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SOTGO 2 days ago [-]
I'm tentatively hopeful. I think it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord, and at least this is continuing to move towards fixing a lot of the problems that migration caused. I do wonder why they chose now though, it seems like there's potentially a lot of value in keeping this data private, or at least selling it for a fee
burnte 2 days ago [-]
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
NoPicklez 2 days ago [-]
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
plant-ian 2 days ago [-]
I think you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
judge2020 2 days ago [-]
Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
sandos 1 days ago [-]
Out of 24 discord servers I am on, only 4 are related to games.
Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?
I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.
calderwoodra 1 days ago [-]
The platforms before discord were very bad (and still are). Discord was such a god send back then simply for being reliable free voice chat for gamers.
Timwi 22 hours ago [-]
I don't disagree with you that Discord is the best option for voice chat now, but there was a godsend before it and that was Skype. It didn't have the equivalent of Discord “servers” but it finally solved the voice chat problem that was previously plagued with technical issues, instability and incompatibility. Discord became the godsend when Skype decided to speedrun enshittification.
morkalork 2 days ago [-]
There are discord communities around hobbies and shared interests that have nothing to do with gaming and have thousands of users.
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
Gaming was the original use-case because historically every gaming clan had a teamspeak server, a forum, and an IM group chat, each of which was a pain to set up and administer. But it just so happens that this is also a pretty good set of features for basically any kind of small-ish online community, so it's taken off across a huge number of areas (my hot take is that feature wise it's actually better than Teams/Slack/etc, especially in terms of how the voice call UX works, and inertia and general reputation/theming are the main reasons it hasn't taken off for internal company communications).
burnte 1 days ago [-]
> it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
3836293648 1 days ago [-]
The UI has lots of issues everywhere and constantly, but unfortunately it's by far the best if you look at the competition.
WheatMillington 2 days ago [-]
It certainly started that way, but the bloat is getting horrendous. Having said that, I still use it weekly.
Yiin 2 days ago [-]
what bloat? unless you're specifically looking for it, default view has none of it, it's just chat, video and memes
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
In vaguely-non-chronological order
- Remember to gift Nitro to your friends!
- Have you played any Quests to get any Orbs?
- Did you know about Discord Nitro?
- Did you know there are server tags now?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Did you know this server has a server tag?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
pprotas 1 days ago [-]
You forgot the “what’s new” popup every time you launch the app
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
Don’t forget the holiday “we’ve changed all of your notification sounds for the third year in a row as a forced opt in instead of an opt out, and we’ve done this across all your clients with settings that don’t follow you”.
Fuck the Halloween sound pack. I didn’t want it.
Bonus points that Discord intentionally knows they abuse and gaslight users with the popups and notifications; one point they hovered a “DIDNT ASK” over the X button to dismiss some of their stunts.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
I remember that! It's like they know users don't care, but try to make a joke about it instead of taking it to heart. Annoying narcissist shit.
bevr1337 2 days ago [-]
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
sgnelson 2 hours ago [-]
Not to be mean? But are you serious? It's supposed to be a simple chat app, but it's so grossly bloated it's insane.
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
Do you even use Discord? Is this comment satire? Discord is loaded with ads, upsells, spyware, and straight scams all throughout its UI.
spixy 23 hours ago [-]
Not quite. It has higher friction than forums.
Most of the forums I can read when not signed in, with Discord I need to:
1) sign in to Discord
2) join to specific server
3) read and accepts all its rules, tems and conditions
4) optionally leave the server after I got all the information
john_strinlai 22 hours ago [-]
forums do not have voice chat or screensharing.
i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.
herbst 1 days ago [-]
It's still horrible software
anthonypasq 2 days ago [-]
i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.
how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.
queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.
RHSeeger 2 days ago [-]
Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
- Can't be found in search engines
- Abysmal search functionality
- Abysmal discoverability
nantangitan 2 days ago [-]
What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality?
Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.
desolate_muffin 2 days ago [-]
Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.
LoganDark 2 days ago [-]
Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
demibabs 1 days ago [-]
THIS. It pisses me off to no end and it seems like something they’re totally uniniterested in fixing.
Barbing 1 days ago [-]
I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
My guess is it was better than nothing and they have incredible scale to deal with. (Like millions of messages per second scale.)
yangm97 2 days ago [-]
But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.
28304283409234 1 days ago [-]
Few things are.
5555watch 2 days ago [-]
Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
lrvick 2 days ago [-]
Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
esseph 2 days ago [-]
> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).
lrvick 1 days ago [-]
I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.
OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
Sure, I'm just pointing out that you're going to be losing a lot of functionality that way and it seems most people would prefer the functionality.
lrvick 21 hours ago [-]
What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.
The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.
rcxdude 18 hours ago [-]
You _can_, but if you're running a FOSS project you probably already have a significant shortage of spare time. Most FOSS devs are not that idealistic: they want something that works and works reliably and not to be building their own platform just to be able to work on the project they actually want to work on.
esseph 19 hours ago [-]
You have a misunderstanding of the value the service provides for the larger market.
They want a service, not software.
If you'd like to build a clone or even a better version? I'd love to see it! I might use it!
esseph 1 days ago [-]
> OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
lrvick 21 hours ago [-]
I have been an IRC operator for over 25 years, and never funneled any data to any third parties.
That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.
esseph 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, I see you never worked for US network providers, then.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
> Matrix
Is a piece of shit with awful UX.
lrvick 21 hours ago [-]
What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?
You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.
rcxdude 18 hours ago [-]
I'll echo the general impression. Even just using Matrix for direct messaging it's not something I am going to be able to pull any of my friends onto unless they already put the privacy and openness advantages very highly. It's just a pain to use, a pain to debug, and flaky enough you often have to debug it. It certainly seems like there's a lot of effort going into it but it seems to have resulted in a lot of churn but not much polish at any level.
Arathorn 17 hours ago [-]
it sounds like you had an awful experience with a specific client and/or server combo (or perhaps multiple ones). can you share which ones? as you say, there's a lot of effort going into it, so it's important to know if impression is based on outdated knowledge or whether you or others have had a bad time with the current generation.
rcxdude 17 hours ago [-]
Element (and Element X) and the main server. I still use it daily (to message the one other person I know who uses it) but nothing makes me think it's viable as a discord replacement. (I haven't had too many problems super recently but then I haven't tried to log in on a new device for a while)
esseph 19 hours ago [-]
Matrix sucks. The ecosystem.
The design sucks. The clients suck.
I'm sure a lot of very well meaning people worked very hard at it! But from an end user and server operator POV, it's ass.
1 days ago [-]
keithnz 2 days ago [-]
yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.
lezojeda 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
justsomehnguy 2 days ago [-]
> low-friction
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
sharts 1 days ago [-]
so…slack? hangouts? the plethora of options?
ozlikethewizard 1 days ago [-]
Slack and hangouts were both functionally worse than discord for a long time. I haven't used them in quite a while, but even if they have now caught up, network effect is already in play.
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
john_strinlai 1 days ago [-]
my comment was not a claim that discord is completely unique in its offering. it was directed at the "genuinely zero idea why anyone uses it" part of the comment
lezojeda 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
Bluescreenbuddy 4 hours ago [-]
Try using your brain instead of hyperbole.
andrewflnr 2 days ago [-]
Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not great, but as a chat room it's fine.
mostlysimilar 2 days ago [-]
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
tancop 2 days ago [-]
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
keithnz 2 days ago [-]
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
andrewflnr 2 days ago [-]
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
marshray 2 days ago [-]
I haven't noticed that.
andrewflnr 2 days ago [-]
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
jacobgkau 2 days ago [-]
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
andrewflnr 2 days ago [-]
FWIW there are settings (maybe in the accessibility section) to avoid playing animations until you've actually clicked on something.
bananzamba 2 days ago [-]
That stuff is so easy to ignore I struggle to understand how it could make it unusable
jamesfinlayson 2 days ago [-]
Yeah most the channels I'm in are meant to be forum replacements and it's terrible at that.
Chat room is fine though.
fallingbananna 2 days ago [-]
It feels like overmonitized free to play Slack.
Aozora7 2 days ago [-]
Discord is my favorite communication platform on the internet. It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
ElijahLynn 2 days ago [-]
To communicate with each other.
tonymet 2 days ago [-]
could you be specific? It has pockmarks for sure. tacky upsells, cringy gamification, horrible resource consumption (mine runs at like 800mb of ram or more). Oh yeah inconvenient updates.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
better than slack, or any competitors.
and if you say IRC i quit.
