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I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be e

I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
I'd say it does more than one thing well, but yeah it's always sad to see every company chase forever growth and often ruin their core product in doing so.
mihaifm 5y ago
Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.
  - Shacklz 5y ago
    There's a difference between "sitting on their arses" and "trying to grab every single customer possible". TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.
    - themacguffinman 5y ago
      Let's not rewrite history and pretend that Teamspeak was always terrible. Their "philosophy" panned out for a long time and made them kings of the space, but to reiterate the GP's comment: things change. Now users want more convenience. Now they want better mobile support. Now they want GIFs and reactions. You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.
- konschubert 5y ago
  Maybe that's okay. Be THE product for half a decade, make your money, close up, next venture.
  - WitCanStain 5y ago
    That sounds horrible. We should focus on making good products that last a long time. What is the point of making something new and almost identical every 5 years?
    - jsilence 5y ago
      Yeah exactly! Maybe that's why users should focus on protocols and not on Platforms. Like Matrix.org
      - petre 5y ago
        And like XMPP before it.
      - Nbox9 5y ago
        How long did it take to upgrade from IPV4 to IPV6? IPV6 is a massively popular protocol in which virtually every technical person admitted we will need to move off of IPV4. IPV6 is 25 years old and we’re still not done with the migration. Protocols have a massive problem with updating their feature sets and security features.
    - perryizgr8 5y ago
      > almost identical If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Discord was horrible bloated software to begin with, and bloat only got worse. Nothing of value will be lost, chatting is no rocket science.
- sadness3 5y ago
  It takes significant evolution to just keep doing what you set out to do well. Running a successful mechanics business to repair cars means continuously updating your skills and tools. Eventually you become a flying car repair shop. It doesn't mean you have to grow to encompass every aspect of the automobile industry and compete with Repco and Mobil.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Except by then cars are rented to you by big advertising companies (in exchange for data), and they also do repairs (or outsource them to the lowest bidder). Skills don't matter if your business case has disappeared.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  I would not confuse the need for further developing ones tech, with the need for growing (in employees, customers, and whatever else). A product can stay relevant, if it keeps up with the tech, but does not necessarily need to capture every possible customer on the planet, not even as a goal.
- lmm 5y ago
  I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    Agreed, Skype used to have much of the Swedish market until they fucked up their clients and pushed people to Facebook Messenger. Now it is irrelevant.
  - relativ575 5y ago
    It's impossible to tell if Skype becoming irrelevant was due to new bloated features, new features that were badly implemented, or just that their users wanted to play with a new shinny tool that happened to be good and gradually moved there. They could have stayed put without adding any new features and would still be beaten by Discord.
- michaelt 5y ago
  The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight. Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking. On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking. So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)
  - sumedh 5y ago
    > Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time They had Orkut, they could have used it to compete with Facebook instead of creating a new service. Its the same thing with Googles multiple chat apps.
vodkapump 5y ago
My main recent annoyance is that they removed the mentions tab on mobile, and replaced it with some weird feature called stage (some sort of clubhouse ripoff where you do... livestreaming?) It placed the mentions in under the search(?!?!) tab, which adds 2 clicks, and also added significant time delays sometimes when the search tab has to load for 3-10seconds........ I have a server with lots of discord "OGs" back from 2015, and it's the most complained about change that has been discussed in that server, by far.
- square_usual 5y ago
  Th thing I hate the most about the mentions-under-search bit is that it's so unintuitive. I had a couple of pings and I looked around everywhere trying to find them, and the removal of the very helpfully labelled "@" button pissed me off. I only found out the pings were under search after I read the changelog. And for what? Discord stages are an absolute ghost town. The top ones are all "Talent shows" in bait servers. I don't mind changing UX as much as most people on HN, but changing UX to chase a fad that has already died out really grinds my gears.
  - vodkapump 5y ago
    Only time I ever see stages mentioned is when they do a paid spot with a YouTuber to do one..
lloydatkinson 5y ago
