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Discord hits a sweet spot of design choices that make sense for online friends occasionally intermingling with strangers on the Internet. It's free and has share-URLs to onboard into the product, it's pseudonymous so one can be known by a chosen persona, it's centrally hosted so DOS-attempts don't impact users' networks, but the management and moderation of channels and spaces is distributed. History is searchable, 1-to-1 conversations exist, voice chat is optional but effortlessly available. IRC is the ancestor of this kind of chat, but IRC isn't as widely known as it was in past generations, it has connection privacy challenges, and has a less cohesive service identity and onboarding story that people have come to expect with the spread of centralized services. Slack is another modern, centralized take on IRC, but reveals one's email address, and multiparty voice chat is gated behind paid plans and limited in size. Gamer voice chat systems are decentralized and are lacking in text chat. Old instant messaging networks have been shut down, new ones either don't have desktop clients, don't have a good group voice chat, or reveal personal info. Skype was fine on all three and was a hangout tool for many, until Microsoft ran it into the ground. It's a bit of a meme now that companies are putting out chat services yet no one can do them right. Surely there's economic forces at play, and rich media chat is probably expensive, but there's companies with very deep pockets who could run it as a loss leader just to starve their competitors, to commoditize their own complements. But cloud storage for individuals or video hosting like YouTube is also expensive, yet an upgrade path exists for users who want to pay. Google has thoroughly ceded chat to Facebook and still can't sort their strategy out, Facebook is just now realizing that they could tackle a more private chat too and they could satisfy that demand, Microsoft has morphed Skype into everything from Windows-integrated platformwide IM to a bad Snapchat clone and back again to a WebRTC shim, this time with a Chrome-only client. Asian apps capable, but are focusing on other markets and aren't as well known in the US. Telegram still doesn't have group voice calls. VC companies focus on the enterprise where willingness to pay is higher, amounts are higher, but use-cases are different. |