
Dark Horse Discord - Osiris30
https://mule.substack.com/p/dark-horse-discord
======
time0ut
I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it
makes Teams and Slack look primitive.

The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty
incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of
communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party
bots.

You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord
is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to
AWS Connect via a bot...

~~~
sneak
Discord cannot be used anonymously via Tor without providing a telephone
number to tie it to your real-world identity, and it does not even pretend to
support end to end cryptography, even for DMs.

No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result.
They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full
chat content, including all DMs.

I have stopped using it for these reasons.

I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out
of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t
important until, suddenly, it is.

~~~
S33V
Wasn't there post on here just a few days ago about how Discord exactly does
that? pretend to support end to end encryption? Someone created their own
discord client and found that VOIP packets were being decrypted by discord in
between clients

~~~
trynewideas
Let's Reverse Engineer Discord:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031218)

~~~
judge2020
I wasn't able to reply at the time but this also might be to show that "this
person is talking indicator". It would make more sense if the client itself
lit up the user's avatar to indicate they're talking, but for some reason the
gateway sends a websocket to let you know when they start/stop talking, and if
the gateway goes down while in a VC you'll lose talking indicators until it
can reconnect.

------
Algent
I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord.
Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with
different account and a strong privacy policy.

They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the
voices & screen share feature work.

~~~
erikbye
> They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the
> voices

IME Discord voice quality has been awful, and that's just direct voice between
two people; multiple times every session the call disintegrates, sometimes
falling out entirely. 'Robotic sounding' is a description often used. I think
region (mine's Europe) and server capacity in that region, might be an
important factor in the perceived quality of Discord voice. Several times it's
been so bad we have fallen back to other options, e.g., Teams.

~~~
erikbye
I'm sure there are many unaffected, but it's a well-known and not uncommon
issue. It has persisted for years.

3 years ago
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/46dnse/robot_vo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/46dnse/robot_voice_not_connection_related/)

2 years ago
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u4uw6/voice_qu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u4uw6/voice_quality_recently/)

2 years ago
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u55vj/robotic_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6u55vj/robotic_voice_laggy_voice/)

11 months
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/apmkja/big_incr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/apmkja/big_increase_in_robot_voice_recently_help_please/)

9 months
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bd6o7v/robotic_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bd6o7v/robotic_voice_for_me_and_my_friends_everyone_has/)

8 months
[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bk63nd/low_ping...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/bk63nd/low_ping_no_packetloss_but_robotic_voices_any_fix/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/search?q=robot+voice&res...](https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/search?q=robot+voice&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on)

~~~
falcolas
Perhaps, but it's still better than a lot of the other options (especially for
the price). It's particularly better the first party voice "solutions" in
games that are utter crap.

------
mxstbr
> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while
> having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion
> versus slacks 12 billion valuation?

Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business
and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has
a much higher valuation.

------
dfee
My experience has been that Discord is a pleasure to use.

And then there’s IRC, Slack and Gitter - by preference. With Gitter being by
far the worst

~~~
blattimwind
Discord is okay as an "all in one" package, but purely for voice
communications falls far behind alternatives like Teamspeak.

~~~
LinuxBender
Mumble / Murmur [1][2] is a nice self hosted alternative to Teamspeak and
there are also many public servers. Rock solid, great voice quality, UX is
still being refined, not as frictionless as Discord for new users, but I keep
one running for family to fall back to. The server is just routing text /
voice, so it scales to VERY large numbers of users with little resource usage.

[1] -
[https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page)

[2] - [https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble](https://github.com/mumble-
voip/mumble)

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Mumble also has the lowest latency of any VOIP software out there, at least to
my knowledge. It's something the developers prioritize a great deal.

In my experience, this improves the quality of _every_ conversation. They just
flow more naturally.

I wish other solutions would prioritize latency. Skype went very noticeably
backward after they switched away from P2P.

~~~
LinuxBender
I agree completely. I found what helps even more is to use fq_codel + google's
BBR congestion control on the server and increase the netdev budget about 4x
the default values and the latency remains very low with more people
connected.

------
BenSS
Discord is one crisis away from imploding if they don't get serious about
moderation tools and parental controls. They're turning a blind eye to the
issues around tweens/teens interacting with much older folks online in pursuit
of growth.

~~~
errantspark
Ugh. Why would Discord, a tool for making private communities be on the hook
for moderation and parental controls? Let's stop it with this tired "but think
of the children" argument. It's not Discord's job to parent people's kids.

