Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Nullabillity 2870 days ago
Let's see:

- The overlay still doesn't work on Linux

- There is still no voice ducking

- The text chat channels are persistent and decoupled from the voice chat channels (encouraging spam)

- There is still no way to self-host it

- The team keeps wasting their effort on stuff like this rather than fixing their broken core "service" (if it can be called that)

Mumble had all of this down to a T back in 2013.

2 comments

Perfect example of features hackers want which don't matter at all to anyone else.

- Nobody cares about Linux. They could drop Linux support today and it wouldn't matter in the slightest. I say as a 100% full time Linux user -- we get what we get.

- Users want persistent chat more than they don't. Spam isn't an issue for most people who are are running servers for their friends and coupling them with voice wouldn't really help anyway. Users want to be in a different chat than their voice coms

- Users don't even know what voice ducking is and would probably be surprised by it.

- Nobody cares about self hosting. Gamers clamour for dedicated servers to reduce lag more than than for P2P.

- Users want these features and their core service is best in class. There's a reason it basically killed their competition overnight. I haven't even seen a Mumble/Vent server in ages.

> - Users want persistent chat more than they don't. Spam isn't an issue for most people who are are running servers for their friends and coupling them with voice wouldn't really help anyway. Users want to be in a different chat than their voice coms

Looking at my old WoW guild's channel now, it's 95% spam that was only relevant to the 4 or so people who were on voice comms at the time any given thing was posted. It'd be fine to have text-only channels, but each voice channel should also have an associated unlogged text channel. For bonus points: prevent people from sending messages to text-only channels without (temporarily) leaving the voice channel.

> - Users don't even know what voice ducking is and would probably be surprised by it.

Tell that to.. anyone trying to listen to music in the background?

> - Nobody cares about self hosting. Gamers clamour for dedicated servers to reduce lag more than than for P2P.

Yup, it's lovely when Discord crashes mid-raid, and there is nothing to do aside from twiddling your thumbs.

I believe voice ducking is supported (at least on windows), I don't think their infrastructure is made to self host, it's not a self contained binary is a set of databases, different servers for voice vs text etc.

How does decoupling voice and text channels encourage spam? Why would you want it to not be persistent? Many communities now use discord instead of slack/irc/etc, barely touching the voice features if at all. Everyone already has discord and they have great community management features for groups of people.

I know several subreddits, gaming communities, youtubers, etc. have moved their "live chat" to discord. You don't even have to install discord to use it.

Edit: Mumble isn't bad and it sounds like you aren't the target demographic of discord. If you want a self-hosted, voice chat first program then mumble is definitely what you're looking for.

> I believe voice ducking is supported (at least on windows)

I can't find it on the Linux client, at least.

> I don't think their infrastructure is made to self host, it's not a self contained binary is a set of databases, different servers for voice vs text etc.

Sounds like their infrastructure is broken then? Even if it's not something you supply to users you'd still want to be able to run a local testing server during development.

> How does decoupling voice and text channels encourage spam? Why would you want it to not be persistent? Many communities now use discord instead of slack/irc/etc, barely touching the voice features if at all. Everyone already has discord and they have great community management features for groups of people.

I've primarily been forced to use this abomination for various WoW guilds. The chat tends to be used for three things: 1) announcements, 2) discussions, and 3) context (links and images, primarily) for the discussions going on in voice.

Since Discord doesn't couple the chat channels to the voice channels people end up spamming #3 in the general channels, causing very annoying constant notifications, and clogging up the history. The persistent history is also an anti-feature here, since the history ends up being nearly useless without the accompanying voice conversations.

Since #3 invariably annoys everyone into turning off notifications it becomes an arms race to get people to actually pay attention to #1.

#2 tends to get sidetracked when people spam #3 all over the place, but even without that it's nearly impossible to keep track of multiple discussions at once. Trying to find and/or make sense of old discussions gets even messier. This case is always much better served by a real forum.

> Since Discord doesn't couple the chat channels to the voice channels people end up spamming #3 in the general channels, causing very annoying constant notifications, and clogging up the history.

On Windows, voice chats are very much separate from Text chats, it looks like https://i.imgur.com/HBXMPY0.png

And no one in the target audience cares about self hosting instances. It adds 0 value for their core user base. People who want a privacy minded voice chat system can use one of those, it isn't worth Discord's engineering time to support a stand alone release to attract some small extra # of users.

> On Windows, voice chats are very much separate from Text chats, it looks like https://i.imgur.com/HBXMPY0.png

That was exactly the thing I was complaining about?

Oops sorry, I thought the complaint was about them being separate. I'm not sure I understand the spam complaint, if everyone is on voice chat why are they in general? But then again I mostly use Discord for community activities, not for group gaming.