pick) is often driven by the desire to acquire talent, technology or capabilities that you don't already have, expanding the scope of the company. If you can integrate the acquired asset with your existing offerings, the theory goes, you will be able to create something greater than the sum of the parts.
Pretty standard Microsoft strategy really. Once they decide they dominate a market they figure there's no reason to invest another cent into improving their product offering. See also: Internet Explorer
Hopefully, things are different under Satya, who wisely has kept GitHub at arms length.
But it is hard to think of other US large cap companies with such a record of being a Destroyer of Acquisitions.
Hopefully. Minecraft is another example of something they didn’t abjectly fuck up. It’s possible for them to do the right thing.
From what I see over my spawn’s shoulders, Discord is substantially better than Slack. Hope they don’t kill Discord with enterpriseyness and keep it more on the gamer side.
GitHub had some value as an independent concern though.
Discord doesn't. Either it has to start monetising so it doesn't lose money (which it could do regardless of Microsoft so the acquisition doesn't add much value) or Microsoft justifies the acquisition by integrating it with it's other services (probably gaming) and taking advantage of the user base.
Not GP, but Teams on Windows 10 is a great example of how Electron apps can be terrible. It is sluggish, uses a lot of RAM and causes other Chromium based apps to run out of memory, crashes every so often, has serious issues with logging in after a password change, is not really feature rich, its User Voice forum for voting on issues and feature requests has many that have been asked for years by a lot of people but not prioritized and so on.
I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years).
In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained.
Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.
They also made a change recently so the X button does not close the app so when it goes funny I have to open the task manager to restart the thing. If I wanted to minimize the program I would have hit the - instead.
It doesn't even, as far as I can tell, show when I'm not logged in in the taskbar. I've worked a few hours before and had to ask a question and then realised I wasn't even signed in. At least Lync and Skype for Business made this obvious.
Plus full screen isn't. I have to ask people to zoom in when they screen share.
The 3 biggest problems I have with it are search, history, and stability. Scrolling back in time past a few weeks will frequently just crash Teams for me. The search Teams has is beyond basic and genuinely unhelpful most of the time, and I frequently just don't get my alerts despite being available and someone directly @ing me. Then there are tons of small problems like Teams automatically setting me as away if I don't touch my mouse for 15 minutes or sometimes I'll have Teams on a second monitor while working in a primary monitor and Teams will have set me as away for no reason. Also Teams threads are literally the worst UX I have ever had. I am not exaggerating
On MacOS there’s some phantom window object that gets created so that you cannot CTLR-<TAB> back to the Teams app. I believe the MacOS window bar indicates it’s “Teams Notifications” or some such thing. Basically these Electron apps are just incredibly poorly integrated in the OS.
Then there’s the painful markup capabilities when messaging. Oh if I paste in an IP address or something and then I want to style it as code, the backticks are ineffective since and pasted text somehow carries its own styling which apparently cannot be overridden. So the backticks just show up as literals.
Pasting large console output generally sucks as well. Out teams tends to switch over to Slack to paste big text dumps.
Teams uses their own terrible notification system (that's the purpose of the invisible window - it is actually the notification and becomes visible when needed). It's not even an Electron thing - Slack successfully uses macOS system notifications despite being an Electron app too.
The UI is so ugly. The use of contrast between elements is so half-assed that it’s hard to find basic buttons like send, attach, end call.
They mess with the Windows audio driver somehow, so even though I have an audio interface that works with Windows for Ableton and Zoom browser calls, Teams will not permit it to be used in calls. It will start the call and then every time you speak say “This microphone isn’t compatible with Teams”, so it is detecting sound and choosing not to pass it. There’s no reason for the application to do anything other than refer to the default audio device but for some reason it doesn’t do that.
I use Teams for education.
I spend a lot of time spelunking through online resources. Unlike file browsers or browsers where you can open documents in new windows or tabs, Teams can only do one thing at a time. The back button is not predictable.
Together this makes it several steps behind poking through a public ftp server.
