Everything else was/is much worse.

Even years later it's still the only platform I know of that combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place, all accessible from your 'server' as they call it.

It also has clients for many platforms, including a web client, all of which look and function the same.

Any alternative out there does one of those things decently well, but either completely lacks or is utterly awful at the other things.

>combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place

and unlike skype (and probably teams too) supports PUSH 2 TALK which gaming oriented voice chats had close to 2 decades ago and is even more useful now, during WFH.

I think the most direct competitor to discord (for gaming and related communities) is guilded.gg which is basically a clone of discord that offers additional features as well, including offering most of the features that discord has paywalled behind "nitro" for free.

The big issue they have is building up a large enough network effect. I really can't see the discord communities I am a part of moving over there any time soon. Also, they were recently acquired by roblox, and nobody knows for sure what the new ownership will end up doing to the platform.

Because most people used ventrilo, teamspeak or mumble, which required running or paying for a server, and had limited chat/ social network functionality, and skype which was just terrible. It came at the right time as gaming hit its stride in the mainstream when people needed a place for 'local' communities that was basically frictionless and discord was there to capture that audience because there was basically nothing else.

All the features afterwards are mostly just them throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Discord ate the market because it is free and good enough voice quality. Before that everyone was paying for voice server hosting or doing it themselves. Is that smart marketing or just the standard operating procedure for startups around that time?

I agree, but also worth mentioning that Discord really did Chatrooms correctly.

The ability to easily create servers, invite users to your server, and then make that server your homebase with its own channels and emojis, is pretty novel and perfectly fit into the gaming community which is basically a loosely connected graph of friend groups.

Also, RBAC which allows huge flexibility for users to run their community in whatever fashion they want.

Technically Skype existed but lost with the new sms-looking ui that everyone hated and it was hardly suitable for anything larger than a friend group. Then there were long-standing issues of voice chats being P2P and thus allowing users to find the IP of other users, enabling DDOS attacks on routers.

Yeah I think people forget that Skype actually owned the video game voiceserver market for a few years.

Ventrillo and Teamspeak and Mumble were all good. But you had to assign someone in your friend-group to manage the server. This meant paying for hosting to do it "the right way", and in turn one friend either paid the hosting themselves or you had to figure out how to split the cost. Then if someone else joined the group you had to split it with them, etc.. Some people would self-host teamspeak or ventrillo at their houses so you could avoid those costs, but now you are reliant on an unreliable system of one friend hosting your voiceserver on their desktop computer. This means that router mishaps could send it offline, them turning off their computer could send it offline, or if the teamspeak/vent daemon wasn't running then your whole server is offline.

Skype solved a lot of those problems because it was always online, no one had to manage a server, and it was free. It sucked in just about every other way as a game chat option, but the benefits of no-server-management, always-available, and no-cost, made an objectively inferior product dominate the world of game chat.

Discord simply took the features of teamspeak/mumble/ventrillo and combined it with the service benefits that skype offered. No more server cost sharing and no more server administration. But you still got the benefits of actual game chat servers like voice lobbies (as opposed to initiating calls like skype).

I really don't think Marketing is what made Discord successful. This is truly an example of someone who solved a need. We needed a product like teamspeak/ventrillo/mumble combined with a service like skype. Discord was that creation. It truly solved a problem for gamers. Gamers were not looking to cling to skype, but they were all using it. Discord created a product that fit into the market perfectly and the masses ran to it because the need was so big, and Discord solved the problem that gamers needed. The ease of setup also helped. Sending a single share link that someone simply clicked was all it took to join a server and start talking. I think that ease of setup is also an incredibly under-rated strength of Discord. In fact I would venture to guess that most gamers joined their first Discord server by clicking a discord share link that was sent to them via Skype.

I don't think they did much marketing. They provided, for free, a replacement for a chat room, forum, and voice chat, which was in total easier to set up than any of the previous options any gaming community had for those, with similar levels of functionality.

uh, how about the fact that vent/mumble/Skype were all awful?

Mumble client is awful. Mumble audio quality and latency is fantastic.

Mumble is also self hosted, and nobody wants to host anything anymore when there's a free alternative that's good enough and hosted by someone else.

Skype is just universally terrible.

EDIT: since I'm part of that tiny minority exception that proves the rule: s/nobody wants/the vast majority do not want/

The only bad part of mumble calls for voice come from:

  * Where the server is hosted / quality of server
  * Poor client UI

The client UI issue is how easy it is to work-around bad audio from other users. It's possible to do, the UI just completely sucks.

User interface and end user fulfillment just aren't great generally for OSS. I think it would take a commons improvement project with either government grants (infrastructure) paying for results AND/OR a university spearheading the development project.

i totally disagree. the worst part about mumble is that it was a pain in the ass to set up. creating a discord server is trivial: all of my nontechnical friends have used the software just fine. mumble is terribly fiddly in comparison.

