> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.

Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.

In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.

Its just works to get your groups of friends together - up until the point the damned thing starts to asking them "papers please!" a they start leaving.

Yeah and even some of us IT people weren't enough into video games to care about hosting voice chat. Like I ran the middle school Minecraft server but not a Teamspeak for it.

As that IT person I’ve set up a few alternatives over the years (and they’re still up, certs and all). Matrix stuck with a decent group of people, but the group I hung out on Discord with refused to move. I definitively bailed after the ID news but the guys didn’t follow (to Matrix, or Jitsi, or TeamSpeak, or Mumble).

I’m kind of salty about making a fruitless effort I’ll admit, but I feel like unless there’s an effortless, perfect, free program that replicates the (voice) channel functionality and screen sharing features people are not going to leave Discord. Even if it does treat its users like shit.

I miss those guys but I refuse to take part in that abuse, and I’m angry about it.