7 ms·

As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

125 points by colbyh 9y ago

desireco42 9y ago
Discord is awesome! Very easy to use, easy to connect with other player in the clan and organize events and raids. Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little. I really like it a lot and I was always wondering why it is not used more in business setting or for coordination in teams, because it could totally do that and it is ligher solution then slack or god forbid hipchat.
- eberkund 9y ago
  Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack, it is a very similar product but I feel like by marketing it primarily to gamers they are positioning themselves in a far less profitable market than Slack is.
  - forthefuture 9y ago
    Its easier to get businesses to use Discord than to get gamers to use Slack.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Turns out 'free' is a good selling point
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack I see several reasons. 1. It's impossible to not be in a public channel. Yes, you can mute it, but you can't ever leave it. In a large company with thousands of channels, this creates cognitive overhead. 2. You can create private channels, but this requires the ability to assign permissions. This has two problems - one, if you have a lot of teams that need to have private rooms you're going to spend a lot of time juggling permissions, and two, if you need a quick ad-hoc room that you don't want littering the general list, you need to be able to assign permissions.
    - hellbanner 9y ago
      You can hide muted channels.. then you don't see them
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        How?
        vitaflo 9y ago
        Under the options for the server, select "Hide muted channels".
    - sandGorgon 9y ago
      Exactly - the permission structure is the single biggest problem. This will pretty much kill slack if they can build this in.
  - j_s 9y ago
    One major roadblock is there is no concept of separate identities managed under one login, or switching accounts easily. I think there is a half-way-there "server nickname" option new this year but it's not quite the same. The primary motivation for most is a clear separation between personal and professional. https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10492779-support-multiple-accounts https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S... Anecdata: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865292 Some people consider this a positive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14089417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14089417
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - robryan 9y ago
    They would have got nowhere just being a slack clone going after the same businesses. In gaming there was a read pain point which they are addressing. Services like Ventrilo, Teamspeak etc required a lot of setup/ self hosting and were only really strong for voice. Skype didn't organise well around how people game. When I come back to WoW a few years ago a lot of people were trying to run groups on Skype which was a horrible experience of adding randoms and joining group calls, in additional to all the other downsides of Skype. Discord is a perfect replacement for that.
- wbond 9y ago
  The Sublime Text community has adopted Discord as the predominant real-time chat platform. Initially I was skeptical, but it has worked out fairly well. IRC suffered from not being very accessible for many, and not having rich formatting nor history scroll back. It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Granted, I don’t think we’ve got more than a couple of hundred users on our Discord server, but it has been serving the core group of contributors well.
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    > It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Fyi, it is gated by Discord and (for instance) I'm unable to create an account under this psuedonym. So, I (personally) will never use Discord as they locked my account when I attempted to create one.
    - wbond 9y ago
      I was under the impression anyone could join who had the server address?
      - AFNobody 9y ago
        I'm actually blocked for registering/banned during registration. I literally cannot have a Discord account 'cause it'll just get disabled immediately.
        wbond 9y ago
        Oh, I was referring to gated meaning you can't get in without being invited.
    - distantsounds 9y ago
      your account name is not the same as your display name, which you can customize on a per-server basis. Also, signups are done via email. And your "username" is not unique by design, it gives you a numeric identity alongside it (much like how Blizzard's battle tags work).
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  > Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little. >... business setting ... These two things don't seem to go together, maybe that's why it is not used more in business?
brightball 9y ago
It's cool seeing an Elixir company have such explosive growth.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Oh? They use Elixir? I see https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b and https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request-bursts-of-over-a-million-per-minute-with-elixirs-genstage-8f899f0221b4 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request... ... Interesting.
- desireco42 9y ago
  I forgot about that part, but that just makes them even more dear to my heart.
- schwap 9y ago
  Interesting that 2 success stories in this space (the other being WhatsApp) are built on Erlang/OTP.
  - OoooooooO 9y ago
    Ericsson language + The Open Telecom Platform. Made by a telecom company, build for telecom stuff. Used by basically every enterprise telecom application software (e.g. Asterik). Not that interesting if one knows the Erlang/OTP background.
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  Elixir is part of their great performance! Their engineering blog is really interesting and full of neat information scaling Elixir (which is really hard to find since Elixir scales for a VERY long time).
  - j_s 9y ago
    They also have open sourced a number of tools that offer tremendous value to anyone scaling Elixir.
NelsonMinar 9y ago
Discord's come a long way on this stuff. About a year ago they started getting used by hate groups for organizing and I was worried the platform would get taken over by bad people. I don't know that they've solved all the social problems but at least they're making an honest effort.
- casione 9y ago
  It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)
