
How Discord Went Mainstream - brian-armstrong
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/how-discord-went-mainstream-influencers/584671/
======
sarcasmic
Discord hits a sweet spot of design choices that make sense for online friends
occasionally intermingling with strangers on the Internet. It's free and has
share-URLs to onboard into the product, it's pseudonymous so one can be known
by a chosen persona, it's centrally hosted so DOS-attempts don't impact users'
networks, but the management and moderation of channels and spaces is
distributed. History is searchable, 1-to-1 conversations exist, voice chat is
optional but effortlessly available.

IRC is the ancestor of this kind of chat, but IRC isn't as widely known as it
was in past generations, it has connection privacy challenges, and has a less
cohesive service identity and onboarding story that people have come to expect
with the spread of centralized services. Slack is another modern, centralized
take on IRC, but reveals one's email address, and multiparty voice chat is
gated behind paid plans and limited in size. Gamer voice chat systems are
decentralized and are lacking in text chat. Old instant messaging networks
have been shut down, new ones either don't have desktop clients, don't have a
good group voice chat, or reveal personal info. Skype was fine on all three
and was a hangout tool for many, until Microsoft ran it into the ground.

It's a bit of a meme now that companies are putting out chat services yet no
one can do them right. Surely there's economic forces at play, and rich media
chat is probably expensive, but there's companies with very deep pockets who
could run it as a loss leader just to starve their competitors, to commoditize
their own complements. But cloud storage for individuals or video hosting like
YouTube is also expensive, yet an upgrade path exists for users who want to
pay. Google has thoroughly ceded chat to Facebook and still can't sort their
strategy out, Facebook is just now realizing that they could tackle a more
private chat too and they could satisfy that demand, Microsoft has morphed
Skype into everything from Windows-integrated platformwide IM to a bad
Snapchat clone and back again to a WebRTC shim, this time with a Chrome-only
client. Asian apps capable, but are focusing on other markets and aren't as
well known in the US. Telegram still doesn't have group voice calls. VC
companies focus on the enterprise where willingness to pay is higher, amounts
are higher, but use-cases are different.

------
MivLives
The majority of people I talk to on Discord went the route of AIM/MSN/Yahoo ->
Skype -> Discord. The big thing that I found was that the concept of Discord
server was so significantly better then using group messages on anything
before it that everyone immediately flocked to it. Just the concept of
channels is a new one to a lot of these people. The majority were not gamers
(never used Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble), or particularly technical people (IRC
would not be a good fit).

So props to Discord for making a chat client that's as easy to use as Skype
was.

~~~
Slippery_John
This is exactly what my group went through. The text channels were nice, but
the real killer feature for us was the seamless _voice_ channels. In Skype you
had to be very careful to not call the whole group, you had to manually
construct voice chats every time. Being able to see who's on and who's hanging
out in a voice channel is huge. Wanna play games or just have a chat but
nobody else is on right now? Just drop into a voice channel and people can see
that you're there so they can jump in without having to pee-arrange anything.
Another live saver has been the ability to control, on your side, how you hear
other people. Friend has a new mic that's too loud / quiet? You can adjust
their volume. Somebody being inconsiderate / distracting? Mute them, or turn
their volume down super low.

The general stability was also just fantastic compared to Skype. I used some
Skype last year as part of a teaching role and good grief was it torture in
comparison. Constant dropping, terrible quality, and painful to arrange.

------
SeanDav
I was a huge Discord fan, but now stopped using it for several reasons.

\- I can't mute some channels completely. I have raised bug reports, tried all
the various options, researched everything I could find in Google about this
issue. Bottom line is that "mute" is taken by Discord to be "only mute, unless
I think you need to hear this", with no way to fully mute a channel.

\- I only use Discord in browser and it now has a complete and very
distracting screen refresh every few seconds.

\- It is a memory pig in browser and my browser seems to become unstable after
a short time, while running Discord in one of the tabs.

~~~
2038AD
I'm not a fan of Discord but I think you're mistaken.

