How did this get so popular? honestly it's meh

No good open source alternatives?

Are you honestly retarded? How are you so autistic you cant understand the mind of a consumer?
before discord normies options were in decreasing order or normie-ness
>Skype
>teamspeak
>ventrilo
Skype requires an account, requires operating through a friends list, and was an absolute cpu-hog. Also, poorly optimized chat, no channels, anything other than a 1 on 1 call was shit.
Teamspeak and ventrilo were honestly just garbage, but they served their purpose in the WoW community when there were no other options, they get a free pass.
Now lets talk the pros of discord:
>Invite operates through a simple link, doesnt require an account, can log in as guest
>barely impedes on the cpu, making it perfect to use in games
>offers channel capabilities which allows for alot of people to be added to a discord, and they can all autistically post images
>also offers roles with customizeable admin rights
>extremely visually pleasing UI, and can be controlled while in game through hot-keyed buttons
The fact that you cant comprehend this honestly enrages me and you should be force-suicided

Everyone just started to fucking use it and it doesn't even matter if you try to use anything else because everyone will just keep fucking saying "Get a discord, get a discord, get a discord" and now I can't show off my ICQ digits because some weeaboo FUCK thinks this stenographic piece of shit is superior to anything else because everyone else uses it and of course the majority of people have the best taste and common sense. IT only makes sense the most popular product is also the most secure, reliable, trustworthy, and respectable product.

Oh FFS i forgot to mention the fact that TS and vent servers cost MONEY or you had to find/steal someone elses which just does not feel good because you never knew if it would go down/ who wants to pay.
Even more reason why you are stupid af for not understanding

>easy to make an account, people didn't mind at all swapping from Skype, which was getting bloated.
>can make your own server for free unlike Teamspeak where you need to find a quiet server to leech off of.
It really got popular because of Twitch communities making servers for their streamers.

Riot.im/Matrix

Unlike IRC there's nothing to set up. You click on a link and it opens up right in your browser. That said it's a literal datamining op and anyone who installs the client deserves to be exterminated.

cringe

paid shills

I think what he means is that other users can't see your IP address. Dunno if it's true or not, but apparently that was what made some people move from Skype to Discord, according to some anons in a previous thread.

TS was the shit. My group of friends and I have one that we pay for and the quality is better than discord. Sure the chat is far more bland but I'd prefer that over getting packet loss just talking to people in discord.

Because is easy deploy a server in seconds. meanwhile with Teamspeak/Ventrilo,etc are aimed to extreme nerds that pay, deploy and host his personal servers.

>Unlike IRC there's nothing to set up.
T H I S
IRC is too 'unix philosophy' for the average normie. If you want feature parity with Discord, you'd need to not only set up IRC, but also a ton of other services like mumble. Discord bundles everything you could want into one package.
That's why I'd probably recommend something like Matrix if you want people to use something Free Software. Riot look very much like Discord or Slack, and has voice and video calls as well.

TS and Ventrilo WERE the shit because they were so unique and novel for almost a decade from the early 2000's on.
Youre deluding yourself if you think discord quality is bad though. I barely use it anymore since I hardly game anymore but In the 3 years I did use it I never had "packet loss" as you describe. Only occasional outages. Paying for a TS while a free option exists is cringe.

teamspeak and vent both require paid hosting while discord servers are free, and skype has been getting worse with each release for years

this is really basic shit, you might as well ask why people prefer a prebuilt OS rather than having to compile their own kernel from scratch or why most people use gui-based editors over stuff like vim

This

this, but unironically. it somehow managed to become popular among the stubborn audience

Free, extremely easy to use, and a generation that has been raised on webapps already.

I'd love to use it but I'm a librefag and would rather not use proprietary bullshit unless there is no other alternative...

Early stages it was paid marketing. The devs would pay popular youtubers to shill it, and then it kinda just snowballed with le gaymers

>nu males

>better than teamspeak
Do Discord users actually use voice?

no, they just use custom emojis and react to eachothers le funny memes with even more custom emojis

stop posting about it faggot

>Free
>easy to use
>can post images, videos, emotes
>network effect

He's being paid to shill Discord again.
Just sage and hide thread desu senpai

Private servers, yes.
Public servers, no.

Skype had a bug which Microsoft refused to fix (more like, the pajeets and Chinks at Microsoft didn't know how to fix it), so Discord showed up and they began to shill Discord as a replacement for Skype to protect your IP address etc.

Several years later, Microsoft hired white programmers to fix the bug on Skype, but it was already too late

We wanted a replacement to Skype's fucking awful interface and bugs, which continually got worse over the years, there were clients like Tox and shit trying to attempt this, but Discord managed to gain traction by marketing itself as a replacement instead of just a chat client, plus it had a decent interface, so everyone swapped.

>just the wow community
Holy shit nigger literally everyone who played multiplayer games on PC was in a ventrilo or teamspeak server at some point, Teamspeak is still widely preferred by major gaming clans because of its channel and permission nesting.