Morromist 2 days ago [-]
"it's a disgrace how many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord"
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
mid-kid 1 days ago [-]
The "open web" is still just websites. The fact that the 5 major websites decided to become algorithmic silos does not mean something like Discord has no place on it, or any of the other billions of websites for that matter.
hungryhobbit 2 days ago [-]
It's almost like there are different-sized Discords out there, and some people (e.g. you) use only the small ones, while other people are different, and some of them use large Discords.
madrox 2 days ago [-]
It's to get more users. This is only applying to servers meant to be public, which is probably already getting scraped
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
Don't forget why this happened. Discourse and opinions counter to the narrative pulled people away from public discussion due to fear or reprisal / issues.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
nitwit005 2 days ago [-]
I'd say the evidence rather strongly suggests people are mostly going to discord to talk about video games and share anime art.
The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.
Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
tancop 2 days ago [-]
I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.
nitwit005 2 days ago [-]
That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
im pretty sure most people moved to discord because it is easy and has a lot of nice features, not because they were scared of global thought police
Sharlin 2 days ago [-]
Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.
add-sub-mul-div 2 days ago [-]
You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.
devilsdata 2 days ago [-]
I've found that people with terrible opinions aren't happy to stay in their own groups. They want to be part of the nice groups.
axus 2 days ago [-]
But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
Both things can be true.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
i doubt it is true for the majority, though.
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
JDups 2 days ago [-]
Discord is popular because a very significant amount of people prefer the casual social instant chatting aspect over the slower threaded style of forums, especially young people.
simonra 22 hours ago [-]
I feel that the faster and more ephemeral flow of irc always skewed older than the (mostly game related) forums I frequented though. Perhaps the age clustering around different media across niches is mostly just dependent on what was the most conveniently accessible when the niche gained broader popularity within an age group?
JDups 18 hours ago [-]
Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.
But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.
RunSet 1 days ago [-]
Lemmy seems the likely reddit replacement, so much so that many Lemmy comments report it is forbidden to mention on reddit.
I don't think this is true for most people on the big issues but do think it's true for a lot of small issues. Reddit (and HN) lead to a lot of pageant show dynamics where the people with the time to hit the buttons decide what content to boost. Small Discord communities are free from that.
nozzlegear 2 days ago [-]
That's not at all why my WoW guild moved to Discord.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
Counter to 'the narrative' or not, the twitter approach to social media means there's always a risk of suddenly gaining a lot of negative attention, and the 'global town square' approach seems to actively encourage that kind of thing to happen. It's not surprising people got tired of it, and it doesn't require some grand conspiracy towards or against a particular set of beliefs.
Freedom2 2 days ago [-]
Do you have an example of opinions that are counter to the narrative that faced reprisal?
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.
mvdtnz 2 days ago [-]
Discussion of Linux has been forbidden on /r/opensource because there's AI generated code in it.
are you going to claim censorship or thought-policing if it's pointed out to you that personal insults are not cool here?
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>Are you going to continue to support stifling conversations? [...] Or should we just go ahead and censor everything?
what are you on about, man?
you can get worked up all you want, i'm just reminding you of the guidelines you agreed to when you created your account here.
hilariously 2 days ago [-]
You do realize your list of choices indicates you follow a groupthink so dense that having a discussion with you is considered a foregone conclusion to most rational human beings?
Here's a nice youtube playlist from Dr. Wilson on why discussing Covid conspiracies is basically a right wing talking point and lie. A damnable lie even.
If you want to "discuss Covid" go right ahead, but repeating misinformation that effectively led to the death of millions of people should leave you ashamed, as you are either a tool of evil or despicable yourself.
Enjoy the open discussion!
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
perchedonstilts 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
This is true but I think it's both.
The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.
And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak.
dont forget about vent and mumble!
cowlevel 2 days ago [-]
I don't think they were ever popular. It was always TeamSpeak.
jacobgkau 2 days ago [-]
While I disagree, it's beside your point, because Mumble and Ventrilo also used the term "server." All three also required installing a client application, which Discord did not (my recollection is that Discord was the first major WebRTC application, and that made it a killer feature in itself at the time).
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
vent was massively popular. basshunter even has a chart-topping song about it. "Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA" or "We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA"
mumble, admittedly, not so much.
AllegedAlec 2 days ago [-]
Vi sitter här i venten och spelar lite DotA
ganoushoreilly 2 days ago [-]
Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.
No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.
AllegedAlec 2 days ago [-]
> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.
"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"
Proving his point in real time
perchedonstilts 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mvdtnz 2 days ago [-]
"How dare you make a claim I don't agree with. Your opinion should be flagged and hidden from the view of the public!"
It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.
impossiblefork 1 days ago [-]
I actually see the point of discord as the fact that it is less public.
It means I can put half-finished story summaries there, without spoilering or alerting potential future readers to the plot ideas, that sort of thing.
