| > 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. |
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.