> I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Blame capitalism for aiming for profit, not actual service to people.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Yep, it goes one level abive execs. Execs who don't do these things get replaced! The shareholder model is broken.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      What is broken about it? Did anyone tell the discord creators to involve other shareholders?
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else. Now, you might think that this still aligns shareholder incentives with the long-term interests of the company, that if the shareholders care about profits over the long term then they should also care about the health of the business rather than just about how much money they are making now. The problem is that the most efficient way for investors to make money (per unit time) is not to care about the long term and instead to "pump and dump" companies by directing them towards (usually destructive) activities that increase profits in the short term, then selling the shares before the value inevitably crashes. Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time. As such, the system is setup to give power to those who are most destructive to real value creation. Ergo: broken.
hhsbz 5y ago
I use discord only for gaming but the entire app was full of text strings that made me cringe. I'm glad they have got rid of them.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Do you have a few examples, for someone who's never used Discord?
  - hhsbz 5y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png The entire app was full of crap like this - it's not funny or quirky, it's practically baby talk.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      That's pretty cringy indeed, though i must say i laughed at the idea of a program snuggling into my systray :) Not sure how well that would localize in other languages though. Thanks for the examples!
      - herbst 5y ago
        > Not sure how well that would localize in other languages though. Thanks for the examples! Not well at all. Making it even more cringe worthy
    - asddubs 5y ago
      why is calling yourself a "good boy" twice so much more unsettling than doing it once?
      - burntwater 5y ago
        One "good boy" and you're talking about puppies. Three "good boys" and now you've entered the realm of BDSM.
    - 5y ago
leshenka 5y ago
> and becoming a bloated mess too late
danuker 5y ago
Discord has done some shady stuff for quite some time. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_uses_ptrace_wildly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...
- speedgoose 5y ago
  I use Discord in a web browser for these reasons. The web sandbox has benefits.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    Does the web version work on mobile? I recall Slack's web app working on my tablet, but I think they may have disabled that now.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  Discord enumerates processes to discover OBS to turn on streamer mode, as well as being able to display what game you're playing. Disable the "share my current game" feature and there is no longer any ptracing
  - saladuh 5y ago
    Are you absolutely sure that's the case? The OP in that reddit post seemed to suggest that he had toggled off game detection and whatnot. Scroll down to the thread where the deleted comments are.
  - dancemethis 5y ago
    It's proprietary software. You can't prove it goes off. And there's both history and evidence that things are going against user privacy.
stared 5y ago
I have the same feeling. If they succeed, they will become Slack 2. If they don't, they will sink their ship.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > If they don't, they will sink their ship. Why would gamers stop using it?
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    Because Discord will probably compromise the existing product in order to try and grow.
globular-toast 5y ago
> I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.
- jeltz 5y ago
  No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    It's always worked for me. I've never used a bouncer. Maybe the "one thing" is not what you think it is. Think of it like a real room. When you're in the room you hear what's going on. When you're not, you don't.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Turns out most people don't like that idea, and appreciate chat history.
- thiht 5y ago
  Are you kidding? IRC doesn’t let you update or remove your messages, doesn’t have a permanent history, doesn’t even properly handle accounts and chan owners, doesn’t support any kind of rich text by itself, has netsplits, … what does it do well exactly? The protocol is simple and I had fun speaking on IRC through telnet when I was younger but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    You mentioned many things. IRC does one thing. I don't want any of that stuff. Netsplits aren't a huge problem. I'd rather have that than a centralised system that does down all at once.
d3nj4l 5y ago
> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.
- rb666 5y ago
  You must know a lot of people who take themselves too seriously.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    A lot of times when apps try to be cute I wish they would just STFU and do the thing I want them to
    - christophilus 5y ago
      > A lot of times Every time. FTFY.
    - kemotep 5y ago