~~~
Analemma_
I'm pretty sure the parent is talking about the court of public opinion. Every
few weeks like clockwork now the New York Times or the Verge runs some
breathless story about how IG/YouTube/Messenger/whatever is harboring
pedophiles; it's easy to see how Discord could be next. The difference is,
those other companies are big enough to manage the PR hit and fallout; I'm not
sure Discord is the same.

~~~
SimbaOnSteroids
Discord is also not big enough of a target to garner the ire of those
publications nor do its users care about the court of public opinion.

~~~
britmob
Except, well...

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/discord-where-teens-rule-and-
pa...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/discord-where-teens-rule-and-parents-fear-
to-tread-11560245402)

------
pier25
It would be great of dev communities didn't use chats for everything. I get
that the casual nature of chats is great for getting a sense of community but
the same issues pop over and over again. Users with issues or questions should
be redirected to somewhere that can indexed (Forum, Github issues, etc).

~~~
ljm
It’s just IRC with extra stuff. I’d love to stick with IRC if we could.

------
sergiotapia
Might as well ask here as it's trending, what happened to Discord's store? It
was unceremoniously shuttered and removed from the UI. How much of a loss was
it? I imagine months and months of work, nevermind the deals needed to be set
with the publishers and game developers.

Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?

~~~
Jasper_
You won't get an answer from the Discord themselves. But here's my take, as a
game developer who was offered to sell on Discord: Discord was trying to turn
their massive userbase into a source of revenue with the Discord Store, but
they didn't quite anticipate what developers would actually need from a
storefront, and they didn't seem interested in understanding the storefront
wars of time past, the many "Steam Killers", GoG, Desura, Origin, UPlay,
Windows Store, the list goes on.

Basically, no AAA partners really care, they've all been burned before, so
they do the old standby when you need to rejuvenate a platform (like the Xbox
360 and PS3), and turn to the indie market, in hopes that would showcase a
more cooperative community desperate to get any press or attention they can.
But the indie market already has itch.io, and Steam, and Discord didn't seem
strictly better than either of those, so it was already a bit underwhelming of
a launch.

Around the same time, the Epic Games Store launched, offering much better
royalty deals than Steam/Discord, and Epic offered large grants to developers
in exchange for limited-term exclusivity. This got a lot of developer/gamer
attention, so quickly all the renewed "storefront war" was seen as Steam vs.
Epic, with maybe GoG/itch.io as a very distant third.

Discord's Store had no chance out of the gate. They tried to pivot to "buy a
Nitro subscription, get some free games", but between their awkward Store
interface and nothing really that great on offer, they eventually shuttered
it. [0]

[0] [https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-
nitro-a732ddc4b...](https://blog.discordapp.com/whats-coming-for-
nitro-a732ddc4b5b1)

~~~
dmxt
Hm I've never heard of itch.io until I see this comment

------
m712
Discord is also proprietary software and is backed by Tencent. Read the
privacy policy, it might surprise you.

Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.

~~~
cyborgx7
>Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.

I did. I put a lot of effort into staying as FOSS as possible. Discord is the
thing that got me to compromise this, by being so incredibly good.

~~~
emptysongglass
I find Discord to be the worst UX for a chat app I can imagine. And nothing is
open source so what few client alternatives there are live in mortal danger of
having their API hacks closed.

No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default
notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server".
Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat
rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?

The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at
all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.

~~~
1_player
No replies is a feature.

Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check
"Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still
don't know if I should.

I hate them.

~~~
1123581321
It depends on your channel’s culture, but generally you check the box when you
want to draw some of the general channel population into the conversation or
just want them to see your reply.

If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in
your reply. No need to send to channel.

------
chrysoprace
People don't often talk about [https://spectrum.chat/](https://spectrum.chat/)
when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always
thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities.
Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other
questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of
messages.

~~~
acemarke
I'm an admin in Reactiflux, which is one of the largest programming
communities in the world, and hosted on Discord
([https://www.reactiflux.com](https://www.reactiflux.com)).

I agree that message flooding is an issue with a real-time chat channel
environment. If multiple conversations are going on at once in a channel, it
can be hard to follow, and questions can quickly scroll out of site and not
get answered. Getting answers is also highly dependent on when they're asked
and who's around.

