6 ms·

The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.

by CerealFounder 5y ago

kryptn 5y ago
How are reddit and discord related?
- OJFord 5y ago
  Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'. You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
  - Dwolb 5y ago
    This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits. Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
- treis 5y ago
  They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example. The difference is purely branding.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        >The difference is purely branding. If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you. If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
        Talanes 5y ago
        But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen. I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    But at the same time, Discord is also built with Ventrilo-like features, which I think helped them gain foothold among many gamers. Lots of people are on voice chat in Discord while playing games together, just like people used to use Ventrilo. And Discord is more like IRC than like Reddit, except unlike IRC it has native rich text and media embeds. But what I mean by how it’s more like IRC is that it’s rooms with text conversations happening in a timeline, instead of mainly threads with comments. Reddit sorts comments by votes by default. Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits. And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation. Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation. Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts. "More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        > "More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. Sorry if that part was unclear but I was saying that Discord and IRC are more suitable to real time communication than Reddit is.
- mintplant 5y ago
  When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
- mbesto 5y ago
  People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there. Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
jorblumesea 5y ago
Fairly different apps/use cases.
qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
zer0-c00l 5y ago
I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
- dimmke 5y ago
  Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful. But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
    - crazy_horse 5y ago
      Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.
    - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
      And not Reddit video? At least you can avoid chat.
      - edoceo 5y ago
        A close second. The secret here is to just not engage with any video content.
tyrfing 5y ago
I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way. 2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction. Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people." I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord. Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.

The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.

kryptn 5y ago

How are reddit and discord related?

OJFord 5y ago
Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'. You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
- Dwolb 5y ago
  This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits. Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
treis 5y ago
They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
- netr0ute 5y ago
  They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example. The difference is purely branding.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      >The difference is purely branding. If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you. If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
        Talanes 5y ago
        But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen. I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  But at the same time, Discord is also built with Ventrilo-like features, which I think helped them gain foothold among many gamers. Lots of people are on voice chat in Discord while playing games together, just like people used to use Ventrilo. And Discord is more like IRC than like Reddit, except unlike IRC it has native rich text and media embeds. But what I mean by how it’s more like IRC is that it’s rooms with text conversations happening in a timeline, instead of mainly threads with comments. Reddit sorts comments by votes by default. Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits. And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation. Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation. Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts. "More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      > "More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. Sorry if that part was unclear but I was saying that Discord and IRC are more suitable to real time communication than Reddit is.
mintplant 5y ago
When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
mbesto 5y ago
People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there. Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.

jorblumesea 5y ago

Fairly different apps/use cases.

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago

The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.

zer0-c00l 5y ago

I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.

dimmke 5y ago
Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful. But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
- edoceo 5y ago
  Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
  - crazy_horse 5y ago
    Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.
  - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
    And not Reddit video? At least you can avoid chat.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      A close second. The secret here is to just not engage with any video content.

tyrfing 5y ago

I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way. 2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction. Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people." I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord. Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.

elliekelly 5y ago
Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.