A hierarchy of privacy levels is necessary in order for people to speak as they like.
gdulli 2 days ago [-]
It's a disgrace what the "open" internet has become.
moralestapia 2 days ago [-]
>many communities have moved from the open internet into Discord
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
urbnspacecowboy 2 days ago [-]
> You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
I don't think it's necessary "welcomed by all actors involved". For sure most smaller discord servers don't want to be public, but then this change doesn't affect them anyhow. It would be nice, in some cases (like a discord server that is the main support channel for an application) to have that more indexable and searchable by others.
mastermage 1 days ago [-]
It however brings disadvantages with it. Specifically if now instead of a forum you have to join five trillion discord servers just to get help with your one issue on "this niche product i use".
nozzlegear 2 days ago [-]
I "own" a Discord server for my WoW guild and I'm not particularly happy about being on it, but it's the default choice for gamers and voice chat. It would kill our raid team's recruiting if we told people they had to install some obscure service instead of Discord if they wanted to raid with us.
These are just network effects.
yeungjipei 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
2001zhaozhao 2 days ago [-]
I'm a Discord server admin and I'd love to turn this on because having more discussion of my game indexable by search engines seems like a good thing in general. For new messages it seems like there's no problem, in combination with the opt-out option. But for existing users, how am I supposed to disclose the change to people? What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.
anonymous908213 2 days ago [-]
> What if people posted content in the past and wouldn't want it on Google, but aren't active anymore?
"Messages from before mid-December 2026 aren’t included, regardless of your setting." Seems like they thought of this, at least.
loa_in_ 1 days ago [-]
The same as with introduction of indexing web pages by any search engine few decades ago, if you posted on a forum that was public accessible, your posts were indexed without your input.
CM30 2 days ago [-]
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
mid-kid 1 days ago [-]
This is tied to the "community server" feature, which was always a way to force some rules they couldn't change for existing servers, so you have to accept them before you can enable fatures like this.
bryanhogan 2 days ago [-]
I tried looking for specific numbers on this, were they mentioned anywhere?
johnneville 2 days ago [-]
"Discoverable Servers are the most public spaces on Discord, with at least 1,000 members" from the linked source.
freediver 2 days ago [-]
Just to note that Google is not mentioned in the title and indeed nowhere in the article. Searching the web is broader than 'google'.
rdmuser 2 days ago [-]
I'm always so conflicted about editing article titles like this for posts. I stick to original titles since that's the rules but it's tempting not to every time I see a post hit front page with good hooks edited in. These edits clearly work and rarely seem to be punished.
"through *googling* " might've been a better phrasing
myself248 2 days ago [-]
It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.
Sohcahtoa82 2 days ago [-]
According to many parents, every game console is a Nintendo.
jbrooks84 2 days ago [-]
There is only google
nixpulvis 2 days ago [-]
This is needed, but likely not enough yet. With the rise of Discord servers as community forums, we've lost the wealth of Q&A they used to provide. Being able to search for a user with the same issue as you and find it was no small part of what's let us all learn to program in the first place, as well as critical to the training data that powers the AIs we use to answer similar questions more quickly.
There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.
CreepyHunterX 2 days ago [-]
The real risk here isn't AI training - It's deanonymization. People posted in a "private" community under nicknames.
However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.
daveidol 2 days ago [-]
This is only for public servers. If you were using a nickname on _public servers_ that was easy to identify before, then that was already a big mistake.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
EA-3167 2 days ago [-]
The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
johnneville 2 days ago [-]
server owners have setting toggles to opt the server out of having public facing channel history or ai channel summaries. a server can remain discoverable and have the history and summaries off for the public webpage of the server.
pampas 2 days ago [-]
It's not just that. It brings with it all the SEO bullshit that places like Reddit have. Everything has to be over moderated because it's a target for SEO spam.
SamInTheShell 5 hours ago [-]
Just what I’m sure everyone wanted. More Google profiling for selling products and data and AI training. Some of us are not fans. I’m definitely not and have opted to clone discord in a way that makes this hard. It’s live already too, openarcanum.org
nixonaddiction 2 days ago [-]
i think this is good. i miss old forums, and i do want information accessible like it was in the old forum days.
that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)
ElijahLynn 2 days ago [-]
It's about time! I wish Slack would offer this feature too for people who want it. I think it's going to be great for open-source, open-communication types of projects and organizations and it's well needed for the world!
