Comment by bandrami
13 hours ago
I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.
IRC has many many usability problems which I'm sure you're about to give a "quite trivial curlftpfs" explaination for why they're unimportant - missing messages if you're offline, inconsistent standards for user accounts/authentication, no consensus on how even basic rich text should work much less sending images, inconsistent standards for voice calls that tend to break in the presence of NAT, same thing for file transfers...
It is IRC, but with modern features and no channel splits. It also adds voice chats and video sharing. Trade off is that privacy and commercial platform. On other hand it is very much simpler to use. IRC is a mess of usability really. Discord has much better user experience for new users.
> Discord has much better user experience for new users.
Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.
You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.
/server irc.someserver.net
/join #hello
/me says Hello
I think I'll stick with that.
At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.
I was a heavy IRC user in 2015 before Discord and even though I personally prefer using IRC, it was obvious it would take over the communities I was for a few reasons:
1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.
All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.
There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.
Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).
it's very easy to make a friend server that has all you basically need: sending messages, images/files and being able to talk with voice channels.
you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested
Right.... how is that different from IRC other than being controlled by a big company with no exit ability and (again) extremely tenuous privacy promises?
IRC doesn't offer voice/video, which is unimaginable for Discord alternative.
When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.
In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.
In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.
For the text chat, it's different in the way that it lets one make their own 'servers' without having to run the actual hardware server 24/7, free of charge, no need to battle with NATs and weird nonstandard ways of sending images, etc.
The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.
Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.