I'm, well not impressed. I don't get why so many people tout discord as this god send of a service.
The web client is Electron(basically chromium) for crying out loud, it's full of bugs and many times I've lost entire conversations due to irregularities with how it handles with a slow and inconsistent connection (I live in the middle of the woods basically, but the internet is still good enough to handle the most basic of tasks, and voice most days).
I like it, but it's not reliable, the interface kind of sucks balls, search function could be a little bit better and why does markdown not work on the mobile application?
Why don't we have threads like in Slack for more business oriented stuffs?
Just know I'm saying all this as someone who uses Discord every day. I do like it, but I'm not going to sit here singing it's praises when in reality, it would be so much better if someone really took time to polish the damn thing.
Also, more to the point, the store sucks.
It's annoying, it adds to the clutter, go buy games off of GOG or Steam if you have to, I don't get why we need to have another middleman, one that already harvests our data.
Side Note: I will say, Discord's keybindings are absolutely amazing, 10/10. Could not be happier, now if the rest of the app was like that, I wouldn't care about the store.
I would rather there was more competition for Steam to be honest. Discord may hit a spot where the functionality required of the app pushes it into a territory where it becomes a resource hog and justifies a rewrite in C++ or C#, but we don't really have insight into why they ran with Electron to begin with. We should be considerate of that fact that not everyone can drum up a team of C++ engineers to create a suave product in a hurry and at the right price.
Basically my point is let's wait and see and give them the benefit of the doubt. From my perspective its an incredible piece of software, front end and back. It's stunning. We get 100% of the product for free, and those that pay get 105%.
Also it is still quite young. With time some of your issues will likely be ironed out, or it may turn into a mess.
I don’t get the Electron hate, Visual Studio Code is probably the best IDE I’ve ever used, and it runs much better than eclipse or even Visual Studio ever did.
Saying this is a little unfair to Visual Studio, but it’s just so bad when you’re in an enterprise setup where you don’t really have a local drive. Visual Studio code on the other hand doesn’t care if your windows profile is on one network drive and your code is on another. Which is a little ironic because I think you’ll see code more in small setups and regular studio more in enterprise.
Anyway, I think electron apps work fairly well. I don’t like discord, the company, but discord itself works and feels a lot better than Skype, teams peak or ventrilo.
Visual Studio Code is a unicorn, an exception to rule.
We at least know that decent apps can be built with it, but for some reason, they aren't. There is a pit of failure somewhere. Maybe the JavaScript eco-system? Sludge hammers for thumbtacks?
VSC is not the exception that proves the rule. VSC is the counterexample that disproves the rule.
Slow electron apps come from a culture of not caring about performance. It's not a technical problem but a values problem. C++ developers _tend_ to care more about resource usage. Any GUI will be slow if the developers stop caring about repaints, even one written in C++.
C++ GUIs are fast because people sit in front of profilers and make them fast. Not because C++ is a magical language where every operation takes less than 16ms. Chromium has great profiling tools available. The chromium team has put a lot of effort into making performance tools available and then people ignore them and say that it sucks.
Atom is quite the heavyweight compared to VSC, especially once you load in a few plugins.
Atleast about a year back when I used it, Atom quickly filled up about 8GB of RAM for a moderately sized project in Go plus all necessary plugins.
VSC is fast but no lightweight either and hogs some resources.
It's not inherently a problem with Javascript, usually it's some framework like React being misused as usual inducing a lot of GC activity on top of unnecessary memory bloat.
I work in the public sector, you wouldn’t believe how many terrible programs I see each year. They are made in C++, C#, Swift, Java and so on, but you wouldn’t find me blaming WPF because someone didn’t know how to use it. :p
There are a lot of great electron apps, that frankly don’t have non-electron equals, so it obviously works. Yet it somehow always gets hit with these “well c++ could have done it better”.
Maybe it’s true, but if the biggest problem with electron is people using a framework wrong. Then what makes you think they’d do a better job in c++?
I'm curious, can you expand on that? I hear a lot about how much people love Discord, but haven't heard much (good or bad) about the company itself. They seem to be in the best position to compete with Steam though, which is hard to say the least.
> I would rather there was more competition for Steam to be honest.
I don't want yet another Steam or Netflix competitor. I just want to use Steam and Netflix solely. Or to be more precise: I want interoperability between these platforms.
The beauty of an open protocol such as IRC meant they anyone could use any IRC compatible client. XMPP had the same advantage.
Unfortunately there is too much friction being generated by Valve's continued 30% commission and lack of curation/barriers to store entry for that to be the case.
