I'm pro-cryptocurrency generally, but I'm horrified by the crypto-as-salvation, utopianist narrative coming from some wealthy crypto proponents in denial of their own moral bankruptcy and the problem of human fallibility in general.
It feels like the same crowd who are buying up places in
cryostasis chambers and pinning their hopes on terraforming Mars.
I recently read three peer-reviewed papers comparing the morbidity of COVID-19 vs the flu, and what it came out to was that COVID-19 is roughly 6x more lethal per modern case.
I'm afraid I can't be bothered finding the links to those papers for you, because it was matter of curiosity. You have to take into account how easily COVID-19 spreads as well, and you don't need the finer details to see the bigger picture.
Let's do a litmus test on whether COVID-19 deaths are a problem compared to the flu. Mass graves dug for flu victims in the last 20 years: zero. Mass graves dug for COVID-19 victims in the last 2 years: a bunch.
COVID-19 IFR overall is something like 0.5% across all populations. While the typical seasonal flu is 0.1%, both are relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. This becomes more clear if you look at ages under 50 - the IFR for them is astonishingly low, to the point that societal restrictions are effectively risk containment for the elderly or unhealthy (like the obese) at the expense of the young and healthy. I think that makes the discussion around the tradeoffs more difficult and nuanced. I’m not saying that any one approach is definitely right or wrong, but that there are legitimate perspectives and lines of reasoning to support a relatively wide set of approaches.
Wow. This is a horrendous level of overreach into personal lives. This kind of thing makes me really hope the Chinese govt's influence doesn't increase any more geographically.
Is it the kids who are punished for non-compliance though? It sounds like the enforcement (and presumably the punishment for non-compliance) is on the gaming companies rather than the kids or their parents.
As a personal user, I'd give Discord more money if high-resolution streaming and higher bitrates etc. were a bit cheaper, and I could buy credit which using these features ate through, instead of having to pay an overly expensive subscription.
I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.
Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.
It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.
> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well. The first of many casualties, no doubt.
This is funny because my impression was that Discord users by and large hated those messages.
I'm definitely in the camp of "don't patronize me with being a 'silly' corporation". I don't believe you, you're trying to make money, trying to be pals with me grosses me out.
They should use a different name then, because "discord" doesn't exactly conjure up images of handshakes and smiling people sitting in meeting rooms in stock photos.
Nah, just the trend of the first letter + number of middle letters + last letter abbreviation scheme, like K8s for Kubernetes, and i18n for internationalization.
B8s = Business
...except then it would be B6s...unless the parent meant "Discord Businesses"?
Funny is relative. Personally, there was nothing humorous about those messages. I know they were trying to be funny, but it was about as funny as knock knock, who’s there?, banana!
On my open source project (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), there's a nyan cat that move around whenever the app takes more than 1s to load. I had quite a few companies contacting me to get rid of it
To see the nyan cat moving around your screen, you got to throttle the bandwidth: https://demo.filestash.app/
Humour is subjective, and whether you found them funny or not didn't really matter. They were just stupid little jokes for you to read while Discord is doing something.
Perfectly harmless, and adds a bit of charm to the app.
There are so many different varieties of sense of humor. It varies from culture to culture, generation to generation, family to family, and person to person.
It's one thing if a joke is actually harmful, of course. But, beyond that, I'd say that denigrating someone else's way of being whimsical is a specific subspecies of taking yourself too seriously.
The person you are responding to did not denigrated anything.
He responded to claim that if someone does not like those messages, then he "take himself too seriously". The response simple explained that author find those jokes unfunny.
As you said, humor varies from culture to culture, generation to generation, family to family, and person to person. That implies that not liking some kind of humor is completely valid sentiment.
There's a difference, though, between simply not liking some kind of humor, and publicly making fun of it.
I generally think that this advice is over-simplistic, but this tends to be a situation where the, "If you can't say anything nice, just don't say anything," principle really is a good rule of thumb.
If you insult someone for not liking the humor, it fair play from them to make fun of you back. And that comment was not making fun, it was expressing how that humor comes off.
Because what you want here is one sided "one side get to insult the other, but other is expected to not even express their opinion."
I'll throw in my 2c and say that I thought they were just fine. I wasn't verbally guffawing at their Sims-esque loading humor but the first time I saw it I thought "oh heh they're doing the sims thing" and then literally never thought overmuch about it again.