With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.
flxngll 2 days ago [-]
For channels with over 1000 members. I think you have to opt in for your server to be discoverable. Looks like the public message feature is opt out rather than opt in if the server is discoverable.
keithnz 2 days ago [-]
I really like discord. This seems like a good move, there is plenty of information locked inside discord at the moment. For instance I'm part of the Wooting keyboard discord and there's a lot info there on problem solving, customizing, etc. There are tons of other discords like this, especially for games. I personally have a dota2 guild discord, but none of these are likely to be searchable as mostly they are private (often with public invite links somewhere) and don't have many users (I think mines at 180ish).
arjie 2 days ago [-]
Funny to see the differences in reaction to this on various communities. Privacy fears, locked down Internet, what a diverse set of views.
yunnpp 2 days ago [-]
Privacy fears from people who didn't see the irony of surrendering their phone number to a company to chat with someone on the Internet.
rcxdude 1 days ago [-]
There's a big difference between the two. For a lot of people on Discord, the fact that the communities are not public is a big feature. That they're sharing information with one company is a much less significant issue (though I agree, it would be better to have a platform that required less).
(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)
anonymous908213 2 days ago [-]
Discord doesn't require a phone number by default. My experience is that it only does if your IP is flagged.
yunnpp 22 hours ago [-]
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I am on a vpn, so yeah, my IP is probably flagged. But disconnecting from the vpn is not exactly a good trade-off either.
morder 2 days ago [-]
Individual servers can require it
anonymous908213 2 days ago [-]
Sure, but privacy-conscious individuals can simply not participate in those servers. The person I was replying to was acting like you have to give up your phone number to use Discord at all.
burnoutdv 1 days ago [-]
This is a fun one isnt it.
Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak.
I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore.
Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.
samtheDamned 2 days ago [-]
This seems like it would alleviate part of the concern I see on HN a lot regarding open source projects keeping their knowledge bases on isolated and unsearchable discord servers. It's still on a proprietary platform but this might be an improvement overall.
bryanhogan 2 days ago [-]
This is a very important and good change. Currently Discord communities are black holes of information.
Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.
I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.
privacyishuman 2 days ago [-]
Fluxer is what people should look at if they're trying to get off discord.
pavel_lishin 2 days ago [-]
Do Fluxer, etc., solve the problem of discoverability that this is supposed to help with? Or is it just a not-closed platform?
DexesTTP 2 days ago [-]
Fluxer has special "forum" areas that are meant to be searchable on the global web, and discussions in chat channels are private. Which is a much better approach for that issue than Discord "make every message from public servers searchable" imo.
I would suggest IRC but apparently typing and reading text is a non-starter for many.
legohead 2 days ago [-]
X app/thing sucks now that they added Z
Try new Y thing! it doesn't do annoying Z thing!
Oh no, Y added annoying Z thing! how come nobody saw this coming :(
russelg 1 days ago [-]
While this is typically true, see X to BlueSky when it comes to AI, Fluxer is open-source and self-hostable.
BorisMelnik 2 days ago [-]
phpBB!
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
why Flxuer and not any of the other dozen or so replacements that have been mentioned every time a discord thread pops up?
DexesTTP 2 days ago [-]
It's already self-hostable witha single-client connection ability, and there's ongoing work to make the Fluxer site and all of the self-hosted servers able to federate (with a prototype planned for the end of the year)
Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago [-]
Fluxer is amazing.
Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.
I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
layer8 2 days ago [-]
Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content. The site also doesn’t explain what it is about. It says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means), but Fluxer doesn’t seem to be bound to terminals?
Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago [-]
> Just as friendly feedback, monospace fonts are difficult to read for me for that kind of content.
Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.
> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),
It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.
(Full story for those curious)
It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)
(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)
[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]
It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.
But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.
I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.
Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.
Have a nice day :-D
hmartin 2 days ago [-]
How does it compare to Zulip?
Zambyte 2 days ago [-]
How does Discord compare to Zulip? Fluxer is functionally equivalent to Discord from a users perspective.
AFAIK, Zulip doesn't have any sort of built in calling, streaming, etc. right? Fluxer has that I'm addition to the Discord style chat features.
nozzlegear 2 days ago [-]
> Discord, Zulip, Fluxer
It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.
Sohcahtoa82 2 days ago [-]
I was like "Poob? Are we just making shit up now?"
So I googled it. And yes, we are, and that's the entire joke of Poob.
tbh, I kinda wanna make a Poob website now. The front page describes itself as the ultimate social media site where you can do anything, taking major inspiration from the classic Zombocom. Yet, there won't be a Register or Login button anywhere. Just a static site.
onel 2 days ago [-]
Both are great options. Easy to self-host.