  - NelsonMinar 9y ago
    American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of legal liability nor brand identification you want. https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-charlottesville-lawsuits/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-c... Also the bad people never stay confined to their private hate club. See the linked article here about "raids" on other channels or literally the entire history of Internet social media.
    - casione 9y ago
      >American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of brand identification you want. The only "people" at fault here are journalists, putting Discord in the title of the article. They do it to put pressure on the service providers so they ban those people, but they will just go elsewhere. It's frankly stupid. The only side who's hurt with those articles is Discord, who don't deserve it.
    - katastic 9y ago
      So by that same logic, then Reddit should be sued into oblivion because both left and ring wing extremists have used Reddit subreddits for harassment campaigns. They even left up an anarchy thread that posted all of the phone numbers in the White House so people could fill the lines with hate speech... because... Trump... and everyone in the white house answering phones is automatically a trump supporter and deserving of harassment. Multiple people filed complaints directly to the admins. They did nothing and left it up. That's far worse than Discord merely having some users that are Nazis, and haven't been sued. And if we're talking about harassment, and bigotry, why not the holy grail of the toxic internet? Twitter. If Discord "needs" to remove bigots from their lines (yes, or, no, pick one), then don't cell phone companies need to do the exact same thing? Why should cell phone companies be allowed to "give Nazis a platform" over texts and phone calls? What's the difference between a group text chat and a Discord text chat? Nothing. Except one is directly using the internet, and the other ... is using the internet as a backbone. Discord even runs on a phone. So isn't Verizon a "Nazi enabler" by the same logic? So let's do it. Let's scan everyone's text message and phone calls to stop the Nazis. Clearly the ends justify the means, so let's do it.
mikkelam 9y ago
I my startup company our dev team is pread across paris, copenhagen, dubai and beirut. We with struggled using slack and skype for communication but have recently went for discord, it really boosts the morale and connects the offices in such a cool way. Always being able to talk in a voice channel is just amazing, and everything works incredibly smooth. You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your channel though Would recommend for other small companies in same boat
- joshmn 9y ago
  Similarly, some time ago I ran a team of 9 through Ventrilo (TeamSpeak alternative) after we struggled with Skype and IRC. It worked great, but we missed text for historical reasons; to supplement text we whipped up another IRC channel. Discord really hit it off with gamers giving them the chat application they want (such as Steam, Battle.NET; formally Xfire) with the VOIP they used in conjunction. It's really an amazing product (who says Electron doesn't work?!) — I'm hoping they can stay around for a long time.
  - Tobba_ 9y ago
    I wouldn't really say their client works in that sense considering how notorious it is for flunking out in completely random ways (i.e missing push-to-talk release events, suddenly deciding your speakers or mic don't exist, not lighting up people who are speaking, the UI randomly blanking out, etc). It's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of bugs other than maybe Skype. Not that anyone picks their chat/VoIP client based off that either way; we all happily used the 2011-era Steam client, and that was a legendary kind of awful. Also, I can't be the only one who can single out Electron/CEF apps just from how bad the input delay is. It gives me the feeling of it being made of cheap plastic.
    - jonreem 9y ago
      Just have to chime in with my own anecdote that I find discord to be mostly bug free and an excellent, easy to use piece of software.
thomas_howland 9y ago
It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private political speech.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  More or less, yes. Fringe political views will get you permanently blocked by Discord and/or Twitter. I'm not a right-leaning person but even the concept speech should be free and uncensored if you aren't enabling a crime is an issue.
  - superkuh 9y ago
    That's the problem with centralization, walled gardens, and proprietary protocols. You won't ever have a problem if you just don't go into the gardens. Self-host with mumble, teamspeak, matrix, or something. They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.
    - akoncius 9y ago
      then why cellphones are not treated same way? SMS/calls should be analyzed and then people should be banned from network if something is “wrong”. And by “wrong” I’m not talking about organising a crime such as terrorist attack or something.
      - gsich 9y ago
        Because ISPs or mobile providers are not that retarded. They provide infrastructure, not content.
      - superkuh 9y ago
        Cell phone telco propviders have monopolies on radio spectrum that come with certain obligations, regulations, and conditions. That's in addition to inheriting the rules from land telephony and public infrastructure/title II stuff. You can bet that this kind of thing will happen if they can make it happen though.
z3t4 9y ago
> "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source Skype alternatives !?
- gsich 9y ago
  There is. Matrix, Mumble, IRC, jitsi ...
  - beefhash 9y ago
    I'll just comment on IRC since I know nothing about the others. As much as I'd love to say otherwise, IRC is not a viable Discord alternative. The onboarding on Discord is as smooth as IRC would be if the standard web clients had actually decent UX. Unlike Discord, however, people can't seem to figure out banning on IRC. There's no realistic way to CAPTCHA on IRC connection. You could work around that on very modern IRCds with something like requiring SASL for authentication and having a web-based registration that does CAPTCHA, but mandatory registration breaks the onboarding process again. People these days have a hard expectation that they can just drag and drop files and have it work, rather than navigating to imgur/some other site. They want server-side logs to catch up on conversations they weren't online for -- rather than setting up a bouncer (which I'd argue is a privacy nightmare rather than a feature, but YMMV if you've got nothing to hype). Some even want voice chat and avatars. In some rare cases, people even have to call their ISP about unblocking 6667/6697 because of old cases with botnets. Web applications would be much more popular, but then other IRC people want ways to ban the web clients reliably. And let's not get into the historical cruft of the ident field that's not entirely historical cruft because it's actually used by shared providers to enable banning in the first place. But that requires, again, knowledge of how to ban properly. Which is a lost skill. tl;dr: Discord UX is so much better than IRC UX to the a lot of people in a lot of ways.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    Being a Skype alternative requires persistent chat, audio, and video.