I find teams to be buggy, confusing, and unresponsive. It also enables fairly undiscoverable and frustrating experiences like those sites within tabs. Then there's the notification overload and strange threading/discussions. I've gotten used to slack, hip chat, and old skype for business, but I have not yet got used to teams even after years is usage.
It just doesn't work? I've tried multiple times on various projects, but "using" Teams on Linux or Mac is a sure way to loose contact with your team. Skype works much better (or at all I guess for me).
There are better alternatives that respect user privacy and freedom, i.e. that actively encourage alternative clients instead of banning people for using them over bloated electron garbage.
If users cared about privacy no one would use Google/Android. If they cared about freedom they wouldn't use Apple/iphone. Frankly those issues, important as they may be to you, are low priorities for most users.
Nobody ever lists any alternatives. I've used some of the most popular and they are halfway to discord's levels in terms of tech and 1% the way in user base.
> they are halfway to discord's levels in terms of tech and 1% the way in user base.
We're comparing 20 unpaid volunteers (IRC, Mumble), a dozen employees of a small business (Teamspeak) to a several million dollar large VC funded team able to run at a loss (Matrix) and a couple billion dollar large VC funded team able to give away stuff they don't even have (Discord).
You can't compete with free beer. Especially not as a bunch of unpaid volunteers.
In the end, the VC money will dry up and these companies will end, as they'll either have to increase prices, reduce services or sell out their users.
Because my company's response to asking for Teams/Slack is "why do you need it when we have google chat/meet?" Google has positioned gchat as an alternative to Slack/Team.
To be honest, my friends and I just want the P2P reliability of Skype back. MS just ruined the UI and experience so badly that Discord, despite being slower, was preferable.
For example, I got hacked on Skype. Already I’m upset because it wasn’t my fault. However, I couldn’t delete the malicious link it messaged to all of my friends because reasons. Instead, I had to contact each individually to tell them not to click the link.
It’s a lot of stuff like that where Skype actively worked against its user base on each new release.
Have you tried using it without a headset? Echo cancelation practically doesn't exist. It's absolutely behind every other voip implementation I used. Clients are half broken, barely integrated, and lose settings all the time.
We use it at work, and 95% of users have issues with it.
I have to open, close, then open again the macos client every single day when I start it because my keyboard shortcut doesn't work otherwise.
I don't even mind the horrible UI/UX if it actually worked as expected.
Most people I know use Discord like IRC during the day. Voice chat if and when they play games. Or big events, like election night or big sporting events. It's not all voice chat all the time.
Mumble has a terrible user experience, especially for non technical users. It also covers a really small subset of discord features, the Voice Chat.
Don't missundertand me, on a technical level Mumble is impressive and can do voice channels with thousands of participants, but on the clientside its just a mess.
I've run a Mumble server for my friends group for a while. It worked fine and had a couple of nice features, e.g. that anyone could create a temporary channel and move there with some people and when they all quit the channel would be removed again. This way everyone could organize as they see fit.
But the audio setup and tweaking was a nightmare. It was the biggest problem for every participant to tune and tweak their levels in a way that would work good, it was very, very frustrating.
The chat was also super barebones and of course no way to stream video.
I think "fantastic" is a stretch. Even Discord's weirdly unconventional UI is better than Mumble and as others have said the practical sound quality is way better.
It would be great if someone could make a modern Mumble client.
Imagine if Twitch had went all in on becoming a Twitch / Patreon platform instead of the failed game store. One stop shop for monetizing and interacting with your communities.
When MS bought Skype and finally merged the IDs with Hotmail and Windows, I was devestated. I had never once changed my password on Hotmail since probably 1996 and it was just a four letter word. So, one day, say 2014, I login to Skype after forever and reset the password but now it also resets the same Hotmail account I used for that Skype ID. I had that password for almost 20 years and bet it was uncrackable since they had stopped allowing less than 4+ digits ages ago. They even scrambled my hotmail's Outgoing user name in the process but whatever - it was just for spam accounts anyhow although I was hopping mad at the time.
