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:
- A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats.
- A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/), general channels, voice channels etc.
- A large (20k users) one for our company's (gaming-centric) userbase.
Discord is a fantastic tool that adapts to all three situations very well, scales really well from 4 people to 100k people. Its DM/friendslist system scales a lot less well, but is still very usable with 100+ DM channels. I have even created a personal (private) Discord server where I'm keeping a journal of what I work on, inspired by a HN post the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15823599).
Discord is scalable messaging UX done right. I'm a huge believer in what they do. (Yeah, if only it were open source etc, I get it; different problem, different story)
I much prefer it over Gitter for open source chat (Gitter's only real advantage is how well it integrates with Github). And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough.
I just wish Discord would get phonecall support, but that part is probably not going to happen. It's doable with a bot though. PhoneCord (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6hlesz/anyone_e...) used to do it, they were shut down because of the obvious abuse implications but I'd really like to hook up Twilio with Discord in a bot for my company, internally, so we can do phone conferencing from it.
Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days.
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.
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
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.
I feel it's unfortunate that they couldn't also extend the channel paradigm to video, where anyone can at any time pop in and out of topics that they're interested in. Voice channels was the main appeal of Discord for me in a team setting.
Discord is the messaging system that I will gladly move to and pay for if only they agree to implement a few enterprisey features (especially around permissions and video chat).
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.
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 :/
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
try bringing up this argument with any of the reddit communities for meditation, Linux, or communities you'd expect to make ethically informed choices about the software they use and support. you will not be well-received.
for whatever reason, people have these shield-walls up against criticism of the software they use every day. it points to a double-think that allows people to engage in ethical practices (meditation) while blissfully continuing to neglect the activity of living ethics (which is the only true meditation). if one doesn't inform the other, you're doing it wrong.
I mod a community around anonymity and have to explain exactly this at least once a month. There is no reasonable way we could trust such a software for anything related to privacy, anonymity or free speech.
This bothers me too, especially since many communities require you to integrate it with other platforms too. Want access to N channel? Connect to Patreon to prove you contribute. So many integrations, so many communities controlled by a single entity. Oiy.
And this doesn’t even touch on the attention cost... it gets stupidly demanding of your attention with all the @ mention options. If you’re part of more than one community, you had best prepare to be quite liberal with the mute feature.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] amk_|8 years ago|reply
- 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://chat.vuejs.org
- https://discord.gg/reasonml
[+] [-] scrollaway|8 years ago|reply
I run three Discord servers:
- A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats.
- A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/), general channels, voice channels etc.
- A large (20k users) one for our company's (gaming-centric) userbase.
Discord is a fantastic tool that adapts to all three situations very well, scales really well from 4 people to 100k people. Its DM/friendslist system scales a lot less well, but is still very usable with 100+ DM channels. I have even created a personal (private) Discord server where I'm keeping a journal of what I work on, inspired by a HN post the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15823599).
Discord is scalable messaging UX done right. I'm a huge believer in what they do. (Yeah, if only it were open source etc, I get it; different problem, different story)
I much prefer it over Gitter for open source chat (Gitter's only real advantage is how well it integrates with Github). And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough.
I just wish Discord would get phonecall support, but that part is probably not going to happen. It's doable with a bot though. PhoneCord (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6hlesz/anyone_e...) used to do it, they were shut down because of the obvious abuse implications but I'd really like to hook up Twilio with Discord in a bot for my company, internally, so we can do phone conferencing from it.
[+] [-] ancarda|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ploggingdev|8 years ago|reply
Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)
[+] [-] gravypod|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Vishnevskiy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwrtz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikkelam|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lewisl9029|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyph0n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] casione|8 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] brightball|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
I see https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b and https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request... ... Interesting.
[+] [-] schwap|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wbond|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] z3t4|8 years ago|reply
Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source Skype alternatives !?
[+] [-] AFNobody|8 years ago|reply
https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html
[+] [-] gsich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodionos|8 years ago|reply
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
[2]: https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/noti...
[+] [-] brendyn|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] taohansen|8 years ago|reply
for whatever reason, people have these shield-walls up against criticism of the software they use every day. it points to a double-think that allows people to engage in ethical practices (meditation) while blissfully continuing to neglect the activity of living ethics (which is the only true meditation). if one doesn't inform the other, you're doing it wrong.
it's deeply troubling.
[+] [-] herbst|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|8 years ago|reply
And this doesn’t even touch on the attention cost... it gets stupidly demanding of your attention with all the @ mention options. If you’re part of more than one community, you had best prepare to be quite liberal with the mute feature.
[+] [-] AlphaSite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philtar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atc|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jaxondu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomis02|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomas_howland|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsod|8 years ago|reply
> “Raiding and spamming is explicitly against our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,”
[+] [-] AFNobody|8 years ago|reply
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.