"Why don't we have threads like in Slack for more business oriented stuffs?"
Because Discord's not for business oriented stuff? It's IRC. Two paths diverged in a yellow wood; Slack went corporate and Discord went for entertainment.
Agree on the Electron front, though: I don't need a chat client hogging my resources when I'm trying to run games at maximum fidelity.
I use Discord for business - I work with a lot of IT freelancers.
Its great for voice conversation and chat. Much better than Skype.
The store is overkill. It will further bloat the client, and had none of the features that customers want (which is basically all the features of Steam) or devs want (which is basically DRM, global reach and localisation, patch management, and a lower cut than 30%).
The way the store is setup now is basically only suitable for games at the end of their lifecycle. There is no way to patch the games, as far as I can see.
The -one- good thing I will acknowledge is its curation. It was remarkable logging into the store and seeing a good-looking list of great games. Its become a bit of a tire logging into Steam and seeing loads of Hentai, porn, and Chinese games (Steam doesn't support title localisation) not to mention all the junk uploaded as part of Steam Direct $100 fee.
It's not just markdown that doesn't work on the mobile client, I don't think syntax highlighting is supported at all yet. I agree that the keybindings are nice - personally I'm also fond of the robust bot APIs and the encouragement of a relatively asynchronous voice channel system over a call-based system.
I don't see Discord threatening Steam anytime soon, but it's nice to have some competition.
Because I can have decently reliable voice calls with people around the world from my mobile app on a UK 4G connection, when bloody Skype for Business, GoToMeeting and the like shit the bed on a daily basis when trying to have a call from a business line?
> I don't get why so many people tout discord as this god send of a service.
Because it is free as in beer. History teaches us free as in beer whilst paying with privacy/ads wins from paid. Example: Android.
All the alternatives (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Skype, Mumble) are much worse than Discord. They're either not gratis or they are not portable or they're more difficult to set up, or their interface or features sucks, or they're centralised (while Discord uses anycast and multiple servers behind the scenes). Discord is also a voice chat and chat server in one with the latter having resume support when you're AFK. This lead to entire (gaming) communities residing on Discord.
I dislike Electron as much as anyone else but it isn't a dealbreaker for most people; just a memory hog and a minus. If the plus outweigh it, it gets chosen. Even though Ventrilo/TeamSpeak/Skype/Mumble use much less resources.
As for Discord the company, they're a startup still, who are trying out business models. Who knows what their next one is going to be.
Completely forgot about Ventrilo. I remember it being a bit of a pain to get up and running.
I think between Nitro & the Store they're going to do well with generating income. Tieing free games to Nitro was a smart idea IMO, but they still have an option to use them seperate.
>I don't get why so many people tout discord as this god send of a service.
It's definitely not perfect, but it's essentially the modern IRC - fast and easy to spin up a server for any community, decent moderation tools, scripting via bots, rich media support, and continuity across different platforms.
I definitely wish they exposed client apis and sanctioned 3rd party clients, but this is likely at odds with their ultimate business model.
I think it's a good move. Discord is definitely making almost no money up to the current point, and this move can help put it on the eventual road to profitability. The cut of profit Discord takes is the same as Steam (30%).
The product itself is fantastic, and other than valid security and privacy concerns, it's a lot better than any other chat application I've used in the past.
Discord is actually quite nice for communities other than gaming. I'm a member of a number of language learning and programming servers that I enjoy.
Skype looks more and more like a massive mistake after the Microsoft acquisition. You have a product with an abysmal user experience, no improvements, an awful group chat feature, unreliable voice calls, and so much more that was wrong. I'd wager that they were over-confident of their dominant position. Slack and Discord will hopefully completely replace it with time.
I agree.. I love what Discord are doing and I hope this works out for them.
For reasons that I struggle to put my finger on.. Discord beats out all of the Enterprise chat apps for chat. Most of the groups I am in (that are non gaming related) now use Discord for their chats.
The client support across iOS, Linux, Windows & Mac is fantastic and consistent. And the mobile notifications are super smart - if your desktop is not idle they go there, if you haven't read them yet once you've been idle or lock your screen they are now sent to your phone - including any you haven't yet read. It's great.
I’ve played with the API a little bit... it’s a brilliant little web socket protocol. Whoever designed it was not pressured to get an MVP product out as fast as humanly possible, or has insane experience with real-time distributed protocols, or both. Discord works through arbitrary NATs and your connections persist across client updates and even device reboots. Sometimes this yields weird behavior but I find it technically reassuring more than anything. I’m pretty sure they use Erlang (Elixir) which is infamous as the language that Facebook couldn’t wrangle. I’d love to read more about their stack.