At the same time, real-time chat offers an immediacy: you can get interactive
help, _right now_.

One of the big sales pitches behind Spectrum is that "all questions and
answers are indexed by Google". That's not wrong, but I think it also kind of
misses the point.

As we've seen both through Stack Overflow's years of existence, as well as the
thousands of devs that have been helped in Reactiflux, new developers aren't
going to go searching for answers. And, even if they did, they don't generally
have the expertise needed to properly assess the quality and relevance of the
answers they find. Most of the time they need some hand-holding to walk them
through their current problem, right now.

Yes, this _does_ lead to the same questions getting asked, over and over, but
I truly don't think anything is going to prevent that from happening.

~~~
chrysoprace
Spectrum is real-time too, but conversations are threaded rather than
separated by global topics. I suppose Discord and Slack offer a kind of
urgency to messages that are hard to replicate in threads.

~~~
acemarke
Yeah, Spectrum feels to me like it's "just" a standard web forum, albeit one
with live reply updates and a chat-bubble style for its UI.

I've certainly seen plenty of other forum software that has live updates as
well, so it's not unique in that regard.

(Note that I'm not bashing Spectrum here, just saying that I don't feel it's
as revolutionary as I've seen it pitched to be.)

------
adambowles
I can't find any reference on the internet to the SUAQ (Shut up and Que[ue])
server mentioned in the article. Anyone got the invite link?

~~~
raziel2p
I found this:
[https://www.patreon.com/shut_up](https://www.patreon.com/shut_up)

The article mentions it's invite-only so you're not going to find a public
link to join.

~~~
adambowles
Thank you, I couldn't even find this page via my Googling

------
heydabop
Just a note, Discord has two Nitro tiers (the table only mentions one) at
$5/mo and $10/mo, or $50/yr and $100/yr.

------
gwilkes
Spot on, the 10,000 free limit is much more limiting than many people think.
I've seen very small businesses of even 3-4 people lose tons of institutional
knowledge just because they wouldn't pay for slack. With larger tech groups
you can start losing information after a few days. And the larger the group
the less likely they will pay for it. I like the UI of Slack but am happy when
I see tech groups using Discord instead.

I have more thoughts here if anyone is interested, including alternatives,
"Why tech groups can use Slack for free but open source projects and
businesses of any size shouldn’t": [https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-
tech-groups-can-get-a...](https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-
can-get-away-with-using-slack-for-free-but-open-source-projects-and-
businesses-of-96c427aaefbb)

------
Lorin
We've been using Discord since the official developer server days - it just
made sense given the flexibility and pricing compared to others such as Slack.

Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's
pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.

------
stubish
Voice? Really? In the communities I've hung around in (gamer & tech) it sits
idle, unused. Curious why it keeps being placed front and center as a major
feature, when people don't seem to actually want it.

~~~
teirce
IME, in large community servers (usually info dumps or LFG platforms like the
video in the article) I almost never see it used. But in my smaller friend-
focused Discord servers, there's always someone in the voice channels.

I think the greatest thing Discord did for gaming communities was make it so
easy to get people together in a voice channel that everyone stopped using
Skype. I tried for years to move people to Mumble/Vent/TS but it never stuck.
But Discord managed to do it. I'd say voice is still the main feature that
draws me and friends to the platform.

------
bruceb
Out of curiosity is there a way to know the general split between how much
Discord is used on a phone relative to a computer?

------
benjaminsuch
They got millions of gamers. Why can't they implement a store like Steam has?

~~~
judge2020
They already tried[0], but the dedicated store page got removed (now devs. can
allow people to download games via their discord server/guild).

0: [https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-
beta-9a35596fd...](https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-
beta-9a35596fdd4)

------
kick
I find this post odd. As far as I'm aware, it seems like the momentum of
Discord has _slowed,_ if anything, since ~2014.

That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost
every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes
blindness.

~~~
alephr
That's pretty interesting considering they launched in 2015

~~~
kick
I said _around_! But yeah, I was off by a year.

------
dotdotdots
From the title I thought this would be Bret Weinstein's the "dark horse
podcast". Check it out if you like evolutionary psychology. Even better is his
brothers podcast, "The Portal" ([https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-
portal/](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/)). Its brilliant, in a mad
scientist kind-of way. Its where the dirty laundry, of the science community,
is aired.

