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0 pointsscrollaway9y ago0 comments

I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord.

I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike Slack's. It's fast. The voice quality is superb.

As far as productivity goes, I get far more done with it than I ever did with IRC. The addition of being able to hop on voice very quickly is insanely good. Screensharing and video chat coming this year as well, I'm pretty excited.

It's to the point that I bought Discord Nitro (their premium offering) the day it was released, for no other reason than to give them money.

I hope the question of protocol openness gets resolved; until then, IRC just doesn't cut it for me anymore. IRCCloud.com helps, but their interface is super slow with lots of channels and IRC itself simply has no support for the thousands of improvements that have been made in communications the past 30-something years.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

subpixel9y ago· 3 in thread

Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.

scrollawayOP9y ago

Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever.

Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/

mahyarm9y ago

I do wonder when they will make a business edition.

rudolf09y ago

They're marketed towards casual users but Discord is probably the best chat and collaboration software I've used so far. I definitely prefer it to Slack for professional-type stuff.

You can use Discord any want you want. If you join some popular Discord server, odds are it'll be full of spam and Internet humor, but obviously you can do whatever like on your own server(s).

jakebasile9y ago

I like Discord a lot, it's far and away better than TeamSpeak and Vent. It's also better than Slack for private group conversations. But it is still a closed system owned by a for profit company.

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