    - 9y ago
gravypod 9y ago
One thing discord fails at accomplishing is voice activation in their web browser client. If anyone from the company is reading I will gladly write you a python/scipy program that will do the correct real-time DSP for voice activation if you implement it into your platform. It's a window, an fft, a filter around a primary frequency range, an integration, and an N second timer since the last time the audio crosses the threshold. Discord's current implementation drops in the middle for words! It's crazy.
- dwrtz 9y ago
  What's wrong with push-to-talk?
  - gravypod 9y ago
    It's obsolete and only needed because their software is broken. Skype, Google Hangouts, teamspeak, ventrillo, mumble, and tox all support my microphone and voice activation correctly.
    - ben-schaaf 9y ago
      Push to talk is most certainly not obsolete. I (and many gamers I know) use push to talk for the privacy of being able to choose when your microphone is activated. Its even more useful in competitive gaming and/or streaming where many want to chose what to say to their team/friends and themselves/the stream.
      - iMarv 9y ago
        Also helps a lot in large communities. There will always be people that are nice and you like to have around, but are a bit "louder" during gaming sessions. We were really successful by teaching them to not hit the PTT-button when they need to drop their load of frustration.
        cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
dbg31415 9y ago
I started using Discord to game. Then pushed it out to some of my clients. It's great. Webhooks make it so I can replace Slack. Voice chat makes it so I can replace Slack / Skype. The ease of use, the voice channels... it's all so simple. Push to talk, who doesn't love that? Discord has been strong out the gate, much faster at getting features polished than any competitor I've seen.
amk_ 9y ago
IMO its origins in the gaming community, and all the moderation features that grew out of it, make Discord a much better fit for open source communities than Slack. For example: - Individuals can block and report other users - There are tiered mod levels - Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad actors Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord than Slack already, too. If you haven't checked out an OSS community on Discord yet here are a few: - https://www.reactiflux.com/ https://www.reactiflux.com/ - https://chat.vuejs.org https://chat.vuejs.org - https://discord.gg/reasonml https://discord.gg/reasonml
- ancarda 9y ago
  >- Individuals can block and report other users As far as I know, Slack won’t implement that because it’s a team chat app and if team members need to block people, there’s larger problems: https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481 https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pluma 9y ago
    In other words, Slack merely tolerates public Slack chats, it doesn't want to encourage them. As we speak, I have five slack communities open in my messenger. All but one of them are open to the public. I'd wager there are more public Slack communities than there are private (i.e. "team chat") ones. But much like Twitter, Slack has a fundamentally different vision for their platform than their users apparently have. To me this was first made clear when Reactiflux (a massive community around React, Flux and related web technologies and topics) had to switch from Slack to Discord because they had hit a hard limit of members and Slack said they wouldn't increase it because their software and infra wasn't build to handle these scenarios. Nevertheless open source projects and community builders keep flocking to Slack and Slack doesn't seem to have any intention to clear up this misalignment. They're benefiting from the free advertisement small public communities create but don't want to spend any extra energy providing their services to them as they grow.
jaxondu 9y ago
Am I the only one who finds Discord iOS unusable due to the small font which is not changeable? Also the font color is of low contrast whether you in its light or dark theme.
rodionos 9y ago
Discord Bot/Webhook API is really great[1]. You can use it to push alerts and charts from monitoring[2]. It's straightforward. In Slack, a comparable integration requires a bit more footwork with file uploads being a separate part of the API. [1]: https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook [2]: https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/notifications/discord.md https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/noti...
brendyn 9y ago
It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing: Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens before switching to a freedom respecting software. Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.
- atc 9y ago
  Discord won many people over simply because it was such well written software, and that continues today. Its proprietary nature has always concerned me too, as well as what they're doing with the data (i.e. assume they're reading & listening to everything). What they mustn't do is forget how quickly they grew and the underlying concept that enabled it: people will flock to different messaging platforms quite easily (Teamspeak to Discord is a great example) which means Discord can lose just as quickly as it won.
  - merb 9y ago
    I think the biggest reason is/was because it is free (Costs no Money). Not because it is/was well written. Nobody cares if it is well written... (at least outside the hn spectrum)
    - zaarn 9y ago
      Everyone cares it was well written, otherwise people would be using Skype, which is also Cost Free (sans some features) or one of the P2P chat apps (bitmessage), but nobody is doing that.
- 9y ago
Tomis02 9y ago
I wonder how much Discord had to pay for this ad.