I really don't take myself seriously at all but I find such things in software more annoying than humorous because it's distracting (the reason for me was because I have to reprogram my behaviour to ignore said loading messages rather than view them as actionable items). Streamlabs is another with stupid loading messages. Such things aren't annoying enough to stop me using their software but it certainly not something I get kick out of seeing.
I'd also add festival themed icons too. The whole VSCode trolling a few years back might have been overblown but the end result was for the better imo. I find it distracting having seasonal icons and the fewer distractions I can find in my productivity tools the better.
Yeah. It always falls flat for me, like the "Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!" messages you get when some web pages break down.
> My company is presently evaluating alternatives to Slack internally. Turns out, Discord is one of the most feature rich alternatives, with a relatively smooth UI and voice/video/screenshare capability. I couldn't even get half of about 10 people on the testing committee to try it.
> The reasons:
> -The logo in the tray is a video game controller
> -The home screen shows a listing of games
> -The chat bot addressed a female employee when she joined as "love"
> -Touchpoint emails aren't asking for feedback, they're talking about the journey for users to share gaming experiences
> Except the third one above, none of these are "bad" per se. And the product is really solid. There's a market there that could certainly use it as is, but perhaps an even bigger (and more lucrative one) that will be turned off to the current state. We're not moving forward with Discord because we don't feel it really has us as a high value audience. But some tweaks to modify the UI/UX to meet these differing needs based on license type may be worth exploring.
Did you look into Microsoft Teams at all? Just wondering if you have a comparison to Discord. At work, I've called MS Teams "Discord for business" because to me, a long term discord user, Teams development feels very "made by people who love Discord".
Teams has better Office apps, and better integration with Microsoft things. It's also clunky and buggy.
Discord, while lacking the app and file features, is much better in terms of what it actually does. It's almost enough to make me not hate Electron (?)
The casual brand is great, but those loading antics are dumb. Nobody actually likes them. This is great news, Discord really, badly, needs multi account support, screen-share and video in stage channels, an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits), sso support, and possibly server DMs instead of global DMs (possibly addressing associated data segregation issues). Otherwise their product already works awesome for smaller more open minded businesses. We replaced Slack with it this week and I don’t see us going back.
Also I want to point out that nothing in the article indicates a shift to b2b. It sounds more like they are going after parteon, onlyfans, consoles, twitch, etc. I just kinda assume they will develop some more mature user management and server payment options along the way.
Multi-account support is extremely important. Professors at my university have started hosting accounts on Discord, and people have been unable to make second accounts without second phone numbers.
The result being that peoples personal and professional lives have started to overlap, which (naturally) results in dangerous positions for some people.
I'm especially concerned if something like disc-cool starts up again, or the data from it gets leaked. (Disc-cool was a group that used self-bots to create a database of harvested messages, letting you search up any users message history.)
That would be great even without any business features. Some open source projects are starting to use discord and it would be nice for some users to link and use their github names and identities for these servers.
> an alternate pricing option/model where a server can be paid for by a company or organization instead of individuals (which would remove stream quality and upload file size limits)
What's stopping an organization from buying multiple server boosts from a single account to unlock these features? If you need the level 3 perks, you can have a single account, owned by the organization, purchase the 30 server boosts to get there.
Nothing, it’s just somewhat roundabout and not really tailored for that scenario. For 1) the pricing model for that doesn't make sense for small teams (which IMO are most likely to adopt, for big teams it’s a deal). You need 30 server boosts to get 100mb upload limit which is $150/mo. And them that doesnt apply to DMs. And 2) the logistics don’t really work out. You need separate accounts to buy the boost. If you buy nitro for the deal it’s account bound which doesn't make tons of sense since nitro only applies to that one account. I’m not saying you cant make it work, more that it’s overly roundabout at the moment. Would just be nice to allow some org to have an account and to gift boosts to users or something to bridge the gap for small teams.
My main recent annoyance is that they removed the mentions tab on mobile, and replaced it with some weird feature called stage (some sort of clubhouse ripoff where you do... livestreaming?)
It placed the mentions in under the search(?!?!) tab, which adds 2 clicks, and also added significant time delays sometimes when the search tab has to load for 3-10seconds........
I have a server with lots of discord "OGs" back from 2015, and it's the most complained about change that has been discussed in that server, by far.
Th thing I hate the most about the mentions-under-search bit is that it's so unintuitive. I had a couple of pings and I looked around everywhere trying to find them, and the removal of the very helpfully labelled "@" button pissed me off. I only found out the pings were under search after I read the changelog.
