Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by screye 1759 days ago
I wonder if discord could straight up sell/separate a 'fork' of their platform that targets a completely different audience.

The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus.

Product companies in general know this quite well. The way to make the (enthusiast) Supra profitable, was to build it on the same platform as the (normie) BMW Z4. The Z4 gets some of the spice of the Supra, and the Supra owners don't feel cheated out of a place in the industry. Effectively, both cars maintain the same back end, but completely different front ends. Maybe discord could do the same. If reddit was run by competent people, then they'd know to continue supporting old.reddit.com for the same reason.

Some aspects of Discord's platform are incredibly useful and class leading. However, their users are a very particular kind of internet person, and the complete un-intuitiveness of the platform highlights that. You can't preserve the 4chan-esque spastic wonder of a platform while still appealing to normies, businesses and older folks.

A platform as funny/productive as 4chan and as sanitized as Teams is the holy-grail. Alas, like all holy-grails, it seems entirely unattainable.

2 comments

Yeah this has been my hope too. The fact that you can’t separate the two right now is holding the platform back. I also wish for a business grade frontend that can be sold as a digital office (we have been experimenting this week with using discord as such), but in lieu of that I think simply supporting multiple accounts in the client would go a really long way. The problem is avatars are account bound so you can’t separate your work persona from your social persona, which matters when your social persona enjoys nsfw hobbies or even simply when you want a punk avatar for one and a headshot for the other. IMO having separate personas is the only way to allow the platform to retain its good qualities while expanding into markets where the masses preside. If people have to use one identity for everything then that identity becomes sterile, and Discord’s biggest success is that it fosters private communities where you can shitpost and trash talk with your close friends while breaking some sweat in <game>.
> The 1-size-fits-all approach to social networks never seems to work. Facebook seems to have figured it out with a clear separation of the kind of lifestyles sold by each of Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp and soon Oculus.

Even Facebook tried forking their own product with Campus.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/introducing-facebook-campu...

Facebook Workplace, too