      The Windows 10 new user setup screen and also the frowny face crash screen come to mind.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Clever humour at the right time is great. A dumb message while I'm trying to get on with my work or hobby isn't good humour or at the right time.
    - AllegedAlec 5y ago
      Yeah. It always falls flat for me, like the "Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" messages you get when some web pages break down.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
gambiting 5y ago
>>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?
- da_big_ghey 5y ago
  In chat app this is not so much an option because network effects. Nobody will use 17 chat app with a different for each thing, only 4 or 5.
antris 5y ago
> It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers. It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down. We need a systemic change.
- nhumrich 5y ago
  > blind to the needs of their customers Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.
  - antris 5y ago
    > one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers Which often isn't the case. Companies have lots of priorities that have nothing to do with end users at all. For example: - it does not matter how good your product is, if your company dies because there's a competitor that does not need to make profit and can temporarily offer their services for free, until your company is driven out of the market - dark patterns are well documented examples how working directly against good user experience can increase profits - lobbying politicians to drive out competition is extremely profitable, and does not take interests of the userbase into account at all There are probably numerous other, obvious examples how capitalism disincentivises companies from serving their customers well, but instead incentivizes gaming the system. The correlation between user experience and profitability is shaky at best. One could argue that user experience has almost nothing to with how businesses operate.
darthrupert 5y ago
What does it do well? I'm genuinely asking.
- DownGoat 5y ago
  Voice chat. It is superior to any other platform on this aspect other than TeamSpeak. We regularly have 40+ people in voice channels without people suffering from connection issues, bad audio quality, and lot's of noise.
  - darthrupert 5y ago
    Ah, good to know. That's indeed something I haven't considered at all.
dancemethis 5y ago
The one thing it does really well is getting personal user data and metadata while convincing people to defend it.
jstummbillig 5y ago
> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. This perception of games is pretty outdated and I assume that is what Discord has come to realize as well. Video games (and gamers) are approaching to be as varied as music (and its listeners) and the only reason they have not achieved parity yet is the difference in how long each has been around as a mass medium. Games have intrinsic qualities that set them apart from music, movies or other mediums – but being "fun" is certainly not it, and "gamery" would, at best, serve as a tautology.
p0nce 5y ago
> the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". It may be worse for you, but it feels way better to me. It has been very annoying to introduce Discord in work/casual settings and see it labelled as "a gamer thing". Right call by Discord.
kwanbix 5y ago
Honest question here. What is so good about discord? It reminds me more if IRC than a modern chat app. I really don't get it. Maybe I am missing something?
- MatthewMob 5y ago
  Voice, video and text chat with unlimited bandwidth, streaming resolution and storage space all for free, and all much, _much_ easier to use for the average user than any other voice and video communication client ever made.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
That’s why I use basecamp - they’re explicit and clear about staying small and profitable enough, with zero ambition for infinite growth.
- G4BB3R 5y ago
  The company I work use basecamp and I love it! The only thing I wish it had is subcomments like slack.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    What are subcomments - nested comments?
sfg 5y ago
Growth and change is why they exist. Its why they might replace things in other sectors and so make those sectors better. Its why they might fail and make things worse, at which point, it is why someone else will come along to try and make things better. Sometimes things are best left alone, but if this is attempted generally, then it'll probably lead to a stagnant pond, rather than a pleasant lake. Fresh flowing water is key. Also, not sure how many agree with you on the cutesy humour. Maybe, it was just time for that to go.
kaonashi 5y ago
If you take any investment money, then you're beholden to investors and investors want growth.
dcow 5y ago
The casual brand is great, but those loading antics are dumb. Nobody actually likes them. This is great news, Discord really, badly, needs multi account support, screen-share and video in stage channels, an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits), sso support, and possibly server DMs instead of global DMs (possibly addressing associated data segregation issues). Otherwise their product already works awesome for smaller more open minded businesses. We replaced Slack with it this week and I don’t see us going back. Also I want to point out that nothing in the article indicates a shift to b2b. It sounds more like they are going after parteon, onlyfans, consoles, twitch, etc. I just kinda assume they will develop some more mature user management and server payment options along the way.
