I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offerings?
It's more than open source. A political party I tried to join organized via Discord. A hardware project offered support only through Discord. Seems most "communities" have one now. But I hate Discord and it's a poor tool for those jobs! A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting, or organizing meetings.
Young people love it. Slack isn't right for "communities" as it's very specifically marketed as a work tool (and it's unless for community organizing building with how it's structured money wise now). IRC is probably too difficult an idea for young people to get behind + they like streaming their video games and movies. I guess it's like if teamspeak meets irc. Either way, if you wanna get old people and young people together for some community and want the tech to be low friction, discord seems to bridge that gap very well.
More specifically, Slack’s payment model makes it impossible to use for communities.
With Discord if you want premium stuff you pay for it at an individual level, and having the free tier doesn’t limit important functionality like message history.
With Slack your workspace’s cost is based on how many people are members in the workspace. You can’t have one member decide to buy a premium subscription and another one decide not to. You’re either all in on paying money for every user or you’re stuck on a gimped free version that hides message history and has other limitations.
Yep, Slack's pricing is terrible for communities. I have a community Discord with 2.8k people with full history. If that were on Slack it would be $25,000/month?
Several years ago we crossed the point where everyone is on Discord because everyone is on Discord. Also it's free, of course.
And there's a bunch of neat features that are somewhat unique, like using roles to sign up for specific types of announcements. It can be a chat room, or a forum, or voice/video chat, or a substitute for email notifications, or all of the above. I think that versatility is important too.
I watched a few open source projects I was a part of move from Slack to Discord. Slack wasn't a great fit IMO, but Discord has always felt much worse to me.
I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.
I am utterly baffled by the complaints about UI changes. Discord looks nigh-identical to when I first installed it in 2017. Literally the only significant changes I remember was the smoothing of the logo, and relatively recent bottom left icon changes. I guess they added the activities button at some point in there, too.
In fact, the stability of their UI is something that I've greatly appreciated. What about the UI is changing?
The overall UI design has been consistent, what has rubbed me the wrong way is all the unnecessary UI features like soundboards, custom animated gifts/stamps, etc.
As far as UI hierarchy goes, its mostly been a challenge of the use cases for open source not fitting well with Discord. Too many channels, permission levels, and an unmanageable sidebar structure. That may just be an issue with scale of a larger OSS project, that's my only experience with it.
It has a better interface than everything else by a long mile. People like using it. I like using it even though voice call quality is way worse than competition, the app is bloated and slow but the interface is just so nice: readable, clear, intuitive.
Hard disagree that it has a better ui than everything else. Every time I’ve used it, it feels like I’m at a carnival with everything trying to compete for my attention. Utterly distracting and feels childish, at least for me. I’m glad that you like the ui though.
For me, I just have to remember there is a huge gap on this thing, it's really trying to cater to a lot of different constituents, and when you look at it that way, it's winning. I mean sure, they add some shit and I'm just like.. wtf is this animated emoji reply shit that is taking up my screen and bothering me. But, if it look at it for what I suppose it's supposed to be... fun... well, it's pretty fun.. so let them have fun I suppose. :) :)
Just curious, which alternative do you like more with free message retention. I think free message retention is absolutely needed for open source projects.
I just wrote a script that i captures the network requests as i scroll through, cleans it, outputs to a nice file that i can then insert into a database.
I think it's the other way around. Most people would rather interact with a semi-private chat group than a public forum.
I suspect the biggest reason is moderation: a private discord can just kick you out, while a public forum has to moderate the whole internet's interaction with it.
What does Discord offer that is more than ‘ephemeral chat’?
Do you disagree with the ‘real’ statement that GP was trying to say, that whatever “functionality on offer” that Discord provides is a poor substitute for forums?
- The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it.
- Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms.
- Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events.
- Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction.
- No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account.
I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality.
People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.
they introduced that last year? if you are looking for something older and you have to use the search function, things get pretty noisy... also most of big commuties despite having a forum, they still have a chat channel for help where people use; a lot
I and my core group of friends spends well over a thousand dollars with Discord each year for our server boosts and their nitro accounts all because we wanted a premium, no-ads experience for our private community. If a server owner doesn’t want this, they should be able to opt out. Discord can kill the golden goose if they aren’t careful.