The difference is that luxer has a more modern UI maybe
rdmuser 2 days ago [-]
You can opt out at an account level. I just checked and I'm already opted out so it seems like it might be using your previous data opt out settings.
jacobgkau 2 days ago [-]
The FAQ at the bottom of the article says it'll default to off for people in the EU, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. Are you in one of those places?
rdmuser 2 days ago [-]
Ah thanks for the correction! And yes I'm on that list. I just heard that and was coming back to make a correction so I'm happy to hear someone got to it before me.
roncinephile 1 days ago [-]
I would love to see the numbers on the shift in engagement on discord that would have otherwise occurred on reddit back before the Great Mod War of 2020. Digital nomads collapse tents and move to more hospitable land. My reading of the gestalt of reddit right now is that there aren't enough active users contributing original bespoke content. Not like they used to. Of course there's always plausible deniability, but I think I'm reading the room correctly here.
TheRoque 2 days ago [-]
Unlike so many people here, I think discord not being indexed by search engine is pretty OK and is even a feature. All other spaces of internet have been invaded by bots, astroturfing, sucking every single bit of data possible... The more the data is easily scrapable, the more it enshittifies everything around it. Moreover people don't behave the same knowing that something is private vs something is public (yes things are mostly public on discord, but at least there's a sense that someone has to actively look for your messages instead of having them indexed by default)
ibejoeb 2 days ago [-]
Maybe I'm jaded. Is this discord announcing that it is entering the training data business?
ghastmaster 2 days ago [-]
Discord has been available for training data for at least some months. I used duckduckgo to search information on my gamertag and whichever AI they were using at the time came up with results that would have only been available had it used Discord's data.
geobica 2 days ago [-]
That's my read on it, they might use this to treat these messages as public information to be packaged and resold like how Reddit can rather than it being a place where people have an expectation of privacy.
realaaa 9 hours ago [-]
not sure this will work now.. but a good move nonetheless !
lacoolj 2 days ago [-]
Low key privacy violated
All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)
Why tho
nuclearsugar 2 days ago [-]
Discord is ok once you get used to it. But golly the various settings panels is a scattered confusing mess, beware.
pampas 2 days ago [-]
Hopefully it won't turn discord into Reddit where everything is over moderated because of all the SEO spam.
sohrob 2 days ago [-]
I've never gotten into using Discord because I find the interface to be way too busy.
pixeljam 2 days ago [-]
The open internet is so back. But also I'm very worried for my privacy :)
2 days ago [-]
mastermage 1 days ago [-]
Well that is honestly a good thing in my book as long as everyone knows when a chat is public.
Maybe it should be put in Forum Mode only or something. Because just finding random chats is likely not going to be helpful at all.
mvdtnz 2 days ago [-]
I don't like how information is siloed in discord but making this change retroactively is dangerous. And the option to opt out is only useful to those who know about it.
xkcd-sucks 2 days ago [-]
Cool, but when will Google let anyone find public website content effectively?
roosterIllusi0n 2 days ago [-]
Google is going to be the reddit and discord search tool. It's useless for everything else.
aussieguy1234 2 days ago [-]
How about private channels?
The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels
j45 2 days ago [-]
Maybe someone will vibecode a replacement.
jpl56 1 days ago [-]
Let's find a new thing to enshittify
1) Bring people on Discord
2) put ads on Discord
3) Enshittify.
Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago [-]
I think that it can be a good change depending on how you interpret it but suppose it becomes part of Google search engine then, wouldn't it allow Google's AI quick summary to search/scrape that and have it part of training process
Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?
A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
john_strinlai 2 days ago [-]
>Discord wishes to open up to Google
they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.
one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
tomstockmail 2 days ago [-]
>one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
Based on what I've read, there will be a short summary then you are given the login page. Not unlike a paywalled news website. Still an improvement, but it does not fully address this criticism.
Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago [-]
> they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.
> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.
I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!
yeungjipei 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
josefritzishere 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
OnlyAProGamer 2 days ago [-]
This is very bad, due to the fact that, while Discord is used as private and server messaging app/website, it could expose secrets that users might be telling people in their private chat.
russelg 1 days ago [-]
This only applies to servers that are "Discoverable". Servers need to opt in to this, and there are minimum user counts for the feature in question.
Needless to say, none of this applies to your server with 15 people in it.
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?
I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.
But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
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- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
Fuck the Halloween sound pack. I didn’t want it.