I heard about it second hand from an engineering manager who knew some people there. Would love more info too. Context was an argument about introducing Kotlin on an Android team which, well, is no longer arguable (=
I find it amazing how very different the user experience is for me compared to so many others. I hate(d) Discord; in fact I deleted my first account there a while back - then, a few months after I was back to Skype full-time (instead of having to run a resource-hogging Chromium browser to deal with Discord), one of the sites I'm on said that they wanted to make all off-site comms come through Discord. I tried it for a single week. I have since deleted that account as well.
Skype, on the other hand, has never once given me a problem. Calls are fine, such as I need them. The text chats for both group and private work well. The client is decent enough on my computer that I can at least run a YouTube video at the same time, or play a game. Heck, I've even done screen-sharing. Trying that with Discord caused my computer to just freeze up and then eventually crash when it figured out how to even do that.
I have tried using Miranda to connect to Discord as well as IRC, but the connection is unreliable and there's no way to tell Miranda "download messages from x time ago".
So you can say it's very much on track to its namesake. All that Discord has done is create just that amongst the groups of friends I have online - chaos and discord.
And on that same note, where's the Pastafarian response to these SubGenius and Erisian derived communication methods?
Seriously though, if Slack and Discord replace Skype and IRC, that will be the end of the age of IM for me.
- You cannot prevent anyone in a group chat from inviting anyone to a group chat. Routinely, people will add their full list of hundreds of contacts to group chats. This is awful.
- Anyone that's a member of a group chat can change the topic of the chat.
- No audit log of actions for group communication owners to look at.
- Awful role permission system for group chats.
- No separate community mechanism from group chats to messages in the same way that Discord separates servers from DMs.
- Skype has a poor history of account security. DDoSing from Skype's API was very prominent. Social engineering Skype to lock user accounts was also common.
- No guarantees of whether or not your messages on Skype will be synced across devices, or when they will disappear.
- Inferior bot ecosystem to that of Discord or Slack.
- Inferior notification system, can't listen to mentions alone.
- No channels in group chats.
- Enjoy being spammed by scam bots adding you in your private messages.
Skype is a terrible piece of software.
Edit: I'm not saying that what you claim didn't happen to you, but I've never heard of anyone with such terrible performance problems before. As far as RAM goes at least, Discord uses similar amounts to what Skype did for me.
Perhaps it's possible you were infected by some form of malware, I can't imagine not being able to run Discord and watch a YouTube video on any computer from the past half-decade.
I haven't gotten a single message from a Skype bot in over a year. Sure, Discord may not have too many yet, but just wait. When it becomes more profitable to allow the bots than to block them, Discord will have them too. The same thing has happened to every communication method in the history of man. When the carrier decides they either can make money off soulless selling machines or that it's simply not worth the money to keep playing 'cat-and-mouse' with them, they'll enter the playing field. And as to the 'bot ecosystem', good. I'd prefer a bot-hostile ecosystem, where every user account has to belong to a human being and every account online has to have a human behind it.
You're right, there are no channels in group chats - why would someone need a channel within a channel? If I want a group chat with a specific group of individuals, it's trivial to create one and add people from either another chat or my friends list. What you're asking for seems somewhat silly to me. I also don't understand what you mean about a 'separate community mechanism', the group chat is a subcommunity within the Skype community. If I want to contact someone, I just find them in my friends list and send them a message. They'll get it the next time they're online.
I'll agree with you, the permissions controls aren't there - the solution is: don't add people you don't trust to a group chat with people you care about. If you want permissions controls and bots galore, go to IRC.
I disagree about the notification system; I've got two groups set up that only pop up unread if my name is said. It's not a "mention" filter, it's a word filter which I typed my name and my nickname within the group into. I also don't care one iota about cross-device syncing, it's not my use-case. I have one computer. That's all I use when it comes to chatting. I don't use a device (i.e. anything that's not a PC) to do a great deal of Internet things.
Social engineering is going to happen no matter what the platform is; that's the whole point of it being social. Heck, the first 'hackers' were arguably social engineers. You can't really defend against it as a platform, all you can do is educate. I'll grant that Skype doesn't do that well, but neither does IRC or Slack.
Also, my computer is not from the last half-decade. It is an x86 machine with 1GB of RAM and will remain such for the foreseeable future. I am not planning on upgrading, ever, because I don't see anything on the market that looks to me like a clear upgrade with no downsides to the software and peripherals I wish to run.