The reason I'd always resisted Discord as much as possible is because it was obvious it had no viable business model. Between a commitment to no ads and having nothing reserved for a paid tier worth paying for it was obvious it would either need to be acquired (I still am shocked Amazon didn't buy it) or ignore it's commitment to users and start introducing ads.
I agree with your thoughts about the paid tier not being worth it, but they seem to be making hundreds of millions per year through Nitro. That just begs the question of where all that money is going.
Is the paid tier worth the platform not turning into crap? It is to me. I also find some of the perks worth a few bucks a month - global (animated) emojis, per-server profiles, etc.
I agree in principle, I pay for many services and products that have workable free alternatives, but Discord is double dipping (with tracking, and ads in the future) like most companies.
I'm fine with "Pay to use our service, privately", but with these corporate products it's usually "Free with tracking and ads" vs. "Paid with tracking (and ads after a few years)", which I think is a disrespectful business model.
Reading the article it sounds to me a lot less like double-dipping than the headline implies: it's not planned to use a "typical" ad network but instead a sponsorship program similar to "Twitch Drops" (Twitch: watch a streamer play a sponsored game's streams get in game/in Twitch cosmetics; Discord: play a sponsored game while friends watch in Discord and get in game/in Discord cosmetics).
Even if it wasn't "opt out" (and the article claims there will be a button to turn it off, but does not know if that will only be a Nitro option or what), it's still specifically devoted enough to the "gaming" side of Discord that it sounds like these "ads" it will just bleed into the background for non-gamers that use Discord like most of the rest of Discord's gaming specific features. (Just like the Game Store that Discord briefly attempted and proved unprofitable and was just about as quickly dropped. Most of my friends at the time didn't even notice Discord had a Game Store.)
Looking for something else, I stumbled onto the first of these "ads" (for a game called The Finals) called "Quests". Their "home" where they display the biggest is User Settings > Gift Inventory. It may also sometimes appear as a banner just above the "voice chat status". Apparently it is more likely to show up if you've played the game in question or are streaming in a chat channel. You can hide an individual banner from the ellipsis menu and Hide Me. You can disable the Quests feature entirely from User Settings > Privacy & Safety > In-game Rewards (aka Quests).
Here's the full official documentation on Quests (with screenshots of all the above):
Thanks for the info! I'm a fairly hardcore opponent of ads, but this seems reasonable enough for now, especially if there's a setting for it.
As always, there's the possibility of the platform going to shit with ads and whatnot, but it seems like people are getting upset about something relatively innocent.
> "That just begs the question of where all that money is going."
It sure ain't goin' toward fixing bugs on Discord's user wishlist in features that users expect from Discord, or adding features that most users really want (as evidenced again by votes on the user wishlist. Discord's user wishlist gets pretty much ignored really, in favor of adding shiny new "Nitro" garbage (stickers and such crap) for the masses that came after, and trashy little "apps" to set folks up for the advertising nightmare that's surely about to ruin Discord for everyone who just wanted a simple voice and video sharing tool.
Just for one example of such ignored issues, if they're hurtin' for money, there's tons of folks who would pay for Nitro, if they'd just fix this one long-ignored bug [1] in their streaming feature. I would have been willing to pay a monthly fee if this feature worked, but the way they've handled it, I doubt I could be convinced to pay them a single thin dime for anything at this point. They clearly don't want my money.
The actual, real usability of Discord is way better than IRC's, it's not even close.
Every time I tried to join IRC it has been a massive pain in the ass. So first if you want to join anything on libera.chat, you have to register through NickServ and provide an email, which is already nonsense. Why would email be required?
And here's the neat part: you can't register if you use Tor/VPN/whatever, which is mad funny and very ironic, considering how IRC is supposed to be this "hacker culture" thing. "Oh but please register from a residential IP", really?
Not saying Discord is better in this particular regard, but still.
If someone says "this isn't a problem with IRC, just a libera.chat thing", well it doesn't matter because it's the de-facto network for most everything open-source.
Notice how I'm not even mentioning all the really obvious usability aspects, like voice/video chat, images and everything else. The general nerd response seems to be "who needs that anyway"/"just send links instead". Literally noone cares about that, it's wasting time, people will just use Discord, which has all the features that are (rightfully) expected.