I think we agree on the login-is-a-pain side of things but I strongly believe passwords should be disposable. If I even catch a hint of a password being leaked or insecure I cycle it.
I'd hide a 20 year old password in shame haha, no matter how many characters it has
I really hope in the future that a policy can be set in place that prevents these types of acquisitions (on this scale, specifically) from happening. A lot of my favorite products have been ruined by acquisitions like this, and its clear that Microsoft will follow suite considering their track record.
Does the concept of antitrust even exist anymore? Or is this our future: new startups grow for a decade than get absorbed by one of ten monster corporations.
This is surprising given Discord had 2 fundraising rounds in 2020 alone. If that wasn't to gain momentum for an IPO, then they must just be losing cash very quickly.
For MS, the obvious integration point is Xbox Game Pass, but Discord has been busy pushing gamers off their platform for the past year in favor of broader communities. It'll be interesting to see if they reverse course here, or if MS will position Discord as a free community version of Teams.
If you're looking for a better alternative, check out Guilded (YCS17) - https://www.guilded.gg
I've heard users say Guilded makes Discord look like Skype, but didn't realize how accurate that would become.
Disclaimer: I work at Guilded, but views are my own, etc
GitHub 7.5B. This one has terrible UI is 100x easier than Discord from UI and engineering point of view and will open for disruption from Discord like team in the future. It's very easy to imagine much better GitHub. With Discord you can think of many cool features to add but that's about it. It is a pleasure to use and has fantastic UI.
Skype - 8.5B 10 years ago for a steaming pile of shit software.
LinkedIn - 26b for trivial (in comparison to Discord) software full of dark patterns people don't really like to use.
It might just be Microsoft best acquisition. Let's hope they leave the original team in charge and let them continue to work on it. Discord is exceptional but there are still many cool things that can be added to it.
I feel like what a lot of people miss about the decline of Skype was the move to smartphones. Chat, audio and video tech built for PCs with wired connections all needed to be replaced with stuff that accounted for the growing number of mobile devices. I remember the brief period where I tried to use AIM on my early Android phone, and it turned it into a skillet, basically, and the battery life was cut by hours just by running AIM. It's not a coincidence that _every_ chat app (text, audio, video) that was popular before smartphones were replaced by ones that were written after smartphones became popular, and it makes no sense to analyze Skype outside of that larger trend.
Skype is still great. The only issue with it is spam. Given my popular in Russia name (I'm actually Bulgarian) and that fact that I have there "nikolay" username, I get constantly contacted by Russian scammers or just random folks. Same with Telegram. There's no way to configure my account to allow messages only from friends or block certain countries. Basically, I can't use either service - it's overflowing with spam and there's nothing I can do about. Well, I did actually try to start blocking people as some keep sending me messages on Skype, but guess what - suddenly, my Microsoft account got disabled. I am a paying customers, I have Family Office subscription, premium Outlook mailbox, Skype subscriptions, Xbox, etc. After many days, and multiple escalations, they found the reason! And it was the most stupid one I can ever imagine - my account was blocked and queued up for deletion (it's 20-years-old!), because I was excessively blocking people!!!
In 2015 my Skype install used >3GB of RAM within minutes of launch. Searching for an uncommon term in chatlogs took hours. I've not been able to open it at all for years because it just hangs on boot.
I'm sure that for the average user none of those are concerns because they're talking with a few dozen users at most, but it had incomprehensibly terrible resource management, which is why all the power users jumped ship the second a viable alternative text chat became available.
I think it still carries a lot of legacy of the almost serverless original Skype. A lot of things must be fixed, but it still (I am speaking of today's version) a very solid tool, which I use daily. In addition, it offers a decently priced calling services, which I use, too - much cheaper than those of rivals and quality is great, too.
I really don't think this will happen - Discord has hit a sort of "critical mass" that you don't just kill like it happened with Mixer.
If anything, I hope they will treat it like GitHub and let them act mostly on their own, while actually improving the service.
