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.
Relatedly, the "gamer-oriented" business model of sell cosmetics and subscriptions to every user individually rather than the Slack big enterprise-oriented business model of a central admin paying an entire per-user cost out of pocket was a factor in many of my communities moving from Slack or skipping Slack. It's a lot easier for a small community admin to start for free and find enough "Boosts" from community membership for the nice-to-have server features that cost a bit extra than to foot the entire bill themselves in the hopes that enough users will eventually reimburse them. (It also allows for a hybrid where a community admin centrally pays for some amount of boosts, but doesn't have to pay for all of them.)
Discord does delete messaging history. Sometimes messages that aren't very old at all. The conversations just outright disappear and there's no way to get them back.
People, do not use discord for conversations with family/friends that you want to have any chance of holding onto, even just a year later.
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.
Their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a better term, that no one was asking for and at least monthly Nitro beg screen is pretty indicative that they are having issues making revue and are desperately throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
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.
That is also why I think it "won" over Slack. Discord solved audio comms for gamers, period. It got so good, that SMB and startups started to migrate for stuff like easy pair-programming, open meetings etc.
Discord IMO won because of a killer trio: 1) good comms 2) full history 3) faster UI over bloated Slack.
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.
But that's the effect. Either Discord gets to lock the information away (even if it currently chooses to leave the gate unlocked), or it's available to anyone who does a web search.
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.)
I haven't heard that word used as a metaphor or hyperbole since I stopped playing on call of duty in 2014...
Weird that the hacker news community wants to stick to it. Yall need to grow up. Because I know you would not use it as a metaphor or hyperbole at work.
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.
Thank you for ironically proving my point, I guess. The main value add here is everything is integrated into one app. I always wonder if folks said the same thing when Salesforce or SAP were created.
Kindly -- I think this is a symptom of the larger issue, right?
You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer (or the more technically inclined ones anyway). That magic should just be self evident. We don't need a document to understand why the iPhone was a hit, right?
Doesn't matter if you have the greatest app in the world. If it overwhelms the user on first use, it's simply not going to be used.
I agree at first glance it is overwhelming unfortunately.
> You shouldn't need a document to help persuade the consumer
For the most part we don't. They get it, they have the frustration with duplication, and they see the value of our pricing being the same or cheaper than one or two of the apps their paying for.
The harder part as I said in the original comment is no one is searching for a household data solution. It's not a thing that exists to people, and we don't advertise (mostly) as "a budgeting app" or "a to-do app", so the persuading if you want to call it that comes from catching these buyers and showing them that yea, we do that, and so much more.
I am in the same boat, however I dont go on X at all. I deleted my account last year for good and dont miss it. BlueSky for me is a mix of people who are trying their hardest in my city to make improvements but also creating a very insular community and people who are perpetually upset (maybe rightfully so) at just about everything. I have a mastodon account but never go on it. I basically read books, play call of duty (or something else low stakes and easy to put down), and watch youtube videos of DIY stuff I need to learn so I can fix things around the house.
I deleted Reddit, Instagram, and Bluesky off my phone last weekend (coming up on day 9 I think) and its been nice trying to readjust myself to being bored and not grabbing my phone.
those rockets use a lot of those same fossil fuels. And he can't even complete a project in Las Vegas, so lets not think he knows how to build on the moon. I live in Nashville, the site of his next little Tesla tunnel. I promise you none of us are holding our breath on that one.
this is the fun part, you can't!
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