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.