- lynndotpy 5y ago
  Multi-account support is extremely important. Professors at my university have started hosting accounts on Discord, and people have been unable to make second accounts without second phone numbers. The result being that peoples personal and professional lives have started to overlap, which (naturally) results in dangerous positions for some people. I'm especially concerned if something like disc-cool starts up again, or the data from it gets leaked. (Disc-cool was a group that used self-bots to create a database of harvested messages, letting you search up any users message history.)
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > multi account support That would be great even without any business features. Some open source projects are starting to use discord and it would be nice for some users to link and use their github names and identities for these servers.
  - dcow 5y ago
    I consider that an organization use case, but yeah same difference.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
kulahan 5y ago
What does discord do really well? I’ve had channels mysteriously become inaccessible until whoever posted something deletes it. The “stay on top” feature for watching a stream never seems to work very well. For some stupid reason, chat and streams aren’t integrated, so you have to chat in an associated channel which is different from where you’re watching the stream. All kinds of icons are hidden until you happen to mouse over them, which is objectively bad design. If you receive an @ and the chat continues on significantly before you see it, clicking on that channel doesn’t take you to the mention, but rather some other, seemingly random location in chat history (sometimes I don’t find it and just give up). Discord doesn’t seem to do anything well except sign users up quickly.
- dcow 5y ago
  There are UX quirks to solve for sure but those are entirely solvable. Discord does private audio chat really well.
screye 5y ago
I wonder if discord could straight up sell/separate a 'fork' of their platform that targets a completely different audience. The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (enthusiast) Supra profitable, was to build it on the same platform as the (normie) BMW Z4. The Z4 gets some of the spice of the Supra, and the Supra owners don't feel cheated out of a place in the industry. Effectively, both cars maintain the same back end, but completely different front ends. Maybe discord could do the same. If reddit was run by competent people, then they'd know to continue supporting old.reddit.com for the same reason. Some aspects of Discord's platform are incredibly useful and class leading. However, their users are a very particular kind of internet person, and the complete un-intuitiveness of the platform highlights that. You can't preserve the 4chan-esque spastic wonder of a platform while still appealing to normies, businesses and older folks. A platform as funny/productive as 4chan and as sanitized as Teams is the holy-grail. Alas, like all holy-grails, it seems entirely unattainable.
- dcow 5y ago
  Yeah this has been my hope too. The fact that you can’t separate the two right now is holding the platform back. I also wish for a business grade frontend that can be sold as a digital office (we have been experimenting this week with using discord as such), but in lieu of that I think simply supporting multiple accounts in the client would go a really long way. The problem is avatars are account bound so you can’t separate your work persona from your social persona, which matters when your social persona enjoys nsfw hobbies or even simply when you want a punk avatar for one and a headshot for the other. IMO having separate personas is the only way to allow the platform to retain its good qualities while expanding into markets where the masses preside. If people have to use one identity for everything then that identity becomes sterile, and Discord’s biggest success is that it fosters private communities where you can shitpost and trash talk with your close friends while breaking some sweat in <game>.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campus/ https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...
NoSorryCannot 5y ago
Discord doesn't even do its one thing all that well. The client is buggy and slow. It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem. Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is. It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really. Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.
- oriki 5y ago
  > Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is. I agree from a moral standpoint but because of the general use of emoji in servers, it really doesn't prove to be that much of an issue. People also enjoy using their own emoji, which is generally good for communities. I think you'll find that as users find platforms to coalesce and try and build communities on, they'll want those customizations. Being able to use them anywhere on the platform is just a bonus - unpaid users can still use those emoji within the servers they come from.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