125 points by colbyh 9y ago

Discord is awesome! Very easy to use, easy to connect with other player in the clan and organize events and raids. Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little. I really like it a lot and I was always wondering why it is not used more in business setting or for coordination in teams, because it could totally do that and it is ligher solution then slack or god forbid hipchat.

eberkund 9y ago
Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack, it is a very similar product but I feel like by marketing it primarily to gamers they are positioning themselves in a far less profitable market than Slack is.
- forthefuture 9y ago
  Its easier to get businesses to use Discord than to get gamers to use Slack.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Turns out 'free' is a good selling point
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack I see several reasons. 1. It's impossible to not be in a public channel. Yes, you can mute it, but you can't ever leave it. In a large company with thousands of channels, this creates cognitive overhead. 2. You can create private channels, but this requires the ability to assign permissions. This has two problems - one, if you have a lot of teams that need to have private rooms you're going to spend a lot of time juggling permissions, and two, if you need a quick ad-hoc room that you don't want littering the general list, you need to be able to assign permissions.
  - hellbanner 9y ago
    You can hide muted channels.. then you don't see them
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      How?
      - vitaflo 9y ago
        Under the options for the server, select "Hide muted channels".
  - sandGorgon 9y ago
    Exactly - the permission structure is the single biggest problem. This will pretty much kill slack if they can build this in.
- j_s 9y ago
  One major roadblock is there is no concept of separate identities managed under one login, or switching accounts easily. I think there is a half-way-there "server nickname" option new this year but it's not quite the same. The primary motivation for most is a clear separation between personal and professional. https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10492779-support-multiple-accounts https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S... Anecdata: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865292 Some people consider this a positive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14093132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14089417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14089417
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- robryan 9y ago
  They would have got nowhere just being a slack clone going after the same businesses. In gaming there was a read pain point which they are addressing. Services like Ventrilo, Teamspeak etc required a lot of setup/ self hosting and were only really strong for voice. Skype didn't organise well around how people game. When I come back to WoW a few years ago a lot of people were trying to run groups on Skype which was a horrible experience of adding randoms and joining group calls, in additional to all the other downsides of Skype. Discord is a perfect replacement for that.
wbond 9y ago
The Sublime Text community has adopted Discord as the predominant real-time chat platform. Initially I was skeptical, but it has worked out fairly well. IRC suffered from not being very accessible for many, and not having rich formatting nor history scroll back. It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Granted, I don’t think we’ve got more than a couple of hundred users on our Discord server, but it has been serving the core group of contributors well.
- AFNobody 9y ago
  > It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Fyi, it is gated by Discord and (for instance) I'm unable to create an account under this psuedonym. So, I (personally) will never use Discord as they locked my account when I attempted to create one.
  - wbond 9y ago
    I was under the impression anyone could join who had the server address?
    - AFNobody 9y ago
      I'm actually blocked for registering/banned during registration. I literally cannot have a Discord account 'cause it'll just get disabled immediately.
      - wbond 9y ago
        Oh, I was referring to gated meaning you can't get in without being invited.
  - distantsounds 9y ago
    your account name is not the same as your display name, which you can customize on a per-server basis. Also, signups are done via email. And your "username" is not unique by design, it gives you a numeric identity alongside it (much like how Blizzard's battle tags work).
SkyMarshal 9y ago
> Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little. >... business setting ... These two things don't seem to go together, maybe that's why it is not used more in business?