I forgot the most important thing of all, there's no invitation system to join a group chat in Skype! You can get put into chats you have no interest in.
Discord servers allow you to build communities, and can and do scale up to tens of thousands of members. This is something Skype simply can't be used for. Maybe it's not your use-case.
You may want channels in a community because there may be different topics you want to split apart. For example, in a programming server, Ruby and JavaScript channels, but both in the same server. Much like subforums on a traditional forum.
Bots are separate from user accounts on Discord, and you have total control over their permissions. Bots using user accounts are strictly prohibited.
I don't think not adding people you don't trust is a solution to proper access control. Even if you do, their accounts being breached is always an issue.
You caught me on the computer issue! I can't say much about it, other than that you might not be the intended target of developers anymore, so for that reason I can understand your choice of Skype Classic.
Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me.
As a final note, I believe the privacy situation on Skype to be much worse than Discord (though I can't act like Discord is Signal or something).
You can also leave those chats you're not interested in with the touch of a button, or mute the chat if you care about the people but don't care about the chat itself. Heck, you can set it with a filter, as I said, so that it pops up if something you are interested in gets discussed. I don't quite understand your mindset about the need for subchannels on a centralized IM client. Why not just have two group chats, one named "Perl" and the other named "ECMAScript/JavaScript"? Or, since as you pointed out it's similar to a forum structure, why not just use a forum?
Also, user-reliant privacy is stronger, to me, than computer-reliant privacy. Educating users, showing them and letting them see why they should have good security practices, etc., seems like a better deal in the long run than trying to keep track of accounts and outwit the next person to exploit some weakness in the code.
But I think your one comment sums everything up:
"Discord is akin to a modern, centralized IRC for me."
Modern IRC, for me, is just, well, IRC. I have Miranda-NG on my computer because ChatZilla's not that good anymore. I don't need it centralized, because that's not how it works. As I said, the most bearable Discord ever was for me, was when I ran it through Miranda alongside my logins to FreeNode, EFNet, and Undernet. And even that only lasted a week before I got too frustrated with the annoyances.
I avoid Slack entirely. My comment [1] on Reddit still stands for Slack's advantages for business. I'm sure Discord is happy without the business userbase, but I can't help feeling they could challenge Slack if they wanted to.
I was close to convincing my small company to go with discord instead of slack, until we realized discord specifically disallows commercial use. Maybe they can charge something for commercial use and I'll get them to switch back.
The Terms of Service for Discord just got updated. Though on DuckDuckGo's search page I see the phrase "solely for your personal, non-commercial use", this must be from an old version because the ToS doesn't use "commercial" anywhere.
Looks like they may have just removed this restriction?
Mostly integration with services that sales/marketing/design/engineering people use. I'm not familiar with Discord beyond destiny lfg, but can you have webhooks for Discord to alert for example, new github PRs/commits?
Absolutely. I'm a part of several servers that post to a channel whenever a github release is made, and some that post straight to Discord from the buildscript.
My full-time job is indie game development, and I'm very pleased to see this. I sell my games on Steam, the Apple Mac Store, Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming (and a few other places, but those are the big ones) but 90% of my income comes from Steam. This is... understandably not the most stable feeling thing, to have one distributor paying my bills. I'm looking forward to Steam not having quite the hold on PC Games that it currently does! It's not that I have any complaints about Steam specifically, but Discord selling games, the rise of GOG and Itch, and Twitch getting in on it are all quite interesting to me.
I hope Discord opens up to more developers soon.
Oh, and another thought, I run a Discord for people interested in the game I'm currently developing. You can imagine the effectiveness of putting a Buy button so close to an engaged community.
I've had this argument all day yesterday (on Discord, of course) about whether Steam can ever be dethroned, and your last sentence nails it on the head: while Steam has tried for a while to integrate social features into their store (and made a real mess of it), Discord is THE place where engaged gamers go to find a community.
I buy on Steam because I like the centralised hub for installing and uninstalling, but the discovery process is just horrible: most of the games that go on my wishlist come from suggestions from other players in the Discord servers I'm active in. I only spend on Steam the bare minimum time I need to manage my library.
I imagine that for a developer it must be a pretty good prospect, having the product for sale just a click away from where the discussion is; for me as a consumer the critical part will be how well the store works on mobile: I do 90% of my Discord activity on an iPhone, and if it's as frictionless as buying on Steam but with a better mobile experience, I will definitely give it a go.
