the damage is already done though. Discord just burned years of goodwill and trust. Im in a few discord communities and while they aren't moving Im not looking to join any more right now because of this whole thing.
Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
For how it got so big, after it took over the gaming market initially it's likely network effect in action.
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
As far as I can tell, Discord doesn't delete history so you can join an older discord and scroll back. 99.99% of slacks that are free lose history after some arbitrary timeframe (used to be 10,000 messages, now I think its 90 days). Plus you can connect Discord to your Steam/Playstation/Xbox account, which gamers like.
Basically dumping - they made an objectively superior product that was completely free to users, funded by investor money without any plans for immediate profitability and long term sustainability.
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
Yeah I was concerned back when it first started rolling out. Years later the gaming community embraced like it was the second coming of Christ. Nobody looks at the people and organization supporting these platforms. If I remember correctly, wasnt funded by major conglomerates in the entertainment industry?
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
> Can someone explain to me how Discord got so big in the first place, particularly for non-gaming uses?
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
To answer how it got so big: it didn't start out trying to replace Slack. It just solved an acute pain point for gamers. Skype was becoming increasingly enshittified, and people were floating between TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble, none of which were that great. Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable without forcing everyone to use push-to-talk. That’s really it. By the time non-gaming communities were looking for a Slack alternative, they just defaulted to Discord because 90% of their target audience already had the client running in the background.
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
The problem is forum UX on mobile is mediocre, and people have to create an account for each forum. Most people are using mobile devices now, like it or not, so convenience of rich text chat wins out.
I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
Isn't it a good thing ? It makes clearly marks companies like Persona dangerous and toxic enough to hopefully makes an example that prevents others from working with them.
I think they have been steadily losing their years of goodwill and trust over time. Their client is becoming worse and worse every release, introduced ads, etc... Typical enshittification, it could be worse, but Discord already went from being cool to being tolerable. The age verification thing is just another step on the way down.
n8cpdx|5 days ago
I saw this coming a mile away when folks started ditching slack for Discord - Slack being problematic because a) it was profit-seeking and would use its leverage over your personal data to seek rent and b) it was antithetical to the open web.
Discord has the exact same two issues so was obviously not a solution.
Why did the internet en masse fall for it again?
lunar_rover|5 days ago
Discord is a centralised IM + basic forum with commercial polish.
Small communities can't afford site hosting and moderation, FOSS alternatives like Matrix are significantly inferior products. Fandom killed independent wikis, Reddit killed independent forums.
If Discord ever goes down, there will be decentralised services competing and advocating freedom until a new centralised service takes all the users for itself, just like Mastodon and Bluesky.
rocketpastsix|5 days ago
m4rtink|5 days ago
That was all nice for a few years, but it was clear it can't got like this for ever - and here we are.
verdverm|5 days ago
trinsic2|5 days ago
I guess thats changing though, I see Youtubers all over the place now watching these things like a hawk. Referring to the Highguard scandal.
dbg31415|5 days ago
It won by simply building a vastly superior product during its growth phase.
For gamers, it replaced fragmented, clunky, or paid alternatives (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Mumble, Skype) with a frictionless, free app that had excellent voice quality and modern UX.
It worked so perfectly for gaming communities that non-gamers inevitably took notice, realizing it was effectively a better, free version of Slack for community building.
But that was the user-acquisition era. Now, we're seeing the classic enshittification phase.
Every other notification badge is an alert trying to sell you something. I still use it, but the product development focus seems to have entirely shifted to selling $9.99/month "blinky bullshit." I understand they have to monetize eventually, but it's exhausting.
Ultimately, it got big because for a few years, it was undeniably the best, cleanest chat client on the market. It was just relentlessly good for the user.
Whether it stays good, or follows down the Microsoft path of turning into a full-on ad-distribution network remains to be seen. But right now, despite all the crap sales, it's still pretty good... (=
takoid|5 days ago
dcchambers|5 days ago
Real time chat? Great. But entire communities, forums, and wikis moving behind the locked walled of Discord has been a disaster for information discovery.
Don't replace Discord with a similar alternative. Return to open forums and wikis!
ronsor|5 days ago
ntoskrnl_exe|5 days ago
fullshark|5 days ago
jacquesm|5 days ago
bsza|5 days ago
We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)
m4rtink|5 days ago
GuB-42|5 days ago
chankstein38|5 days ago
baq|5 days ago
...not here, they never had any. it is good tech, but so is the w80 nuclear warhead, the tiger iv (for its time) and the j-35.