- Individuals can block and report other users
- There are tiered mod levels
- Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad actors
Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord than Slack already, too.
If you haven't checked out an OSS community on Discord yet here are a few:
I run three Discord servers:
- A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats.
- A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/), general channels, voice channels etc.
- A large (20k users) one for our company's (gaming-centric) userbase.
Discord is a fantastic tool that adapts to all three situations very well, scales really well from 4 people to 100k people. Its DM/friendslist system scales a lot less well, but is still very usable with 100+ DM channels. I have even created a personal (private) Discord server where I'm keeping a journal of what I work on, inspired by a HN post the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15823599).
Discord is scalable messaging UX done right. I'm a huge believer in what they do. (Yeah, if only it were open source etc, I get it; different problem, different story)
I much prefer it over Gitter for open source chat (Gitter's only real advantage is how well it integrates with Github). And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough.
I just wish Discord would get phonecall support, but that part is probably not going to happen. It's doable with a bot though. PhoneCord (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6hlesz/anyone_e...) used to do it, they were shut down because of the obvious abuse implications but I'd really like to hook up Twilio with Discord in a bot for my company, internally, so we can do phone conferencing from it.
Would love to hear more about the reasoning behind this. IRC might not be as flashy as Slack, but for my daily work and communication, it works fine (I use IRCCloud) even though I would love for IRCCloud to offer a bouncer so I can use my own client.
AFAIK, the only way Gitter "integrates" with Github is sending repository updates to the channel, something which Github has a webhook for doing with IRC as well.
As far as I know, Slack won’t implement that because it’s a team chat app and if team members need to block people, there’s larger problems: https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481
As we speak, I have five slack communities open in my messenger. All but one of them are open to the public.
I'd wager there are more public Slack communities than there are private (i.e. "team chat") ones. But much like Twitter, Slack has a fundamentally different vision for their platform than their users apparently have.
To me this was first made clear when Reactiflux (a massive community around React, Flux and related web technologies and topics) had to switch from Slack to Discord because they had hit a hard limit of members and Slack said they wouldn't increase it because their software and infra wasn't build to handle these scenarios.
Nevertheless open source projects and community builders keep flocking to Slack and Slack doesn't seem to have any intention to clear up this misalignment. They're benefiting from the free advertisement small public communities create but don't want to spend any extra energy providing their services to them as they grow.
Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days.
It's a window, an fft, a filter around a primary frequency range, an integration, and an N second timer since the last time the audio crosses the threshold.
Discord's current implementation drops in the middle for words! It's crazy.
also as a phoenix dev (just released my first big site), you picked the right stack :)
Edit: I've adjusted the thresholds to try and tune it, but it's been very hit or miss.
It's usually specific users whose words get dropped, maybe their activation threshold is just low enough. But still, seems to me like this should not happen, especially in the middle of sentences, since the beginning of the sentence is recorded just fine.
(Windows 10 Pro)
Last time I tried it the browser app was especially prone to this, to the point of rendering push-to-talk completely unusable.
Skype, Google Hangouts, teamspeak, ventrillo, mumble, and tox all support my microphone and voice activation correctly.
You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your channel though
Would recommend for other small companies in same boat
Discord really hit it off with gamers giving them the chat application they want (such as Steam, Battle.NET; formally Xfire) with the VOIP they used in conjunction. It's really an amazing product (who says Electron doesn't work?!) — I'm hoping they can stay around for a long time.
Also, I can't be the only one who can single out Electron/CEF apps just from how bad the input delay is. It gives me the feeling of it being made of cheap plastic.
I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/
(My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)
Also the bad people never stay confined to their private hate club. See the linked article here about "raids" on other channels or literally the entire history of Internet social media.
Hm, I looked at your account and you posted another comment which looks for all the world like an attempt to imply by dogwhistle that the Jews are planning on replacing you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15870471
Are you sure you were not banned for being a Nazi, hiding behind the label "alt-right"? People dissatisfied with mainstream right-wing politics are one thing. Nazis are another entirely, and they have no place on this forum or in our industry.
(Can the decent people in the alt-right -- assuming any exist -- denounce dogwhistle anti-Semitism as having no part in the movement?)
I see https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b and https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request... ... Interesting.
Made by a telecom company, build for telecom stuff.
Used by basically every enterprise telecom application software (e.g. Asterik).
Not that interesting if one knows the Erlang/OTP background.
We've been able to handle millions of concurrent HTTP(!) connections on a single machine for years; it feels like a pretty solved problem. Although, a lot of that involved userspace TCP stacks and really high-end networking hardware, so if you want to stay within saner territories you can scale that number back a bit.