Bonus points that Discord intentionally knows they abuse and gaslight users with the popups and notifications; one point they hovered a “DIDNT ASK” over the X button to dismiss some of their stunts.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040843952-K...
Most of the forums I can read when not signed in, with Discord I need to:
1) sign in to Discord
2) join to specific server
3) read and accepts all its rules, tems and conditions
4) optionally leave the server after I got all the information
i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.
how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.
queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
- Can't be found in search engines
- Abysmal search functionality
- Abysmal discoverability
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.
OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.
They want a service, not software.
If you'd like to build a clone or even a better version? I'd love to see it! I might use it!
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.
Is a piece of shit with awful UX.
You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.
The design sucks. The clients suck.
I'm sure a lot of very well meaning people worked very hard at it! But from an end user and server operator POV, it's ass.
is the key here
the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I guess its all subjective.
There actually is technically an official method to request a copy of your own data (think Google Takeout): https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
Chat room is fine though.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
better than slack, or any competitors.
and if you say IRC i quit.
Why? Its primary use for me is having small, private communities of people who aren't entirely anonymous to eachother and isn't scraped (too much), commodified and filtered through an algorithm like most of the open internet. I would hate it if suddenly it became like reddit or facebook.
The open web really went down a bad path well over a decade ago and I think its time to hard-turn away from it until things get better. The benefits of everyone abandoning the open web are considerable.
Some people are annoyed because discord doesn't have the archival capacity of an old fasioned message board, and if that's your problem with it you're right, but I think the benefits of fluid accessibility and relative privacy outweigh the problems at the moment.
Reddit outside of some niche subs still largely deals with global thought policing.
The most popular servers are for AI companies, and video games.
Which is not too surprising for a platform heavily designed around supporting video gaming.
The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.
in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.
But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.
https://lemmy.world
You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".
are you going to claim censorship or thought-policing if it's pointed out to you that personal insults are not cool here?
what are you on about, man?
you can get worked up all you want, i'm just reminding you of the guidelines you agreed to when you created your account here.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhjSYYRGNprYzOArDU9B5...
Here's a nice youtube playlist from Dr. Wilson on why discussing Covid conspiracies is basically a right wing talking point and lie. A damnable lie even.
If you want to "discuss Covid" go right ahead, but repeating misinformation that effectively led to the death of millions of people should leave you ashamed, as you are either a tool of evil or despicable yourself.
Enjoy the open discussion!
The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.
And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.
dont forget about vent and mumble!
mumble, admittedly, not so much.
No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.
"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"
Proving his point in real time
It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.
It means I can put half-finished story summaries there, without spoilering or alerting potential future readers to the plot ideas, that sort of thing.
A hierarchy of privacy levels is necessary in order for people to speak as they like.
This was a feature.
This was desired.
This was welcomed by all actors involved.
(You're not an actor but a spectator, unless you own a Discord server)
Nobody owns Discord servers except Discord's server admins. I don't mean the glorified mods of glorified channel groups, I mean the real admins of the real servers!
These are just network effects.
Furthermore, what if someone wants to opt-out of their messages being indexed in some Discord servers but not others? I don't see that option being available right now.
"Messages from before mid-December 2026 aren’t included, regardless of your setting." Seems like they thought of this, at least.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
There will always be new questions, one that even AI cannot figure out alone. Things that require other environments or polled feedback. Making these channels indexable on the internet is critical to the progress of information.
However, the server administrator enables the "discoverability" feature for everyone. So the entire history of members who never chose this option suddenly becomes discoverable and linked to their accounts. Use the same nickname on GitHub or X - and in a matter of seconds, it will point to the same person.
And this feature does not affect old messages - only ones after December 2026.
As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.
that being said, my internet history from when i was 13 is on some discord servers at risk of going public. ive been letting that stuff remain up for sentimentality reasons, but it seems i will need to do a wipe of some old servers i have been on just in case. been meaning to do this for years, but this is whats making me finally feel the need to do it. (i got lucky and the forums where the rest of my teenage internet activity was have all been wiped for years.)
With this announcement, I'm actually interested in studying the discord and participating in discord servers now! I'd much rather participate in an open garden than a closed garden.
(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)
Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak. I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore. Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.
Especially for communities that have valuable discussions and support going on in Discord, Obsidian or Astro come to my mind, this is super helpful.
I do wonder about their motivations behind this, making the web a more open and user friendly place is obviously good for the users, how does Discord profit from this? Forcing users into creating an account to view valuable information seemed like a profitable thing for Discord.