I'd say it does more than one thing well, but yeah it's always sad to see every company chase forever growth and often ruin their core product in doing so.

mihaifm 5y ago

Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.

themacguffinman 5y ago
This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.
- Shacklz 5y ago
  There's a difference between "sitting on their arses" and "trying to grab every single customer possible". TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Let's not rewrite history and pretend that Teamspeak was always terrible. Their "philosophy" panned out for a long time and made them kings of the space, but to reiterate the GP's comment: things change. Now users want more convenience. Now they want better mobile support. Now they want GIFs and reactions. You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.
konschubert 5y ago
Maybe that's okay. Be THE product for half a decade, make your money, close up, next venture.
- WitCanStain 5y ago
  That sounds horrible. We should focus on making good products that last a long time. What is the point of making something new and almost identical every 5 years?
  - jsilence 5y ago
    Yeah exactly! Maybe that's why users should focus on protocols and not on Platforms. Like Matrix.org
    - petre 5y ago
      And like XMPP before it.
    - Nbox9 5y ago
      How long did it take to upgrade from IPV4 to IPV6? IPV6 is a massively popular protocol in which virtually every technical person admitted we will need to move off of IPV4. IPV6 is 25 years old and we’re still not done with the migration. Protocols have a massive problem with updating their feature sets and security features.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    > almost identical If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.
  - herbst 5y ago
    Discord was horrible bloated software to begin with, and bloat only got worse. Nothing of value will be lost, chatting is no rocket science.
sadness3 5y ago
It takes significant evolution to just keep doing what you set out to do well. Running a successful mechanics business to repair cars means continuously updating your skills and tools. Eventually you become a flying car repair shop. It doesn't mean you have to grow to encompass every aspect of the automobile industry and compete with Repco and Mobil.
- amelius 5y ago
  Except by then cars are rented to you by big advertising companies (in exchange for data), and they also do repairs (or outsource them to the lowest bidder). Skills don't matter if your business case has disappeared.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
I would not confuse the need for further developing ones tech, with the need for growing (in employees, customers, and whatever else). A product can stay relevant, if it keeps up with the tech, but does not necessarily need to capture every possible customer on the planet, not even as a goal.
lmm 5y ago
I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.
- jeltz 5y ago
  Agreed, Skype used to have much of the Swedish market until they fucked up their clients and pushed people to Facebook Messenger. Now it is irrelevant.
- relativ575 5y ago
  It's impossible to tell if Skype becoming irrelevant was due to new bloated features, new features that were badly implemented, or just that their users wanted to play with a new shinny tool that happened to be good and gradually moved there. They could have stayed put without adding any new features and would still be beaten by Discord.
michaelt 5y ago
The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight. Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking. On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking. So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time They had Orkut, they could have used it to compete with Facebook instead of creating a new service. Its the same thing with Googles multiple chat apps.

vodkapump 5y ago

My main recent annoyance is that they removed the mentions tab on mobile, and replaced it with some weird feature called stage (some sort of clubhouse ripoff where you do... livestreaming?) It placed the mentions in under the search(?!?!) tab, which adds 2 clicks, and also added significant time delays sometimes when the search tab has to load for 3-10seconds........ I have a server with lots of discord "OGs" back from 2015, and it's the most complained about change that has been discussed in that server, by far.

square_usual 5y ago
Th thing I hate the most about the mentions-under-search bit is that it's so unintuitive. I had a couple of pings and I looked around everywhere trying to find them, and the removal of the very helpfully labelled "@" button pissed me off. I only found out the pings were under search after I read the changelog. And for what? Discord stages are an absolute ghost town. The top ones are all "Talent shows" in bait servers. I don't mind changing UX as much as most people on HN, but changing UX to chase a fad that has already died out really grinds my gears.
- vodkapump 5y ago
  Only time I ever see stages mentioned is when they do a paid spot with a YouTuber to do one..