I really like it a lot and I was always wondering why it is not used more in business setting or for coordination in teams, because it could totally do that and it is ligher solution then slack or god forbid hipchat.
Granted, I don’t think we’ve got more than a couple of hundred users on our Discord server, but it has been serving the core group of contributors well.
Fyi, it is gated by Discord and (for instance) I'm unable to create an account under this psuedonym.
So, I (personally) will never use Discord as they locked my account when I attempted to create one.
https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...
https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...
Anecdata:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14865292
Some people consider this a positive.
I see several reasons.
1. It's impossible to not be in a public channel. Yes, you can mute it, but you can't ever leave it. In a large company with thousands of channels, this creates cognitive overhead.
2. You can create private channels, but this requires the ability to assign permissions. This has two problems - one, if you have a lot of teams that need to have private rooms you're going to spend a lot of time juggling permissions, and two, if you need a quick ad-hoc room that you don't want littering the general list, you need to be able to assign permissions.
Services like Ventrilo, Teamspeak etc required a lot of setup/ self hosting and were only really strong for voice. Skype didn't organise well around how people game.
When I come back to WoW a few years ago a lot of people were trying to run groups on Skype which was a horrible experience of adding randoms and joining group calls, in additional to all the other downsides of Skype. Discord is a perfect replacement for that.
>... business setting ...
These two things don't seem to go together, maybe that's why it is not used more in business?
Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source Skype alternatives !?
As much as I'd love to say otherwise, IRC is not a viable Discord alternative. The onboarding on Discord is as smooth as IRC would be if the standard web clients had actually decent UX. Unlike Discord, however, people can't seem to figure out banning on IRC.
There's no realistic way to CAPTCHA on IRC connection. You could work around that on very modern IRCds with something like requiring SASL for authentication and having a web-based registration that does CAPTCHA, but mandatory registration breaks the onboarding process again.
People these days have a hard expectation that they can just drag and drop files and have it work, rather than navigating to imgur/some other site. They want server-side logs to catch up on conversations they weren't online for -- rather than setting up a bouncer (which I'd argue is a privacy nightmare rather than a feature, but YMMV if you've got nothing to hype). Some even want voice chat and avatars.
In some rare cases, people even have to call their ISP about unblocking 6667/6697 because of old cases with botnets. Web applications would be much more popular, but then other IRC people want ways to ban the web clients reliably.
And let's not get into the historical cruft of the ident field that's not entirely historical cruft because it's actually used by shared providers to enable banning in the first place. But that requires, again, knowledge of how to ban properly. Which is a lost skill.
tl;dr: Discord UX is so much better than IRC UX to the a lot of people in a lot of ways.
You can use it to push alerts and charts from monitoring[2]. It's straightforward.
In Slack, a comparable integration requires a bit more footwork with file uploads being a separate part of the API.
[1]: https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook
[2]: https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-engine/noti...
Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens before switching to a freedom respecting software.
Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.
for whatever reason, people have these shield-walls up against criticism of the software they use every day. it points to a double-think that allows people to engage in ethical practices (meditation) while blissfully continuing to neglect the activity of living ethics (which is the only true meditation). if one doesn't inform the other, you're doing it wrong.
it's deeply troubling.
And this doesn’t even touch on the attention cost... it gets stupidly demanding of your attention with all the @ mention options. If you’re part of more than one community, you had best prepare to be quite liberal with the mute feature.
If you prefer a more classical voice chat use mumble.
Its proprietary nature has always concerned me too, as well as what they're doing with the data (i.e. assume they're reading & listening to everything).
What they mustn't do is forget how quickly they grew and the underlying concept that enabled it: people will flock to different messaging platforms quite easily (Teamspeak to Discord is a great example) which means Discord can lose just as quickly as it won.
> “Raiding and spamming is explicitly against our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines,”
> Resmini’s statement comes just a few months after Discord took action against a number of nefarious ALT-RIGHT servers. One of the largest servers, Centipede Central, became heavily monitored by Discord administrators and in the past few months, underwent its own implosion.
And more importantly:
> “The team has confirmed that they are aware of Centipede Central and will take action IF they find CC is in violation of their terms of service and/or community guidelines”
In other words, it sounds like the politics of that group alone was probably enough to justify keeping them under close surveillance. It wasn't necessarily just responding to "raiding and spamming" once it happened.
Even privacy oriented people just can't use Discord because it used to ban registrations. It just blocks registration now apparently.
Fringe political views will get you permanently blocked by Discord and/or Twitter.
I'm not a right-leaning person but even the concept speech should be free and uncensored if you aren't enabling a crime is an issue.
They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.
