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by trampypizza 1815 days ago
In my experience, discord was better than the previous options for a few reasons.

A) it's free, as opposed to a vent or TS server, which while they are not expensive, it's still a barrier to setting one up.

B) the free tier has quite a lot of functionality without paying for servers, even for a lot of players (like a World of Warcraft guild).

C) it merged voice Comms with a community hub where people could communicate and share things relevant to their game (to use the WoW scenario again, raid organising, upcoming patch discussion, guides and other helpful information) in an organised and central location.

I recognise there is a bunch of issues with discord, I've had it have complete melt downs when the voice systems have broken, it can be a real resource hog, and don't get me started on the security and privacy (it's not great), however because of the additional functionality I still think it's a great bit of software.

I'm so glad I don't have to be in Warcraft guild Facebook groups anymore!
1 comments
calpaterson 1815 days ago
These three points are all well and good but they don't contradict my original points: Discord's UI is exceptionally confusing and requires specific knowledge to operate it. This isn't a field with brilliant UI either: eg it's often confusing whether you're muted or unmuted on most videoconferencing programs. Even so, Discord is definitely the most confusing videoconferencing UI I can remember using. I'm sure that harms adoption greatly, even if it is still very popular.
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trampypizza 1815 days ago
Oh I don't disagree with you!

My purpose was not to suggest you were wrong, just present my experience and thoughts about why it's become so widely used _despite_ the issues you've raised.

I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives. That has certainly been my experience, which I appreciate is a single data point.

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calpaterson 1815 days ago
> I think people overcome the awkward UI because of the perceived benefits of the platform verses alternatives.

I'm sure you're right! The robustness of Discord's call quality definitely seems to be much better than average (though a lot of this comes down to people's local networking hardware).

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