lloydatkinson 5y ago

> I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content

southerntofu 5y ago
Blame capitalism for aiming for profit, not actual service to people.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Yep, it goes one level abive execs. Execs who don't do these things get replaced! The shareholder model is broken.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    What is broken about it? Did anyone tell the discord creators to involve other shareholders?
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else. Now, you might think that this still aligns shareholder incentives with the long-term interests of the company, that if the shareholders care about profits over the long term then they should also care about the health of the business rather than just about how much money they are making now. The problem is that the most efficient way for investors to make money (per unit time) is not to care about the long term and instead to "pump and dump" companies by directing them towards (usually destructive) activities that increase profits in the short term, then selling the shares before the value inevitably crashes. Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time. As such, the system is setup to give power to those who are most destructive to real value creation. Ergo: broken.

hhsbz 5y ago

I use discord only for gaming but the entire app was full of text strings that made me cringe. I'm glad they have got rid of them.

southerntofu 5y ago
Do you have a few examples, for someone who's never used Discord?
- hhsbz 5y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png https://i.imgur.com/dy13lcm.png The entire app was full of crap like this - it's not funny or quirky, it's practically baby talk.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    That's pretty cringy indeed, though i must say i laughed at the idea of a program snuggling into my systray :) Not sure how well that would localize in other languages though. Thanks for the examples!
    - herbst 5y ago
      > Not sure how well that would localize in other languages though. Thanks for the examples! Not well at all. Making it even more cringe worthy
  - asddubs 5y ago
    why is calling yourself a "good boy" twice so much more unsettling than doing it once?
    - burntwater 5y ago
      One "good boy" and you're talking about puppies. Three "good boys" and now you've entered the realm of BDSM.
  - 5y ago

leshenka 5y ago

> and becoming a bloated mess too late

danuker 5y ago

Discord has done some shady stuff for quite some time. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_uses_ptrace_wildly/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/coo3h6/discord_use...

speedgoose 5y ago
I use Discord in a web browser for these reasons. The web sandbox has benefits.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Does the web version work on mobile? I recall Slack's web app working on my tablet, but I think they may have disabled that now.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Discord enumerates processes to discover OBS to turn on streamer mode, as well as being able to display what game you're playing. Disable the "share my current game" feature and there is no longer any ptracing
- saladuh 5y ago
  Are you absolutely sure that's the case? The OP in that reddit post seemed to suggest that he had toggled off game detection and whatnot. Scroll down to the thread where the deleted comments are.
- dancemethis 5y ago
  It's proprietary software. You can't prove it goes off. And there's both history and evidence that things are going against user privacy.

stared 5y ago

I have the same feeling. If they succeed, they will become Slack 2. If they don't, they will sink their ship.

perryizgr8 5y ago
> If they don't, they will sink their ship. Why would gamers stop using it?
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  Because Discord will probably compromise the existing product in order to try and grow.

globular-toast 5y ago

> I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess. IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.

jeltz 5y ago
No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  It's always worked for me. I've never used a bouncer. Maybe the "one thing" is not what you think it is. Think of it like a real room. When you're in the room you hear what's going on. When you're not, you don't.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Turns out most people don't like that idea, and appreciate chat history.
thiht 5y ago
Are you kidding? IRC doesn’t let you update or remove your messages, doesn’t have a permanent history, doesn’t even properly handle accounts and chan owners, doesn’t support any kind of rich text by itself, has netsplits, … what does it do well exactly? The protocol is simple and I had fun speaking on IRC through telnet when I was younger but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it
- globular-toast 5y ago
  You mentioned many things. IRC does one thing. I don't want any of that stuff. Netsplits aren't a huge problem. I'd rather have that than a centralised system that does down all at once.

d3nj4l 5y ago

> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt. This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.

