Man, every time I've used Discord it has been an aggressively unpleasant experience. How is this platform so popular?
@pganssle I thought I was using it wrong…
@pganssle Based on my experience with my beer league hockey team: It works better than SMS for videos and it works on both Apple and Android. So someone says let's move there and most of the team does. And the one guy who holds his ground gets left out. Which is considered fine by the rest of the team because nobody has a better idea.
@lucifargundam @pganssle yup. In many cases it would be bad. For our beer league team it is just transient messages. Locker room numbers etc. So none of us would blink if we had to start fresh. I wish I had had a good alternative to suggest when they set it up. I didn't then and still don't now. I would have been fine staying on sms.
@poleguy @lucifargundam All messaging apps these days are pretty bad in most ways. I think Matrix is probably best because it is a protocol with a few implementations. Signal is also miles better than "SMS Group Chat", even if Signal leaves a lot to be desired as a platform.
@pganssle
From an IRC friend told me, it's only really useful for sharing media or doing group chats. Communities who base their entire lore or tech support on discord, are largely dysfunctional in some aspect.
@pganssle I can't really answer that question but what parts do you find unpleasant?
@cenobyte Pretty much every aspect of it.
1. The client is this monolithic thing with all the servers in the sideboard, and then *every room on the server* is available and possibly generating notifications. Even being default-in every room would be annoying enough, but from what I understand you can't even leave or hide rooms you don't care about!
2. The voice chat doesn't seem to work as well as other options I've used before, which I thought was the whole point of using a Discord?
3. No alternative clients and no support for multiple accounts (at least on Android).
4. If I'm not using the *absolute latest client*, Discord refuses to connect. The Arch linux package for discord updated pretty much immediately, and I still couldn't connect because my specific package server had not refreshed their index in the last *four hours*.
5. It's a walled garden situation controlled by discord. Apparently discord has some questionable content policies (servers can get banned for allowing people to talk about violating the ToS of a service, apparently?)
I essentially only use this platform when I absolutely must (and even then poorly). I am totally the kind of person who drops into an IRC or other chat room for a specific purpose and just never leaves for years and years, but I am *never* tempted to do this in any sort of Discord or Slack.
@pganssle
> The client is this monolithic thing with all the servers in the sideboard, and then *every room on the server* is available and possibly generating notifications.
I think that's a big reason people find Discord friendly: it is discoverable, it's all there to click on and it pushes information at you.
@pganssle
> How is this platform [#Discord] so popular?
I lean on the old reliable explanations:
Network effect, brings people in.
Switching costs, prevent them from leaving.
#NetworkEffect: There are a lot of real-time channel-focussed chat systems; IRC being an early one.
While IRC was the clear popular winner for years, *most people* have never heard of it. Nor any other similar system.
Until they join some group – their workplace, or a hobby group, or a #FreeSoftware hacking project – and #Slack or #Discord or MS Teams is mandatory for participation.
So, most people *don't* choose it, they do it because they are presented with no alternative.
#SwitchingCosts: One people are on #Discord or #Slack or whatever, they've got their group meeting there, often primarily and by default.
It's a #ProprietaryPlatform, so they're hostage. Leaving would require abandoning *that group* of people. For many people, they really need or want to stay in that social group.
And that means they must stay on the platform with the proprietary bloated surveillance client.
And, worse, bring new people in and hold *them* hostage too.
This doesn't explain why that #ProprietaryPlatform (#Discord, #Slack, MS Teams, etc.) were initially chosen for that specific group of people. The person who made that decision did it for other reasons.
But it does explain what you asked: Why is this so popular, i.e. why are *so many* people continuing to use it?
#NetworkEffect and #SwitchingCosts. Nothing much to do with the properties of that particular platform.
#ProtocolsNotPlatforms avoids those problems.
@pganssle I largely feel the same and that it's the Facebook of these messaging apps.
I have a few friends and communities that it works really well with, so I maintain a presence there.