Right click on the channel icon and go to 'Notification Settings' rather than
clicking on 'Server Mute'. From there you can choose whether a mention
(inc./ex. @everyone/@here) counts and whether mobile notifications are
enabled.

As for the client you may want to try Ripcord[0]. It uses less memory though
I'm not sure you can mute people the same way. While I don't think it's ever
enforced, technically using other clients is against the Discord ToS.

Either way there are plenty of reasons not to use Discord if you can.

[0] [https://cancel.fm/ripcord/](https://cancel.fm/ripcord/)

~~~
avree
There is no way to mute "Role Pings" on Discord currently. You can mute
@here/@everyone/@your name, but if you are assigned a role and that is pinged,
it goes through.

That is one of my main gripes with Discord, in addition to:

1\. Uploading photos/videos through the mobile app stops if you lock your
phone or background the app. No other modern app exhibits this behavior.

2\. Blocking users shows a large "BLOCKED" message, with no option to truly
block them.

~~~
manicdee
I have channels full of “1 blocked message” messages, thanks to people using
stupid pointless chat bots. That is one feature I wish they could implement
differently (the idea being that you can click the “blocked message” message
to see the content of the blocked message)

------
jelv
Discord business model seems te be to sell games. Not sure if it's going to be
a good fit for non-gamers in the future.

[https://riot.im/](https://riot.im/) powered by Matrix also seems a good
alternative. It's getting more stable every day.

~~~
opan
Matrix is really nice. I hope that some of the TUI clients improve a bit,
though. I absolutely loved the weechat plugin made in lua, but it'd often take
several tries to connect. One day I couldn't connect at all, and there hasn't
been github activity lately. It was the only client I found that let me
actually reorder rooms and people manually. I really hate the constantly
changing order that I can't seem to configure in Riot. Gomuks lacks a lot of
good keybinds and stuff that weechat did right by default for being weechat.
The emacs package matrix-client.el is alright but tricky to get going due to
using quelpa, which none of my other stuff uses. I also have only used it
graphically in emacs, so not sure how it is in non-graphical emacs. These
little disappointments in the clients make me still prefer irc for a lot of
things, but easily sharing images and such on matrix is pretty nice.

~~~
benparsons
There is a new and much more actively maintained WeeChat plugin, take a look:
[https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-
matrix](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix)

------
NelsonMinar
Slack has been very clear they are not a consumer service. They have no
interest in being public social media, their market is businesses paying
$$/user. Fair enough. But then Discord has deftly stepped into that void of
Slack-for-consumers and it's working pretty well for them.

I've been a Discord fan since very early days. It's a great product and a good
company.

------
fouc
One thing that really irritates me about Discord is that it has really crappy
low-contrast dark & light themes. And it's not theme-able at all. At least
slack's default light theme is high contrast and also slack is theme-able.

~~~
Can_Not
> also slack is theme-able.

But no dark theme options, so not theme-able in any useful way.

~~~
sphynxie
If you use macOS, you can do this:
[https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed2...](https://gist.github.com/a7madgamal/c2ce04dde8520f426005e5ed28da8608)

------
aboutruby
I think Discord is slowing eating away all other form of online communication
as it can be used for such a variety of situations and their API makes it very
customizable.

The main issue I see is the culture. Discord's community has quite an opposite
culture as Slack (free time vs work time) for instance. Being able to have
multiple Discord handles could solve that.

~~~
scrollaway
Even though I use it a lot for 1 on 1 convos it's definitely not eating that
lunch (yet). And imo it won't as long as it remains less reliable for
notifications and doesn't have things like last-online, quote replies and read
receipts like messenger and WhatsApp.

~~~
h1d
I don't understand why read reciepts are important. People will respond when
they feel like whether it says read or not. Just makes it more cumbersome to
get around it when you're too busy to respond.

~~~
scrollaway
Read receipts being there simplify 1-on-1 conversations a lot. Nobody wants to
admit it because they don't want to "sound creepy", but most people do use
them to know whether or not the other party has read/received the message.

It avoids the whole "hey, did you get my text" thing and there's several
social situations where knowing whether the other person has read your message
(regardless of reply) is useful, so you don't end up calling them to do
exactly that.

It's like quote replies, emoji, etc… none of these things are _essential_ to
1-on-1 comm, but if there's a platform that has these features, it'll most
likely win out over others.