Do you produce games on actual printed disks? Have you reached out to smaller gaming stores - both in your area and around the country? If you move away from digital distribution, you might just find yourself feeling more stable. And certainly, you'll be pulling away from Valve/Steam.
When I buy games or movies, it's only on physical media. Then again, maybe I'm just old fashioned when it comes to this, because I don't believe in paying real money for non-physical goods and services. I don't trust a company to maintain a server perpetually - after all, evidence has consistently shown that they will not. With non-physical media, someone else holds all the cards and can restrict access to something which you paid for. With physical media, that data is with you, offline, for the life of the disk. They can't take it away without breaking into your home, office, or storage facility and stealing the item from you.
Paying for something on Valve's platform means that at any time, Valve or some other group can revoke your access. The same goes for Netflix. Things get added and removed from their catalog so often that I could never bother keeping it straight, even when I had a free account for a few months. All I knew was one day, I wanted to watch something that they'd had and it was gone. That was the day I made absolutely certain that they had no payment information and would end the free trial gracefully and without trying to take my money.
Most of my games are on Steam, but for Xbox One X I prefer a physical copy due to size and price. 100GB download for one game is a bit much on my current connection.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on Xbox Store, $85 (cheapest edition). Physical copy, $66 (prices converted from NOK to USD).
EDIT: Apparently RDR2 Xbox One X download size will "only" be 88.57GB. Still, a bit heavy. Forza 7 was 95GB.
Steam seemed unassailable by competition until now - is this the solution to competing with platforms that have a monopoly from community lock in (Facebook and Youtube being good examples)?
Build a tangentially related service, build up your own community and then slowly pivot into their space once you've got your userbase.
Anecdotally everyone I know who uses Steam is also on Discord for chat now because it works so well.
The only downside is the total lack of Linux support despite Discord having a Linux client. I'll def. stay on Steam until they support Linux as well as Valve does.
I doubt continuing to be a game store on Windows will be profitable indefinitely, considering Microsoft is trying to push their own store and close down Windows gaming for themselves.
Love how people are claiming they are going to close down Windows for gaming back in the GFWL days and it never happened.
Now we have the Microsoft Store, whille substantially better, Windows hasn't even attempted to close down the system and yet again everyone is claiming they will. They aren't, and they won't, the Microsoft Store still hasn't urserped Azure or regular Windows keys in sales or profit. So why would any company close off their system potentially losing more sales on Windows keys, it just makes no sense.
It's certainly something they might do. It wouldn't be totally out of character for MS. But there's no evidence that they're "trying to push their own store and close down Windows gaming for themselves".
At this point the only competition I could forsee is Epic launching their own storefront. They have a giant audience thanks to Fortnite, and could heavily integrate the store into the engine.
They don't. Stuff like "This bad boy runs so much better now." and "For when you can't even alt-tab fast enough to abandon ship." (taken from changelog). This is just additional shit you need to parse with no additional information received. Similar to Microsoft and their Windows Installer "We'll setup a few things for you", which is equally stupid.
People™ usually include much more swear words and other non political correct terms (or memes). When a company does that, it always feels forced.
Maybe it would seem forced for say, McDonalds, but it is on-brand communication for Discord. They are all about "made by gamers for gamers"-- maybe you use Discord in a different way than me, but there are multiple servers in my list that are just straight memes.
It doesn't bother me that much, personally, but the way they shoehorn some sort of faux-casual wordplay into every single bullet point does push it a bit into "how do you do, fellow kids" territory.
Constructing additional pylons... is cringeworthy? I mean maybe get a faster machine if you are staring at loading screens for more than 800ms XD (I joke). Sure there are some silly ones, but also 12-year-olds use discord too.
In the replies, they said they are planning a blog post to talk about the tech in-depth. Looking forward to that! Apparently they’re also deploying Rust + Elixir via a NIF.
I like it, but it's not reliable, the interface kind of sucks balls, search function could be a little bit better and why does markdown not work on the mobile application? Why don't we have threads like in Slack for more business oriented stuffs?
Just know I'm saying all this as someone who uses Discord every day. I do like it, but I'm not going to sit here singing it's praises when in reality, it would be so much better if someone really took time to polish the damn thing.
Also, more to the point, the store sucks. It's annoying, it adds to the clutter, go buy games off of GOG or Steam if you have to, I don't get why we need to have another middleman, one that already harvests our data.
Side Note: I will say, Discord's keybindings are absolutely amazing, 10/10. Could not be happier, now if the rest of the app was like that, I wouldn't care about the store.