brightball 9y ago

It's cool seeing an Elixir company have such explosive growth.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Oh? They use Elixir? I see https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b and https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request-bursts-of-over-a-million-per-minute-with-elixirs-genstage-8f899f0221b4 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request... ... Interesting.
desireco42 9y ago
I forgot about that part, but that just makes them even more dear to my heart.
schwap 9y ago
Interesting that 2 success stories in this space (the other being WhatsApp) are built on Erlang/OTP.
- OoooooooO 9y ago
  Ericsson language + The Open Telecom Platform. Made by a telecom company, build for telecom stuff. Used by basically every enterprise telecom application software (e.g. Asterik). Not that interesting if one knows the Erlang/OTP background.
sergiotapia 9y ago
Elixir is part of their great performance! Their engineering blog is really interesting and full of neat information scaling Elixir (which is really hard to find since Elixir scales for a VERY long time).
- j_s 9y ago
  They also have open sourced a number of tools that offer tremendous value to anyone scaling Elixir.

NelsonMinar 9y ago

Discord's come a long way on this stuff. About a year ago they started getting used by hate groups for organizing and I was worried the platform would get taken over by bad people. I don't know that they've solved all the social problems but at least they're making an honest effort.

casione 9y ago
It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of legal liability nor brand identification you want. https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-charlottesville-lawsuits/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-c... Also the bad people never stay confined to their private hate club. See the linked article here about "raids" on other channels or literally the entire history of Internet social media.
  - casione 9y ago
    >American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of brand identification you want. The only "people" at fault here are journalists, putting Discord in the title of the article. They do it to put pressure on the service providers so they ban those people, but they will just go elsewhere. It's frankly stupid. The only side who's hurt with those articles is Discord, who don't deserve it.
  - katastic 9y ago
    So by that same logic, then Reddit should be sued into oblivion because both left and ring wing extremists have used Reddit subreddits for harassment campaigns. They even left up an anarchy thread that posted all of the phone numbers in the White House so people could fill the lines with hate speech... because... Trump... and everyone in the white house answering phones is automatically a trump supporter and deserving of harassment. Multiple people filed complaints directly to the admins. They did nothing and left it up. That's far worse than Discord merely having some users that are Nazis, and haven't been sued. And if we're talking about harassment, and bigotry, why not the holy grail of the toxic internet? Twitter. If Discord "needs" to remove bigots from their lines (yes, or, no, pick one), then don't cell phone companies need to do the exact same thing? Why should cell phone companies be allowed to "give Nazis a platform" over texts and phone calls? What's the difference between a group text chat and a Discord text chat? Nothing. Except one is directly using the internet, and the other ... is using the internet as a backbone. Discord even runs on a phone. So isn't Verizon a "Nazi enabler" by the same logic? So let's do it. Let's scan everyone's text message and phone calls to stop the Nazis. Clearly the ends justify the means, so let's do it.