~~~
h1d
Problem is, it's not reliable.

I might accidentally tap on notification and make it read when I'm eating but
don't actually want to read it then or if the sender keeps bugging to read it
when I know the message had arrived but want to read it later instead, it's
not helping the conversation.

------
phreack
Is there a reason why they don't just keep a fork their code and rebrand it as
a "serious app" for corporate use and charge money for it? Discord has the
best service for voice chat and screen sharing I've seen and I'd love to use
it with clients instead of all the other weird apps I've had to use. The least
painful so far has been Google Meet but even that one has its issues and
likely an expirement date.

~~~
sgarman
Because more often than not losing focus kills companies. The greed to do
everything leads to doing nothing well.

------
arminiusreturns
I'll never understand why people continually fall into the proprietary closed
source app trap for things as important and sensitive as voice and txt chat...

I have run a mumble/murmur server for years, but I had some life things happen
and dropped it for a while and most of my online friends moved to discord and
I see nothing but annoyance with it, not to mention privacy and security
concerns for days.

~~~
CDSlice
Maybe because they don't want to worry about life things happening and you
dropping it for a while? Most people don't have the knowledge, capability,
and/or will to run their own chat server when they can just use Discord for
free and not have to worry about downtime or managing the server hosting.

While me and my friends could run a Matrix or IRC server or whatever the new
open source chat awesomeness is these days we don't really see the point when
Discord does everything we want and more and doesn't require any management
beyond setting up our guild settings, channels, and roles.

~~~
aseipp
This basic problem can always be summed up as something like: "Extreme nerds
who are almost completely divorced from the needs and skills of 95% of all
computer users are BAFFLED by the fact Social Effects Are Real, and people do
not know how to run their own servers. News at 11." and it's extremely
predictable and always on-time.

------
ngrilly
What do you think of Telegram, compared to Discord?

Telegram has one feature I miss in Discord: quote replies. It makes easier to
follow conversations in a crowded channel. It is the most upvoted feature in
the Discord feedback tool: [https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/community/posts/3600...](https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-
us/community/posts/360030063152-Quoting).

But Telegram misses a lot of things provided by Discord: multiple channels on
the same server to organize conversations, reactions/likes, voice, the
possibility to transfer ownership of an existing server.

~~~
wetpaws
Discord is a replacement for irc, telegram is a replacement for
messenger/blogs. You can't really compare them, it's like matching oranges and
apples.

~~~
ngrilly
I agree that Telegram is primarily a messaging app like WhatsApp or Messenger.

But its group feature has become really powerful, and can be used as an
alternative to IRC (except for the fact that a "group" can't be divided in
multiple channels).

Some Mozilla groups have been using Telegram for some time:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telegram)

~~~
sciurus
I think part of the nature of Mozilla is that we end up using everything. I
wouldn't be surprised if there are some groups using Discord, too. My team and
related ones are still mostly on IRC. Officially, as employees we're all
supposed to be using Slack...

~~~
dralley
Same thing at Red Hat. Most of engineering runs off IRC, most of consulting
runs off of Rocket.chat, I hear sales and marketing uses slack, and the
"official" company solution is Gchat.

And a half dozen other little enclaves.

------
elagost
From the TOS:

By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with
the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-
free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify,
adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform,
and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the
Service. The Company does not guarantee the accuracy, quality, or integrity of
any user content posted.

They also have a ban against distributing or even talking about
macro/autohotkey programs, and, of course, they can see every single message
and piece of content you put on the service.

It's 20XX; why is there anything but harsh condemnation for services like
this? Modern communication platforms should not be set up this way.

~~~
GuB-42
The first part of the TOS is standard, even something as simple as showing a
thumbnail of a posted picture (which discord does) requires it.

AutoHotKey have their own relatively active Discord server, so obviously, you
can talk about it. What is banned is the use of macros on the Discord client
itself.