Recent feature additions point to an Enterprise service they are setting up, so this may be a part of their new strategy while keeping the service accessible to free users despite their crazy operating costs.
Microsoft's strategy with GitHub is very likely to replace their old Azure DevOps (Server) offerings within the next 2-3 years. Then they can cash in on the Windows and mac/Linux crowd at the same time with a single product.
The same will probably happen with Discord inside the Xbox ecosystem where they want to rival Steam with their Xbox game pass. Discord is the perfect community to do it with.
It won't. When Google acquired YouTube, there were similar concerns that the platform would be "corporatized" to death and be replaced. Corporatized, it has been, but its dominance in its marketplace is stronger than ever. Twitch has emerged as a serious competitor for games, but YT remains just as big if not bigger than Twitch in this corner.
GitHub and LinkedIn are similarly thriving under Microsoft's wing, without a Twitch-like competitor in sight.
Instagram is more popular than ever since it was acquired by Facebook.
Discord will be fine. Microsoft has a lot of experience in the gaming space thanks to the Xbox ecosystem of services, and in the online chat room space, thanks to Teams.
10 billion dollars for a software that have no clear competitive advantages other than having a community is simply obscene to me.
The older I get (I'm 39), the less I understand this tech world. Huge valuations thrown out of thin air, indecent crazy ass salaries in the valley, sales of companies in the range of ten of billions. I don't see why I should read tech news anymore, apart from actual tech and not business related news.
I'll go back in my small OSS world where I feel "normal".
Slack is not strategically interesting. They are already eating the enterprise communication market with Teams. Acquiring Slack would basically be a talent and tech hire nothing more... not worth $8B.
Discord gives them something gamers know and love and could be paired with Xbox. Gives them a huge competitive edge against Sony, especially if they intend to build a cross-play centric platform between Windows and Xbox.
Discord is pretty powerful. It needs a security layer and it can be deployed on a corporate network. It’s much better than Cisco teams or Mattermost. Lots of discord groups that are as organized as company serving 1-2k members
Surprisingly enough this gives it more credibility in my book. I refused to use it for a while until a revenue stream was introduced (Nitro) and still gave me an unsettling feeling with all the data harvesting - I still won't download the desktop app simply because of the information it collects about the games you have installed, without the user's consent.
It also feels like there's much less of an inclination of it failing like Skype has, with a high likelihood of joining the Xbox division while keeping the brand.
While I'm sure this is just their way of validating their current market value after their last cash raise. Assuming its real this might actually be a good thing, at least on the technical front. For all the talent at Discord and their impressive efforts as far as core product... their basically non-existent privacy between users is a disturbing joke, and while I want to be polite, i'm just going to quote myself from a comment on the github issue here. https://github.com/discord/discord-api-docs/issues/1393
> I’ll be brutally honest, I am quite disappointed to discover that a service so popular that goes out of its encourage developers to integrate, embed, and build on top of their api, lacks any machine readable API specification for developers. Really, really disappointed
> Edit: This shouldn't be funny. How is the discord public api developers lack of respect for the developers who use their api funny? Standards based api specifications makes it easier for everyone to work with their API. Their API documentation isn’t translated, they have no machine readable API specification to make up for the lack of translated documentation for people who speak languages other than English.
> I am disappointed because this is at odds with their professed goals of being for everyone. Apparently they are only for everyone if you’re a user/customer. Developers better read English and have enough spare time to implement their api from scratch... And before someone mentions their community libraries, I’d argue that being required to use those to get anything practical done, because the official API isn’t specified well enough to just use directly with standard tools, is just a further disappointment.
In Eastern Europe, Viber is pretty popular. Also, many telecoms in Bulgaria, for example, don't account Viber data usage towards your quota, so, even people on the lowest tiers get unlimited free video and audio calls. But some offer this for WhatsApp traffic and many mix and match it with Facebook. So, Microsoft really doesn't pay much attention to Skype - it was the most popular service in Bulgaria, but now almost nobody uses it due to these promos.