See, I won't comment on anything except for one thing...
I've never had a problem with CPU usage on Skype ever. Had an account for about 4 years prior to just getting off the majority of social networks.
What CPU do you have to have for Skype to be a hog? The lowest I've had was a mobile i5, which I had through the majority of the time I used Skype, only jumping ship to a desktop around a year after I left it, and even then there were no problems with Skype.
I'm not shilling Skype, don't try and accuse that, I'm just curious as fuck as to what the supposed problem is.

>Competitors at the time were Skype and Teamspeak
>MS have been ruining Skype for years
>TS had shitty UI, costs money
>Discord were promoting their app through youtube and twitch
>UI is well designed, plenty of features, great voice chat quality
>Very accessible as it'll run in browser

UI was laggy even on good hardware

Huh, maybe not everybody had to deal with it. How long ago was this? Because I never noticed any unbearable CPU usage on either an i5 2467m, i7 3720qm, athlon x4 880k, i5 4460, or even now, ryzen 5 1600, after redownloading it to check if it's shit now

About the time they started redesigning it to be a Snapchat clone, strangely enough that was when it started hemorrhaging users.

TS doesn't cost any money, there are plenty of services that have been providing free servers for over ten years.

Shitty UI matters a lot.
Skype, Mumble and TS all had garbage usability.

Teamspeak's interface is fine, I've literally never heard anyone who's used it complain about it.

>garbage usability in ts
>meanwhile discord still doesn't have nested channels or permissions
>has to take up half of the fucking screen just so you can see chat and voice properly together

Zoomers don't understand that lots of whitespace =/= usability.

>burgers use mumble
>europeans use teamspeak
>burgers use ventrillo
>europeans use teamspeak
>burgers use skype
>europeans use teamspeak
>burgers use discord
>europeans use teamspeak
they will never learn.

Can't see how lack of features is relevant to UI design.

I keep Discord minimised, it really doesn't have an excess of white space at all. You must be one of those "there's one pixel of space around the text that's perfect" CLI retards, nobody wants to use software that looks like that.

Are you actually dumb enough to not understand how nested channels relate to interface design? You don't need them, but they help with channel organization and categorization.

It's free
it's rather light weight
it's easy to use
it just weks

All the third party support for it is insane ( so it makes it perfect if you are managing a guild in an MMO )

Dunno why you muh freedomz rednecks have such hard time understanding it.

I'm not, Discord just overdoes it; on a 1080p screen, with the window maxed, I can display 9 single line text messages. 9. On TS with the window fully maximized and the text box sized appropriately, I can display like 60. There's a fine line between making your UI look nice and ruining usability.

People don't understand or care about their security. Hammer & Chisel are le gamers too just like you and me, so letting Jason Citron data mine you like Zuckerberg is fine!

I don't run a Discord server or have ever felt the need for nested channels. If Discord wanted nested channels I would expect a well designed approach/implementation.

Yes you are. You can change the layout to compact if you want. This argument is null anyway, the whole "below the fold" meme is dog shit, people scroll all the fucking time you do not need 60 messages on your screen at one time when people scroll so regularly. There is value in the clarity of information rather than just density.

how the fuck is there still no push to talk suppression
mumble did this 20000 years ago

Except TS' information is still perfectly clear and you need to scroll far less to find the same information. Even in compact mode I can display at most 24 lines of text on a 1080p monitor; if I am having a lengthy conversation and need to reference prior material, or quote it, I want that to be easily obtainable, I don't want to spend a minute scrolling up to find something just to quote it, then scroll all the way down again only to find the conversation has moved on.

Nested channels have been a commonly requested feature since its release.

>teamspeak
Nonfree junk, into the trash it goes.

Below the fold isn't bullshit, as a website designer I can accurately state that finding a way to provide information compactly while still providing a nice design helps retain visitors.

Discord is super bloat and is obviously lying about privacy and security.
Discord banned private(!) chatrooms where deepfakes (are these even illegal??) were exchanged. Bigots.

Every big media company gets super cucked by political correctness to keep investors calm.

You can scale everything including the text smaller in settings and even remove icons etc through compact mode for irc feels.

...

Paid shills is unironically the real reason

discordapp.com/hypesquad

Having to scale text reduces readability, I shouldn't need to do this; if they made the message box smaller and placed it at at the bottom of the window I could get like 10 more lines of text in there, but for some reason even in compact mode they have like 30 pixels of padding below it.

Spotted the HypeShill

60 messages on a 1080p screen is not "perfectly clear", it sounds like information overload. You think the average gamer cares about seeing the most messages possible on their screen?

That's nice I don't want and wouldn't use this feature.

>as a website designer
As a junior more like. I design frontends for web apps and below the fold is a meme, it has been dubunked by user testing again and again, especially on mobile.

>we'll give you free "stuff" and mention you on twitter if you become a full-blown shill for our program
Jesus christ.