As for seeing every single message, then yes, certainly. That's how you get
the entire conversation history when you first log into a server, search,
previews, etc... Discord is not privacy oriented, it is a convenient platform,
and great for semi-public conversations. It is not a replacement for Signal,
and vice-versa.

Modern communication platforms don't have to be all privacy-oriented. Just
like in real life, there are public and private places, with different
expectations.

~~~
elagost
This is the most well-thought-out response in the thread. My initial knee-jerk
is too extreme. Thank you for the sanity check.

~~~
wesammikhail
And that was a mature response from you. Glad to see this exchange :D

------
yannovitch
I honestly don't understand why, especially on _Hacker_ news, we do not push
much more for privacy-oriented solutions. Moreover, with Matrix/Riot, or with
XMPP/Conversations, viable alternatives exist, and if we all would put the
energy to make these softwares better rather than putting it into proprietary
solutions like the one described here, the open alternatives would already be
much better than the proprietary ones!

Sure, as I've read in this thread, Discord is intended for the same kind of
discussions that would happen in a public space, or in a group, not for the
"truly private discussions",so "no need for all the privacy features "...
except you do, precisely for these reasons!

I mean, Discord is privately-owned, a public space by its verynature is not.
If I'm talking about anything beyond how nice is the weather, such as my
political thoughts, or what I love, I don't want anybody (but possibly me) to
be able to make a profit through it!

------
neilv
Does anyone know what dotcom partnerships and individual/influencer affiliate
programs Discord has done?

For a while, I saw many subreddit mods pushing Discord in side bars and
stickied posts, often with language that suggested it was an official Reddit
counterpart to the sub.

I supposed it could be that Reddit management was choosing to siphon off its
own user base and influence to Discord. But my suspicion was that it was more
likely the action of one or more mods of the sub, and then question would be
what was their motivation.

~~~
MivLives
There's an influencer program but it's more aimed at Lan parties and other
events of that nature.

I suspect that the reason you see so many Discords for subreddits is it's
free, and easy. I recall few subs having IRCs which the only other option that
really compared, probably because of the barrier to entry for both the user
and the admin.

Reddit did launch their own chat feature. No idea if anyone uses it, I sure as
hell haven't.

~~~
hemicepha
But the reddit chat launched when a Discord channel was already established in
all the major communities. And they tried to push it too fast, when it wasn't
ready to production, like their official android/ios app.

------
SubiculumCode
I came on to Discord before hearing about it from HN or other news source. I
was invited to a "server" by members of my play-by-post RPG group. I had the
impression it was a small and "rebellious" startup with a great product. Word
of mouth is the best kind of growth. In a matter of weeks, I moved most of my
chat to discord....though for chats with my brother (one of my closest
confidants) we still run our own Mattermost server, which has honestly been
great.

------
CM30
Part of me wonders if community moderation had something to do with it. With
Discord, people have to know where to find your server link, and can be denied
access to various channels until they get past admin set verification rules.
This makes it much harder for trolls or troublemakers to brigade a server
compared to say, a subreddit, and makes it tricky for your enemies to go
trawling through your chat history like on Reddit or what not. It really puts
off the content scraping services you saw abusing social media sites a while
back for clickbaity articles (like BuzzFeed, College Humour, etc), and shuts
down attempts to turn niche communities into a moral panic in the mainstream
media.

Of course, these aren't the only reasons. Obviously the sheer ease of setting
up a Discord server had a major effect, as did the pseudononymity, the voice
chat features, the extra bells and whistles compared to IRC and Skype and the
share URLs among other things.

But I definitely feel the moderation may have had some effect, and may be
partly why it seems to be replacing Reddit as the network of choice in gaming
communities and what not.

------
gaspoweredcat
maybe im just getting old but i cant really understand the runaway success of
discord, it seems awfully similar to IRC to me

~~~
panic
Here are a few things that make Discord nicer than IRC for ordinary (non-
voice) chat:

1\. You can start a new server right in the client by clicking a button.

2\. Logs are saved server-side and synced across all your clients (phone, PC,
etc).

3\. You can upload images and videos to be hosted by Discord's servers. Media
and links appear inline in the chat log.

4\. No strange rituals involving NickServ or ChanServ.

5\. Mobile notifications.