rb666 5y ago
You must know a lot of people who take themselves too seriously.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  A lot of times when apps try to be cute I wish they would just STFU and do the thing I want them to
  - christophilus 5y ago
    > A lot of times Every time. FTFY.
  - kemotep 5y ago
    The Windows 10 new user setup screen and also the frowny face crash screen come to mind.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Clever humour at the right time is great. A dumb message while I'm trying to get on with my work or hobby isn't good humour or at the right time.
  - AllegedAlec 5y ago
    Yeah. It always falls flat for me, like the "Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" messages you get when some web pages break down.
- nkrisc 5y ago

gambiting 5y ago

>>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?

da_big_ghey 5y ago
In chat app this is not so much an option because network effects. Nobody will use 17 chat app with a different for each thing, only 4 or 5.

antris 5y ago

> It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that. I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers. It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down. We need a systemic change.

nhumrich 5y ago
> blind to the needs of their customers Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.
- antris 5y ago
  > one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers Which often isn't the case. Companies have lots of priorities that have nothing to do with end users at all. For example: - it does not matter how good your product is, if your company dies because there's a competitor that does not need to make profit and can temporarily offer their services for free, until your company is driven out of the market - dark patterns are well documented examples how working directly against good user experience can increase profits - lobbying politicians to drive out competition is extremely profitable, and does not take interests of the userbase into account at all There are probably numerous other, obvious examples how capitalism disincentivises companies from serving their customers well, but instead incentivizes gaming the system. The correlation between user experience and profitability is shaky at best. One could argue that user experience has almost nothing to with how businesses operate.

darthrupert 5y ago

What does it do well? I'm genuinely asking.

DownGoat 5y ago
Voice chat. It is superior to any other platform on this aspect other than TeamSpeak. We regularly have 40+ people in voice channels without people suffering from connection issues, bad audio quality, and lot's of noise.
- darthrupert 5y ago
  Ah, good to know. That's indeed something I haven't considered at all.

dancemethis 5y ago

The one thing it does really well is getting personal user data and metadata while convincing people to defend it.

jstummbillig 5y ago

> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. This perception of games is pretty outdated and I assume that is what Discord has come to realize as well. Video games (and gamers) are approaching to be as varied as music (and its listeners) and the only reason they have not achieved parity yet is the difference in how long each has been around as a mass medium. Games have intrinsic qualities that set them apart from music, movies or other mediums – but being "fun" is certainly not it, and "gamery" would, at best, serve as a tautology.

p0nce 5y ago

> the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". It may be worse for you, but it feels way better to me. It has been very annoying to introduce Discord in work/casual settings and see it labelled as "a gamer thing". Right call by Discord.

kwanbix 5y ago

Honest question here. What is so good about discord? It reminds me more if IRC than a modern chat app. I really don't get it. Maybe I am missing something?

MatthewMob 5y ago
Voice, video and text chat with unlimited bandwidth, streaming resolution and storage space all for free, and all much, _much_ easier to use for the average user than any other voice and video communication client ever made.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

That’s why I use basecamp - they’re explicit and clear about staying small and profitable enough, with zero ambition for infinite growth.

G4BB3R 5y ago
The company I work use basecamp and I love it! The only thing I wish it had is subcomments like slack.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  What are subcomments - nested comments?

sfg 5y ago

Growth and change is why they exist. Its why they might replace things in other sectors and so make those sectors better. Its why they might fail and make things worse, at which point, it is why someone else will come along to try and make things better. Sometimes things are best left alone, but if this is attempted generally, then it'll probably lead to a stagnant pond, rather than a pleasant lake. Fresh flowing water is key. Also, not sure how many agree with you on the cutesy humour. Maybe, it was just time for that to go.

kaonashi 5y ago

If you take any investment money, then you're beholden to investors and investors want growth.

dcow 5y ago

The casual brand is great, but those loading antics are dumb. Nobody actually likes them. This is great news, Discord really, badly, needs multi account support, screen-share and video in stage channels, an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits), sso support, and possibly server DMs instead of global DMs (possibly addressing associated data segregation issues). Otherwise their product already works awesome for smaller more open minded businesses. We replaced Slack with it this week and I don’t see us going back. Also I want to point out that nothing in the article indicates a shift to b2b. It sounds more like they are going after parteon, onlyfans, consoles, twitch, etc. I just kinda assume they will develop some more mature user management and server payment options along the way.