Try new Y thing! it doesn't do annoying Z thing!
Oh no, Y added annoying Z thing! how come nobody saw this coming :(
Quick self-promo to my website: https://mirror.forum which can help people find some fluxer communities and also help migrate discord communities to fluxer. It also works for not just fluxer but also matrix and stoat as well.
I have submitted Fluxer 2 times on Hackernews if not more, I really really strongly believe that people of HN should look into it more & (maybe my website as well :D)
Yes! Feedback is great and means a lot to me. I never thought about that. I do wonder though how do I exactly fix that as monospace is rather the core identity of my website. I might have to re-think the whole website but I will try to provide the ability for your own fonts. I would sincerely love some great feedback here as well because I had built it extremely with monospace in mind because I thought that it would look good. But perhaps it looks good but monospace is not practical here as you suggest. I can be wrong, I usually am and it was just me wishing to play with monospace fonts.
> says “terminal-grade communities” (whatever that means),
It just sort of reflected the style of it being terminal or (retro?) but if I have to answer what that means: It probably means nothing relevant, as such, I will remove it.
(Full story for those curious)
It was an experiment: I just had bought a domain out of an mirror: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330475 (TLDR: someone on HN wanted to show someone else mirror so they showed mirror.org and It led to a very high price so I wondered what the cheapest mirror.<tld> which I like could be), mirror.online was available for 1st year for 1$ at Namecheap (I use tld-list.com to find cheap domain tlds)
(extreme side note I also have a custom tampermonkey script to sometimes find the cheapest one ie. completely available not premium domains but yeah I need to make the script slightly better)
[I built the project because the domain was idling and I wanted to experiment with the architecture of a pure golang binary with modernc sqlite and a 7$/yr VPS and https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/ and I wanted a real project for that so I thought of it after discovering fluxer]
It is sadly vibe-coded. Thus the terminal-graded community comment. I am sorry if I didn't disclose it. I tried to show it to people and didn't get much response and so in the end, I was still happy with the experiment because I just wanted to tinker around but after its completion I was satisfied thus I didn't tinker more with it other than running it and showing it to my friends sometimes.
But knowing that a person cares about it to give me feedback enough makes me warrant to fix the changes that you've mentioned. I will try to fix them.
I will try to add an about-me page and make it better.
Though that being said, I think that the domain renewal is coming soon and I might sell the domain as renewal of 20$ is still slightly expensive for me for experiments (college student budget here!). If I do that, I will hopefully try to create a last archive.org pointing to a new subdomain of a more long lasting domain that I will try to have.
Have a nice day :-D
AFAIK, Zulip doesn't have any sort of built in calling, streaming, etc. right? Fluxer has that I'm addition to the Discord style chat features.
It's on Poob. Poob has it for you.
So I googled it. And yes, we are, and that's the entire joke of Poob.
tbh, I kinda wanna make a Poob website now. The front page describes itself as the ultimate social media site where you can do anything, taking major inspiration from the classic Zombocom. Yet, there won't be a Register or Login button anywhere. Just a static site.
All privacy is just extra layers from the public. They want to remove all those layers (which in this case is just the barrier to entry of writing API calls)
Why tho
Maybe it should be put in Forum Mode only or something. Because just finding random chats is likely not going to be helpful at all.
The servers I've joined typically have a lobby where you land right after joiming, and you need an admin to approve you before you get access to the actual channels
1) Bring people on Discord
2) put ads on Discord
3) Enshittify.
Or having all of the search/scrape data itself be part of the training process of Google/other's AI process?
A quick LLM search gives me the answer as a "maybe", but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up. I remain slightly skeptical as to why Discord wishes to open up to Google*
they aren't opening up to google specifically. any search engine will be able to index the content on the server web pages.
>but knowing the financial incentives at hand and why Discord might be opening up.
one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
Based on what I've read, there will be a short summary then you are given the login page. Not unlike a paywalled news website. Still an improvement, but it does not fully address this criticism.
My apologies. I didn't see that and skimmed through the web-page and I thought that it was a discord-google specific deal.
> one of the biggest complaints about discord (other than all of the grooming and such) is that communities move to discord and then all of their (previously freely available) information is locked behind a login.
> addressing a big complaint that many people have about your service is a good financial move.
True, that can very well be the case but my question of AI training still stands. Couldn't this make many discord texts/discussions part of AI training corpus and AI models as has been the case for many such situations.
I but am just slightly worried about all the AI training that can happen but other than that, its a good change!
Needless to say, none of this applies to your server with 15 people in it.