Someone also explain to me how gamers of all people can live with Discord when the thing barely works.

bigstrat2003 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Because it actually works pretty well most of the time. I'm not sure where you get "barely works" from, but that's not remotely my experience or the experience of anyone I know. And of course, network effects are strong so that keeps people using it even through the occasional hiccups.

As for how it got its foothold, it comes down to having an easier onboarding than the solutions it competed with. With Mumble (or Ventrilo, etc) someone has to pay for a server. Then you have to download the client, get the host and port to connect to, enter credentials, and so on. Repeat for every server you might join. With Discord, once your account is set up you just click on a link and join the server. You don't even have to use the client if you don't want; you can join from the browser just fine. I don't think the friction of using previous solutions was actually bad, but it was enough to give Discord an edge even without the integrated chat+voice angle (which is something that those other programs never did and still don't do).

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guerrilla 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> I'm not sure where you get "barely works" from, but that's not remotely my experience or the experience of anyone I know.

Alright, I'm exaggerating but I've never had as many problems with such a popular app of that class. I'm literally locked out right now due to a known bug (confirmed by support) and this isn't even the first time. Then there were months when recording voice notes (of all things) didn't work on Android. So many other little random things. If YouTube or something behaved that way I'd be shocked. It's a ghetto in comparison.

Yeah, I get what you're saying about friction. I'm complaining as someone who's fine with Signal and IRC, so not the target audience. Someone else also mentioned that the performance may have been better early on as well. I find that hard to believe but I'll trust ya'll for now.

	▲	hansvm 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's wild to me. I'm mostly not a fan of browser-based tools, and I was apprehensive of Discord calling things "servers" when they're clearly not (if they lie about that then what else?), but it's been rock-solid for me and for several friend groups for ~6 years. We don't use any particularly fancy features (chat, voice, streaming, various settings changes on all of those, etc), but we use a mix of clients/web/mobile-web, and out of all of us there was exactly one issue in that time (a few weeks were incompatible with a particularly esoteric browser, fixed not long after I reported it).

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jbaber 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I installed matrix, I thought it was an example of FOSS UI being crummy. Then I found out they were actually doing a good job of emulating discord.

	▲	sealeck 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Discord is much, much more user friendly than Matrix!
	▲	dade_ 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Except that Matrix is a protocol.

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chillfox 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because when Discord released it had less impact on game performance than any of the other solutions at the time. And these days it’s still great, so only a fantastic solution will be able to replace it. But maybe in a few more years of enshitification it will be easier for something new to be better than it.

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greenavocado 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait until you find out both Ukrainian and Russian military were using Discord to communicate

	▲	superb_dev 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wait until you find out that the interim prime minister of Nepal was elected on Discord