I don't see how that's relevant? I don't even prefer those over Discord, but I don't think it's enough of an improvement to warrant the market share it has now.

So what do you think happened? That people were manipulated in to using discord? Or that they don't know what the alternatives are?

Everyone I have spoken to loves discord and thinks it is one of the best programs they have. It's only a select group of hacker news style users who complain about minute details the average person does not care about.

I know it's hard for most people on this site to understand but the average user has very different priorities. Being able to create a "server" with the click of a button is worth more than every other issue listed in this thread. Having to pay or self host to create a group is a total non starter in 2021.

What I think happened, as someone who's been using Discord daily since 2015, is that they came up with a slightly better product than the alternatives, spent enough in marketing (to gamers specifically) to convince investors that it was a platform worth investing in, and only then slowly started improving their faulty software.

To say people were manipulated into using Discord is obviously not true, but it's also disingenuous to deny the massive amount of marketing Discord pushed back when it first started, not only in advertisement but just branding in general.

I'm not going to address the latter part of your comment because I don't understand what you're trying to say. I'm of the belief that I'm allowed to voice the legitimate issues I have with the software that impact not only myself and other developers but users in general.

The last part of the comment was probably a reply to this: "I don't see how that's relevant? I don't even prefer those over Discord, but I don't think it's enough of an improvement to warrant the market share it has now."

You don't see how those valuable those improvements are but the average person does and that's why it has a massive market share.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

What do you prefer?

The fact that you can:

(1) Find a server with a simple URL (no pw needed, no port or IP, etc.)

(2) Find your friends easily with a unique username and use chat as a fallback

(3) Create an audio room (that scales!) that has great audio quality (doesn't "drop" calls and

(4) Client that auto-updates to provide more and more features

All within a few minutes is a HUGE upgrade or Ventrilo.

This doesn't even mention the network effects, bot integration, gif/photo capability, etc. It's superior in almost every way possible.

I think you misread my comment. I definitely prefer Discord over the others, but I still think it has a long way to go before it becomes a chat experience that's not insufferable to use.

Got it, definitely did.

Small amounts of friction make a big difference. Back when my gaming friends were using Mumble, half of the group wouldn't bother joining voicechat (and we were lucky to have someone technical enough to run the server in the first place); with Discord it's easy enough that everyone does it.

Slack was/is pretty terrible too. Having every workspace require a new user is the pinnacle of idiocy. So annoying and even worse if you have different emails for different workspaces.

There are plenty of reasons to do this, all of which have to do with, say, privacy, and Slack has managed their way into making it dramatically less annoying.

1) They send magic links. Pretty easy.

2) They make all known workspaces you've logged into before discoverable and allow for a one-click "add to desktop Slack" option, which makes dealing with the whole "different users" issue. And to the extent that I use different emails for different workspaces, Slack accommodates that and allows me to do so within the same desktop instance, so not really sure what the concern is there.

That's true, but it doesn't change the user story going from "I click a link, I join the workspace" to "I click a link, I fill out yet another registration form, decide which email to use, add another password to my password safe, then join the workspace". Minor differences but friction does matter.

To add onto this, you also have no cross platform user consistency, so if I DM a user, if I want to search my DMs there, I might have to search my DMs in 10+ servers for the specific message I want. There are a million other problems with this model but this example is definitely one that I frequently ran into before people I knew switched to discord

People love it, marketing has nothing to do with it. I've heard any Discord when I followed open source programming project (Leela Chess Zero) and it was obvious after a few minutes why it's a fantastic fit. I moved my project there shortly after as well and it's fantastic.

Could marketing not be the reason people loved it, or the reason it was allowed to reach the point where it became lovable?

I'm not even sure it was a lot of marketing, for the new generation, it's just what they needed, chat+voice+screen on a html5/css3 visual language.

I despise discord quite a lot btw :)

Their moderation and community management tools are fantastic.

It's definitely improved over the years, but every remotely populated server I'm in uses bots for basic moderation features like ban words, proper bans/kicks (for example, temporary bans), warns, etc. There's still a long way to go in my opinion.

I'm not aware of anything that does a better job than discord. So they can be doing a fantastic job relative to the competition while still leaving stuff to be desired. Although bots are not really a bad solution and they leave the tools in the hands of the users who can now do just about anything.

I disagree. In my opinion those tools are the bare minimum for effective moderation, and while I love that Discord gives developers an API that allows them to implement those systems, I think it's something that should be handled by Discord themselves.

The audio quality of discord is incredibly bad when I compare it to teamspeak3 (opus music 10)