mikkelam 9y ago

I my startup company our dev team is pread across paris, copenhagen, dubai and beirut. We with struggled using slack and skype for communication but have recently went for discord, it really boosts the morale and connects the offices in such a cool way. Always being able to talk in a voice channel is just amazing, and everything works incredibly smooth. You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your channel though Would recommend for other small companies in same boat

joshmn 9y ago
Similarly, some time ago I ran a team of 9 through Ventrilo (TeamSpeak alternative) after we struggled with Skype and IRC. It worked great, but we missed text for historical reasons; to supplement text we whipped up another IRC channel. Discord really hit it off with gamers giving them the chat application they want (such as Steam, Battle.NET; formally Xfire) with the VOIP they used in conjunction. It's really an amazing product (who says Electron doesn't work?!) — I'm hoping they can stay around for a long time.
- Tobba_ 9y ago
  I wouldn't really say their client works in that sense considering how notorious it is for flunking out in completely random ways (i.e missing push-to-talk release events, suddenly deciding your speakers or mic don't exist, not lighting up people who are speaking, the UI randomly blanking out, etc). It's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of bugs other than maybe Skype. Not that anyone picks their chat/VoIP client based off that either way; we all happily used the 2011-era Steam client, and that was a legendary kind of awful. Also, I can't be the only one who can single out Electron/CEF apps just from how bad the input delay is. It gives me the feeling of it being made of cheap plastic.
  - jonreem 9y ago
    Just have to chime in with my own anecdote that I find discord to be mostly bug free and an excellent, easy to use piece of software.

thomas_howland 9y ago

It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private political speech.

AFNobody 9y ago
More or less, yes. Fringe political views will get you permanently blocked by Discord and/or Twitter. I'm not a right-leaning person but even the concept speech should be free and uncensored if you aren't enabling a crime is an issue.
- superkuh 9y ago
  That's the problem with centralization, walled gardens, and proprietary protocols. You won't ever have a problem if you just don't go into the gardens. Self-host with mumble, teamspeak, matrix, or something. They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.
  - akoncius 9y ago
    then why cellphones are not treated same way? SMS/calls should be analyzed and then people should be banned from network if something is “wrong”. And by “wrong” I’m not talking about organising a crime such as terrorist attack or something.
    - gsich 9y ago
      Because ISPs or mobile providers are not that retarded. They provide infrastructure, not content.
    - superkuh 9y ago
      Cell phone telco propviders have monopolies on radio spectrum that come with certain obligations, regulations, and conditions. That's in addition to inheriting the rules from land telephony and public infrastructure/title II stuff. You can bet that this kind of thing will happen if they can make it happen though.

z3t4 9y ago

> "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source Skype alternatives !?

gsich 9y ago
There is. Matrix, Mumble, IRC, jitsi ...
- beefhash 9y ago
  I'll just comment on IRC since I know nothing about the others. As much as I'd love to say otherwise, IRC is not a viable Discord alternative. The onboarding on Discord is as smooth as IRC would be if the standard web clients had actually decent UX. Unlike Discord, however, people can't seem to figure out banning on IRC. There's no realistic way to CAPTCHA on IRC connection. You could work around that on very modern IRCds with something like requiring SASL for authentication and having a web-based registration that does CAPTCHA, but mandatory registration breaks the onboarding process again. People these days have a hard expectation that they can just drag and drop files and have it work, rather than navigating to imgur/some other site. They want server-side logs to catch up on conversations they weren't online for -- rather than setting up a bouncer (which I'd argue is a privacy nightmare rather than a feature, but YMMV if you've got nothing to hype). Some even want voice chat and avatars. In some rare cases, people even have to call their ISP about unblocking 6667/6697 because of old cases with botnets. Web applications would be much more popular, but then other IRC people want ways to ban the web clients reliably. And let's not get into the historical cruft of the ident field that's not entirely historical cruft because it's actually used by shared providers to enable banning in the first place. But that requires, again, knowledge of how to ban properly. Which is a lost skill. tl;dr: Discord UX is so much better than IRC UX to the a lot of people in a lot of ways.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Being a Skype alternative requires persistent chat, audio, and video.
  - 9y ago

gravypod 9y ago

One thing discord fails at accomplishing is voice activation in their web browser client. If anyone from the company is reading I will gladly write you a python/scipy program that will do the correct real-time DSP for voice activation if you implement it into your platform. It's a window, an fft, a filter around a primary frequency range, an integration, and an N second timer since the last time the audio crosses the threshold. Discord's current implementation drops in the middle for words! It's crazy.