lynndotpy 5y ago
Multi-account support is extremely important. Professors at my university have started hosting accounts on Discord, and people have been unable to make second accounts without second phone numbers. The result being that peoples personal and professional lives have started to overlap, which (naturally) results in dangerous positions for some people. I'm especially concerned if something like disc-cool starts up again, or the data from it gets leaked. (Disc-cool was a group that used self-bots to create a database of harvested messages, letting you search up any users message history.)
908B64B197 5y ago
> multi account support That would be great even without any business features. Some open source projects are starting to use discord and it would be nice for some users to link and use their github names and identities for these servers.
- dcow 5y ago
  I consider that an organization use case, but yeah same difference.
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago

kulahan 5y ago

What does discord do really well? I’ve had channels mysteriously become inaccessible until whoever posted something deletes it. The “stay on top” feature for watching a stream never seems to work very well. For some stupid reason, chat and streams aren’t integrated, so you have to chat in an associated channel which is different from where you’re watching the stream. All kinds of icons are hidden until you happen to mouse over them, which is objectively bad design. If you receive an @ and the chat continues on significantly before you see it, clicking on that channel doesn’t take you to the mention, but rather some other, seemingly random location in chat history (sometimes I don’t find it and just give up). Discord doesn’t seem to do anything well except sign users up quickly.

dcow 5y ago
There are UX quirks to solve for sure but those are entirely solvable. Discord does private audio chat really well.

screye 5y ago

I wonder if discord could straight up sell/separate a 'fork' of their platform that targets a completely different audience. The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (enthusiast) Supra profitable, was to build it on the same platform as the (normie) BMW Z4. The Z4 gets some of the spice of the Supra, and the Supra owners don't feel cheated out of a place in the industry. Effectively, both cars maintain the same back end, but completely different front ends. Maybe discord could do the same. If reddit was run by competent people, then they'd know to continue supporting old.reddit.com for the same reason. Some aspects of Discord's platform are incredibly useful and class leading. However, their users are a very particular kind of internet person, and the complete un-intuitiveness of the platform highlights that. You can't preserve the 4chan-esque spastic wonder of a platform while still appealing to normies, businesses and older folks. A platform as funny/productive as 4chan and as sanitized as Teams is the holy-grail. Alas, like all holy-grails, it seems entirely unattainable.

dcow 5y ago
Yeah this has been my hope too. The fact that you can’t separate the two right now is holding the platform back. I also wish for a business grade frontend that can be sold as a digital office (we have been experimenting this week with using discord as such), but in lieu of that I think simply supporting multiple accounts in the client would go a really long way. The problem is avatars are account bound so you can’t separate your work persona from your social persona, which matters when your social persona enjoys nsfw hobbies or even simply when you want a punk avatar for one and a headshot for the other. IMO having separate personas is the only way to allow the platform to retain its good qualities while expanding into markets where the masses preside. If people have to use one identity for everything then that identity becomes sterile, and Discord’s biggest success is that it fosters private communities where you can shitpost and trash talk with your close friends while breaking some sweat in <game>.
908B64B197 5y ago
> The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus. Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus. https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campus/ https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...

NoSorryCannot 5y ago

Discord doesn't even do its one thing all that well. The client is buggy and slow. It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem. Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is. It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really. Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.

oriki 5y ago
> Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is. I agree from a moral standpoint but because of the general use of emoji in servers, it really doesn't prove to be that much of an issue. People also enjoy using their own emoji, which is generally good for communities. I think you'll find that as users find platforms to coalesce and try and build communities on, they'll want those customizations. Being able to use them anywhere on the platform is just a bonus - unpaid users can still use those emoji within the servers they come from.