[just2n]

It's basically a generally passable VOIP client with a Slack built in, which AFAIK no other VOIP service has really done well (including Skype).

The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persistent communications outside of games and VOIP, and this rolls all of that into one package that's really easy to use.

I had huge issues with Discord's quality when it was first being publicly used because I was on a latent/lossy connection at the time and it just repeatedly disconnected me and forced me to completely rejoin a Discord server over and over, which implied their engineers had no understanding that the internet is inherently unreliable. That seems to have been well remedied, so actually improving their software immediately puts it 10000 feet above Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc from my perspective. I've watched these applications stagnate over the years and it's bothered me pretty deeply.

[jhgg]

This was a long time ago - back in alpha stages of the product. We've since made some pretty big strides to being resilient to network drops, packet loss, network roaming, etc... I was actually one of the engineers who worked on these. We've tested the client under some pretty inclimate network conditions (30% packet loss - high latency - extreme roaming [meaning your IP address keeps changing] - either due to hopping between cell towers, wifi networks, or a dynamic pool of IP addresses). It's super awesome to know these little behind the scene changes are noticed!

[Zarel]

I still get more problems on bad connections than other chat clients. The biggest one is probably that messages get sent twice or three times when I have a bad connection (I just had this happen yesterday). Sometimes a message goes red but it's still been sent, and clicking "Resend" makes it appear twice. Another is that while offline (on the desktop/web client), I can't look at past messages, because everything is replaced by a loading screen.

No chat client works _great_ under bad network conditions, but I think overall I tend to try to avoid using Discord more than I try to avoid others when I'm on a bad internet connection.

[kevingadd]

Do you have plans to address the fundamental unreliability of your chat? It regularly messes up message delivery (failed delivery, delivery multiple times, delivery out of order) at the slightest sign of network instability or server trouble. It's the worst I've seen from any sort of chat application, ever.

[jhgg]

Yeah - there are more plans to handle more robust message retry logic. But it's a pretty hard problem to handle. Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though - although there are some rare cases where it can still happen. I don't think out of order delivery is possible as the messages are processed one at a time - but if you have a specific example I'd be more than happy to take a look.

[thegeekpirate]

> Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though

Happens to me incredibly often after I lose my connection while sending a message on Android 6.0.1

[kahrkunne]

Just FYI, I've had both out of order delivery and duplicate messages happen semi-recently. Duplicates are far more rare than they were, though.

[jhgg]

on desktop, ios or android?