~~~
hedgew
6\. You don't need to publicize your IP address by default.

~~~
Sendotsh
IPs have been hidden on most IRC servers for years now.

------
Biganon
My group of friends migrated from Messenger to Discord a few days ago, we are
very pleased. Here's a list of what I love the most:

* When a friend arrived in the evening and the others had been talking about random things all day long, the friend was often submerged by the amount of fluff to read. Discord solves this in two ways: 1) the different channels allow us to keep discussions tidy, we have a channel for random discussion, one for our evening plans, one for future holidays, one for music... 2) we can pin (not sure of the name in English) important messages, so the friends arriving later only have to read those.

* The desktop application feels light-weight and fast, even on my weak chromebook. Compared to the memory hog that was Messenger in the browser, it's very pleasant.

* Many fun functionalities such as custom emojis. The emoji panel that opens when you type a colon makes it easier to find the reaction you want to send. I'm aware many on HN don't see the point of emojis, but I find them really fun and useful.

* Bots. Good luck having a bot in a Messenger discussion, with Discord it's trivial.

* The audio discussions are very easy to use and efficient. I love the push to talk mode.

* Muting is fine-grained. You can mute one channel, an entire server,...

* The reactions system makes it trivial to very spontaneously start a little poll. "Where do you guys want to eat? [Letter A emoji] restaurant x [Letter B emoji] restaurant y", and then you react to your own message with both emojis. Your friends just have to click one of the reactions to add theirs, so the little numbers next to each reaction act like a poll counter.

* You can edit your own messages, with no time limit AFAIK. Very convenient, especially with the up arrow which automatically edits your last message.

* Roles are precise and easy to use. We have a role for the core group of friends, with our private channels.

A few drawbacks :

* No quote responses, like Whatsapp has for example

* No attachments larger than 8 MB, which makes it impossible to send even a small video you've shot with your recent phone (unless you decrease the film resolution in your phone's settings I guess)

* I've had a few issues with the Android client, such as receiving a notification for a message, opening the app and the message isn't there. No way to force a refresh, so I have to kill the app and open it again. Might have been caused by battery saving mode, not sure.

* Accessing private messages is not very intuitive. Why do you have to go to the main screen first? I don't have many servers, so I'd like to be able to add my closest friends in the server list on the left of the screen, to access our discussions in one click or press.

* Some clever things are part of the client instead of the server, which would be fine if it were consistent between clients, which it's not. I'm thinking of the +:reaction_here: shortcut to quickly add a reaction to the last message in the discussion. It doesn't work with the Android client.

~~~
shishy
Nice! What are the advantages you see with Discord over Slack for the same
purpose (if any)? I figured Slack's been around longer and offers most of
these things so I was curious what makes people use Discord over it.

FWIW I use both happily.

~~~
Biganon
I've almost never used Slack, but isn't it more institution-oriented? Can you
use it for free with a bunch of friends?

I'd be interested in knowing what you prefer in both, since you're using both

Also, have you ever tried a free software, decentralized alternative?

~~~
robrtsql
I'm not who you were talking to, but while Slack was definitely intended for
use by businesses, you can create a Slack "team" for free (or at least, that's
what I remember). There are limits around free Slack (finite chat history) but
it is possible.

> Also, have you ever tried a free software, decentralized alternative?

Which are you thinking of?

I've used Riot before, to see what Matrix was all about. The Riot client was
kind of sluggish.

Anyways, I suspect the real reason people use things like Slack and Discord is
not because it's the best tool for the job but because it's free for them to
make a community. Typically, the person who administrates the
server/team/community also has to pay a monthly subscription fee or pay to
host it on a VPS, so it's only natural that people are flocking to a service
which offers to let you do that for free.

~~~
benparsons
When did you last try Riot? Version 1.0 was released last month, and in
general Riot performance has improved a lot in the last ~year.

------
rdiddly
Bit of a submarine article, or at least it reads like one.

------
ouid
easy, skype became garbage.