dwrtz 9y ago
What's wrong with push-to-talk?
- gravypod 9y ago
  It's obsolete and only needed because their software is broken. Skype, Google Hangouts, teamspeak, ventrillo, mumble, and tox all support my microphone and voice activation correctly.
  - ben-schaaf 9y ago
    Push to talk is most certainly not obsolete. I (and many gamers I know) use push to talk for the privacy of being able to choose when your microphone is activated. Its even more useful in competitive gaming and/or streaming where many want to chose what to say to their team/friends and themselves/the stream.
    - iMarv 9y ago
      Also helps a lot in large communities. There will always be people that are nice and you like to have around, but are a bit "louder" during gaming sessions. We were really successful by teaching them to not hit the PTT-button when they need to drop their load of frustration.
      - cuckcuckspruce 9y ago

dbg31415 9y ago

I started using Discord to game. Then pushed it out to some of my clients. It's great. Webhooks make it so I can replace Slack. Voice chat makes it so I can replace Slack / Skype. The ease of use, the voice channels... it's all so simple. Push to talk, who doesn't love that? Discord has been strong out the gate, much faster at getting features polished than any competitor I've seen.

amk_ 9y ago

IMO its origins in the gaming community, and all the moderation features that grew out of it, make Discord a much better fit for open source communities than Slack. For example: - Individuals can block and report other users - There are tiered mod levels - Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad actors Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord than Slack already, too. If you haven't checked out an OSS community on Discord yet here are a few: - https://www.reactiflux.com/ https://www.reactiflux.com/ - https://chat.vuejs.org https://chat.vuejs.org - https://discord.gg/reasonml https://discord.gg/reasonml

ancarda 9y ago
>- Individuals can block and report other users As far as I know, Slack won’t implement that because it’s a team chat app and if team members need to block people, there’s larger problems: https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481 https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pluma 9y ago
  In other words, Slack merely tolerates public Slack chats, it doesn't want to encourage them. As we speak, I have five slack communities open in my messenger. All but one of them are open to the public. I'd wager there are more public Slack communities than there are private (i.e. "team chat") ones. But much like Twitter, Slack has a fundamentally different vision for their platform than their users apparently have. To me this was first made clear when Reactiflux (a massive community around React, Flux and related web technologies and topics) had to switch from Slack to Discord because they had hit a hard limit of members and Slack said they wouldn't increase it because their software and infra wasn't build to handle these scenarios. Nevertheless open source projects and community builders keep flocking to Slack and Slack doesn't seem to have any intention to clear up this misalignment. They're benefiting from the free advertisement small public communities create but don't want to spend any extra energy providing their services to them as they grow.

jaxondu 9y ago

Am I the only one who finds Discord iOS unusable due to the small font which is not changeable? Also the font color is of low contrast whether you in its light or dark theme.

rodionos 9y ago

Discord Bot/Webhook API is really great[1]. You can use it to push alerts and charts from monitoring[2]. It's straightforward. In Slack, a comparable integration requires a bit more footwork with file uploads being a separate part of the API. [1]: https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook [2]: https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/notifications/discord.md https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/noti...

brendyn 9y ago

It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing: Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens before switching to a freedom respecting software. Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.

atc 9y ago
Discord won many people over simply because it was such well written software, and that continues today. Its proprietary nature has always concerned me too, as well as what they're doing with the data (i.e. assume they're reading & listening to everything). What they mustn't do is forget how quickly they grew and the underlying concept that enabled it: people will flock to different messaging platforms quite easily (Teamspeak to Discord is a great example) which means Discord can lose just as quickly as it won.
- merb 9y ago
  I think the biggest reason is/was because it is free (Costs no Money). Not because it is/was well written. Nobody cares if it is well written... (at least outside the hn spectrum)
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Everyone cares it was well written, otherwise people would be using Skype, which is also Cost Free (sans some features) or one of the P2P chat apps (bitmessage), but nobody is doing that.
9y ago

Tomis02 9y ago

I wonder how much Discord had to pay for this ad.