Using compact mode makes the text boxes tiny and scaling the text down should give you much more than 24 lines except you have bad eyesight. In that case Id like a comparison of what's readable for you in the platform of your choice with the same readability and displaying more content.

It depends on the kind of information being displayed and the target audience, I'm not a junior.
The average gamer doesn't know whether or not they even need that capability until they have it, when my groups moved from IRC to Discord literally everyone bitched about how little text could actually be displayed.
>front-end app designer
What applications have you worked on?

It's not about bad eyesight, it's about not ruining my eyes.

People scroll all the time because we fucking make them scroll; do you actually think someone wants to scroll through a shitload of information just to find something? No. Nobody wants to do that, they do it because they have to, because designers decided to throw actual usability and functionality out the fucking window just for the sake of a better look.

basically twitch chat with voice.

>It depends on the kind of information being displayed and the target audience
The reality is that everyone scrolls in practice, it is well established user behaviour and touch screens are a driving force behind it. The below the fold meme is merely a distraction based on flakey user research, even boomers will default to scrolling and basic analytics and user testing will show this.

Also you think your IRC friends know shit about usability? Wahh there's not text in every pixel of my shitty 20" CRT wahh, bet it took them minutes to get over themselves.

>Whitespace is the enemy
I'm not saying have pages thousands of pixels long, I'm saying that the claim that people don't scroll below the fold is bullshit and easily refutable with basic user testing.

I would love to see what your idea of what a perfect site looks like, expecting a neocities link desu.

I like it

I never said whitespace is the enemy, too much is. Everyone scrolls in practice because they're used to it, it's been the standard for years; now that's starting to change, the best reviews I've gotten on my designs are for websites that use full page transitions. These are also the designs that are winning awwwards right now. This is the design philosophy the web is moving to, and we're doing it because our analytics show us we should.

>bet it took them minutes to get over themselves.
No it took us emailing discord when it was first released and asking them to implement a compact mode, when they responded with confirmation that something like it was going to be introduced, then we stopped bitching (mostly).

There is no perfect site, but I can say it's definitely not a site that makes you scroll for a minute to find relevant information.

Shilling
/v/

Integration with Twitch and other popular services helped push it into the mainstream, this is a feature that no other client supports.

As long as you don't think that it's some bastion of security, it's fine.

The encryption and security only go in to voice, your texts are logged and queryable in elasticsearch, plaintext.

And servers aren't really servers. they were trying to just use a similar naming thing

if you accept these things, it's fine. it's great for gaming among small groups of friends especially for voice. it kinda combined everything anyone could want from IRC and TS\Mumble and put it in a 0 effort package.

For what it is, it's great, a little bloaty yeah but that's any electron app for ya. there's better shit, but this is just easier

You could always spin up your own server at home but then that also means maintaining your own servers for friends and there's really no pay off unless you wanna learn that shit.

>icq digits

who let grandpa on the computer again?

Discord has a web client and I know I can theme that myself, is it also possible to do this with the desktop client? Doesn't it just use markup and CSS to display its interface?

hello

reddo

It is a Slack for kids and neets

Skype & Gaming worked fine on my Pentium 4 back when that was new.

>Invite operates through a simple link
>uses facebook/instagram/skype... to send the link

Discord gave the tools to create your own "server" to even the dumbest and poorest retards. With Teamspeak, Mumble etc. you at least had to have half a brain or pay money to create a server. This actually helped create communities of friends.
The only thing discord can do is have every dumbfuck sit in his own server with 3 friends or spam pictures in those fuck huge community discords where no one knows each other.
Discord is anti social, proprietary. Dpyware, retardproof shitware.

>paid shills
They do it for free lmao.

Again I never said make your site thousands of pixels high if it's not necessary, nor am I saying you can't have a design that uses full page transitions, I'm saying limiting your site height arbitrarily makes no sense.

Not sure, I think there's a third party wrapper for Discord on nix but I can't remember what it's called.

Does it have persistent chat for everyone connecting to channel?

This, except it's not light weight.
The one link / no client / insta invite thing is helpful for anyone setting a chat or call on the go.
Anyway, aside from setting a mumble server for voice communication; you can still use discord for shit servers you need (just like a forum) and if you have concerns when talking with your friends set up something like:
gitlab.com/leogx9r/DiscordCrypt

No one thinks you're cool for not playing video games, niggerfaggot rape victim.

what if I just use the browser version ?

Accessibility. No other VOIP client is as easy to use as Discord; all the competition requires entering in archaic server details/paying to start your own.

looks cool, website was responsive

You just don't share your pc software data. Aside from that, it's the same

Skype just become unusable afther Microsoft got it. And the group chat and calls are better done on discord.

Honestly I gave up on my data like 10 years ago.

It's convenient and all my friends use it. I prefer telegram though for DMs.

What amazes me the most is how Blizzard is STILL incapable of making good in-game voice chat 14 fucking years later so everyone still have to use TS/discord/whatever.

They're not incapable, players would just rather use 3rd party programs than integrated ones for voice.