Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market.
I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical.
Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.
It's free for the same reason everything is free these days. VC funds anything that will attract a lot of users to mine data from so they can sell the data. Discord didn't do anything that was groundbreaking or even solve a problem that had no solution; they just came along during a time when investors are willing to fund a company operating at a loss for a decade until FANG buys them.
Discord's a pretty good product, and they've got the engineers and money to get better, but the only reason they won is because of timing. Same for Slack; there were identical products to Slack that tried for decades to gain traction, but they weren't free, because that business model didn't exist at the time.
The ux of Slack is essentially screen+irc implemented in JS with emotes. It enabled technical and non-technical people to use the same tool. The key to success is not technical, it's that they tailored the product to a specific group that would then lock itself in.
I didn't understand Discord's success, but comments here point that gamers couldn't find free group-voice apps at a critical time. Here again, they tailored the product to a group that would then voluntarily lock itself in.
Later, they sell the companies with valuations based on the captured user bases.
I wasn't referring to things like IRC. When Slack was initially released, it was no different from Campfire and a whole string of other web-based chat systems that came and went going all the way back to the dawn of AJAX in the late 90s. Slack's improved a lot since then, with app integrations and other features, but fundamentally it wasn't any different than its predecessors. It's easy to think that Slack did something groundbreaking, or figured out the magic solution to the problem that sank its predecessors, but just like Discord, the reason Slack won is because it came along at a time when companies can raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to float them for years while offering a free product. Then they can upsell later, and/or commoditize their users' personal information. Those business models weren't as easy to come by in the past, so a lot of products failed. None of this is to bash Slack; it's an adequate product for what it does.
Another big thing that the current crop of winners has going for it is that cloud hosting allows applications to launch literally for free and scale quite a bit without paying much of anything in infrastructure costs. That also wasn't an option 10-20 years ago.
I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).
one of the founders and current CEO Jason Citron had a previous org called OpenFeint, which:
> was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications" [1]
Of course that doesn't mean anything about the current model of Discord, but good to be aware of.
IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.
Unless businesses are paying for server boosts[0] (which would only be useful for 1080p60 screen-share or a 50mb upload limit), there's no way to use Discord for business or pay extra for business use outside of creating a free server like any other; there's no real reason to choose Discord for business either, since it has no real retention policy (other than storing messages forever, for now), DLP is non-existent, there's no SSO/SAML, etc. The only reason to use Discord for business is if you really like Discord and/or other parts of your business are on Discord, like if you run a video game.
There are "businesses" that have communities, and want to own/manage them. Discord works much better than Slack as a platform for "official" managed open-membership communities; it's seemingly a use-case the Discord staff have put a lot of thought into.
Think: every content-creator or streamer.
But also: regular corporations that provide platform services that people build their own stuff on top of, such that people want to talk to each-other about the service rather than just talking to the corporation about the service. (The sort of thing you used to stand up a hosted forum for.)
Yep, I agree about limited industry but it does work in that respect. I see it used a lot for content creators as a way to organize and tier out their fans as well.
we're trying to use Discord for our multi-site grant-funded healthcare project... it's pretty messy to use. Would love to pay for some decent support... People are getting locked out of their accounts for some reason and working with their support team is very painful.
Our only source is this WSJ article (excerpt from qz[0]):
Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled.
we use discord for work and to "boost" your server to a level where you get reasonable streaming you need to pay ~$60 and a higher upload limit, or ~$110 for the max. Which is pretty good in that it applies for all users
It's a bit of an odd model for paying for businesses, but works well in the gaming world where multiple people can essentially help pay for a server (if you want the extra toys)
Why did you pick Discord over Slack or Teams? I'd be driven crazy if there wasn't any SSO or fancy admin features, but then again I'm a nerd who cares about things like that (and also why I really want Discord for Enterprise to happen). Is it just because it's easier to use?
I pay for nitro, I don't use discord non stop but it's great for a bunch of niche channels i'm on. I'm happy to pay $10 to a platform that makes it easier for me to find information and I know a bunch of my colleagues pay as well. All in we still support individual projects as well but truthfully it's the cost of a beer a month.
I don't get it, you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house, you don't need to pay to have it hosted somewhere. Works find running on any box on your desk.
Discord makes you the product. It's gratis in exchange for letting them spy on you. If you don't know why that's bad...
> you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house
That seems easy to you. That would be easy for me too and most likely 90% of the people on HackerNews.
But the average person doesn't have a "random Linux box" in their house. Most people don't even know what Linux is. Most people would be overwhelmed just looking for the terminal emulator on their computer, before they even typed a command into it.
Most people don't want to manage an always-on linux box for a voice server. Most people don't want to manage port-forwarding on their firewall/router. Most people don't have static IPs at their house and wouldn't know how to setup dynamic dns to solve the problem. Most people don't even know what DNS is.
MOST PEOPLE just want a program they can launch when they want to talk to their friends. That is why Discord has been successful.
I'm not saying that's good. I am just saying that its the way the world is.
I find it astounding that people here can not even grasp the concept of why Discord is popular. I am perfectly capable of hosting my own server and doing everything manually. But it is clear as day why discord wiped out the competition while most of the comments here seem dazed by the fact and are left wondering why people don't just use IRC.
It's no wonder so many projects and FOSS tools fail to gain large userbases when it seems that most developers seem to be living on another planet entirely.
This is an important point. I write that with no disrespect to all those FOSS developers who have devoted themselves to the work of creating new, interesting and useful things. But the fact is that usability, like intuition, is usually a very subjective matter. That's why QA and UAT were such an integral part of traditional software development, and why community engagement needs to be a two-way street.
Best comparison for Discord is to think it as social media site, Facebook or Reddit. Find or get invite to server, everything is there trivially. Creating your own space is simple, easy and fast. Everyone is already there.
IRC is pretty similar, but much more fragmented and not really very user-friendly.
somehow the only real challenge for the tech community is how to wrap all that self-hosting complexity so that most people could just use it with the click of a button.
its not a technical challenge, its a moral challenge. it means doing what is good for the users even if they don't really know it
I vouched for your comment. A lot of the rise of Discord can be attributed to convenience, network effects, and pretty features like animated reactions, but ultimately it is still surveillance capitalism. Unfortunately, it appears that the masses don't care about things like privacy, as they're more than willing to sign up for these kinds of services.
I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical.
Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.