I assume those data waivers are set up through deals between the telcos and the companies behind those applications. Microsoft certainly has the resources to arrange similar deals, but they seem to have given up on Skype years ago. Absolutely baffling, especially with the recent valuation of Zoom.
Is crazy that Microsoft had an app chat for years (Messenger not exactly the same) that basically died and now they are buying another chat app for 10b!
Not to forget what a mess they have done with Skype UX.
$14bn on hand per their last earnings report, but any deal like this would be paid for using a mix of MSFT stock plus cash. And yes, at the scale of company we're talking with Microsoft, they can afford any innovation stage company they want.
This is the problem with capitalism - company is starting to be getting too big to fail and the rich are looking to exploit it as a storage of wealth and influence. It has no longer a mission to provide value for customers, but to provide value to shareholders while doing everything in its power to keep or increase the value and stifle the competition, so that customers who no longer like the product had nowhere to go.
When a company reaches that point it should be ordered to split by law or it should not be allowed to be sold to other company.
Another thing that needs fixing is corporate ownership - it should only be possible for individuals to hold shares - as individual will unlikely to have a negative influence as corporate shareholders do.
While I use teamspeak myself and will probably use the new one when it comes out (provided I can still host the server), I don't think they have much of a place in the future because they failed to innovate in time. As the top comment for this article is arguing, Microsoft isn't buying discords shitty js based software or their company for the great culture they might have, they're buying the mainstream teenage communication market. That market isn't interested to switch to a copy of discord where the only perceivable difference is a total lack of users.
The only thing teamspeak will achieve with this update is further alienate it's current userbase that stuck with them for various reasons, may that be the familiarity, the native client, the ability to selfhost or the availiable plugins for games like arma.
There's no solution to this, they're in a position where the only possible move is to lose.
Bombing the Discord interview to be one of the first hires hurt. It was the first time I interviewed for a company that fit my personal interests to a tee but I couldn’t write a web front end from scratch that could do a progressive loading bar before the end of the second interview session. It was embarrassing to be so dependent on my Google tooling that I couldn’t cut it when I was untethered from my work laptop.
I find existing IRC communities/channels almost impossible to penetrate. The people have known each other for so long, that they are effectively a closed group.
And I'm saying this as a person who was a daily IRC user 20 years ago.
in that case, i will ditch discord for zulip chat instead
microsoft buying Github is fine, since everything i do on github is open source, but chat applications are more private, and I would consider ditching discord if a company like microsoft buys discord, just like i ditched tumblr when yahoo bought it
No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own. But users are locked into platforms so heavily and for such long time periods that they themselves give the platform almost the entirety of its value (not to single out Discord, since we all know this is how a lot of acquisitions work in practice). [As an additional caveat, I will add that Discord has definitely built something that its users love, and I don't want to undermine the absurd amount of UI, feature refinement, and scaling work they've done successfully. It isn't negligible, but it is also not >$10B of software engineering.]
I've read many discussions where someone says something of the form "I wish I didn't have to use X, but my friends and family all use it, so I'm forced to", and I think upon consideration of this statement that there is something deeply wrong with the way network effects and protocols function on our Internet such that this can even be a common scenario. We really do have quite a crisis of non-interoperability that generalizes towards a complete lack of user control, be it software, hardware, data, or anything in between.
With that said, if Microsoft does purchase Discord, it might not be as bad as some foretell. While we can point to something like Skype as a failure, we can also point to something like Github, which has been doing very well post-acquisition, and in my opinion hasn't gotten worse at all. It's quite possible they wouldn't want to profit off of Discord individually, but rather use it as another tool to expand their general ecosystem horizontally. On the other hand, they could also do the exact opposite and start harvesting data and maximizing advertisements en masse, lest my post become too optimistic in tone, since this is still HN. Lastly, remember that this is still just a rumor that various news outlets have picked up on and is nowhere near guaranteed.
For those looking for alternatives due to this, or just because they'd like to own their own data for once, I think Matrix is likely to be the best general solution in this product space, both with respect to similar app functionality as well as quality constraints (real encryption, decentralization, FOSS, etc).