And for what? Discord stages are an absolute ghost town. The top ones are all "Talent shows" in bait servers. I don't mind changing UX as much as most people on HN, but changing UX to chase a fad that has already died out really grinds my gears.
Problem is the tech world is changing very fast. If you're going to sit idle hoping to make the same amount of cash every year, you're going to disappear within 5-6 years. Not liking where Discord is headed either, just saying some change is necessary not only for growing, but for staying relevant.
The difference between 'keeping up in a fast-changing market' and 'failing to focus on your core market' is often only obvious with hindsight.
Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time, resources and goodwill. It had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
On the other hand, Google's acquisition of Youtube was a genius move that's massively paid back, even though it had nothing to do with their core search and e-mail products, except for sharing ads/tracking.
So you don't just need to change to keep up - you need a specific type of change and it's not always easy to know what that is :)
> Google's launch of Google+ to keep up with Facebook was a huge waste of time
They had Orkut, they could have used it to compete with Facebook instead of creating a new service. Its the same thing with Googles multiple chat apps.
I'm not convinced - in my friend group Discord would never have got a chance if Skype had left well enough alone and not tried to fix what wasn't broken. Instead they added more and more bloat, which created the opportunity that Discord then stepped into.
Agreed, Skype used to have much of the Swedish market until they fucked up their clients and pushed people to Facebook Messenger. Now it is irrelevant.
It's impossible to tell if Skype becoming irrelevant was due to new bloated features, new features that were badly implemented, or just that their users wanted to play with a new shinny tool that happened to be good and gradually moved there. They could have stayed put without adding any new features and would still be beaten by Discord.
This is exactly what happened to Teamspeak, they sat on their arses for ages without changing much of anything. Now it's hard to imagine them getting back any major market share in popular communities ever again. That seems like a death sentence for a social application.
There's a difference between "sitting on their arses" and "trying to grab every single customer possible".
TeamSpeak didn't bother to acknowledge that a lot of people often just want to write some messages to others without actually hopping into a channel/server, let alone a VoIP-channel. Their synchronous-only communication philosophy via community-maintained servers just didn't pan out.
Let's not rewrite history and pretend that Teamspeak was always terrible. Their "philosophy" panned out for a long time and made them kings of the space, but to reiterate the GP's comment: things change. Now users want more convenience. Now they want better mobile support. Now they want GIFs and reactions.
You can point out what Teamspeak didn't acknowledge as much as you like, anything is obvious in hindsight. To see what you're missing, you need to explore more and more possibilities and constantly innovate. You can bet that your current or future competition is. Prescience is not a business strategy.
I would not confuse the need for further developing ones tech, with the need for growing (in employees, customers, and whatever else). A product can stay relevant, if it keeps up with the tech, but does not necessarily need to capture every possible customer on the planet, not even as a goal.
It takes significant evolution to just keep doing what you set out to do well. Running a successful mechanics business to repair cars means continuously updating your skills and tools. Eventually you become a flying car repair shop. It doesn't mean you have to grow to encompass every aspect of the automobile industry and compete with Repco and Mobil.
Except by then cars are rented to you by big advertising companies (in exchange for data), and they also do repairs (or outsource them to the lowest bidder).
Skills don't matter if your business case has disappeared.
That sounds horrible. We should focus on making good products that last a long time. What is the point of making something new and almost identical every 5 years?
How long did it take to upgrade from IPV4 to IPV6? IPV6 is a massively popular protocol in which virtually every technical person admitted we will need to move off of IPV4. IPV6 is 25 years old and we’re still not done with the migration.
Protocols have a massive problem with updating their feature sets and security features.
If that were so, you would still be in business. The whole thing is products try to continuously evolve, which is what the parent is against. He/she says don't evolve so much that you become a new product. Instead shut shop when it becomes unprofitable and make a new product.
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.
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.
> Recently, they replaced the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal". Now it does it's one thing slightly less well.
This perception of games is pretty outdated and I assume that is what Discord has come to realize as well. Video games (and gamers) are approaching to be as varied as music (and its listeners) and the only reason they have not achieved parity yet is the difference in how long each has been around as a mass medium.
Games have intrinsic qualities that set them apart from music, movies or other mediums – but being "fun" is certainly not it, and "gamery" would, at best, serve as a tautology.
> I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.
Blame execs and CEOs and boards for not being content
Not specific to discord, but what's broken is that work is organized to maximize personal profit of shareholders (and the remuneration and other privileges of managers), not to benefit users/society.
I'm not against people profiting from their activity, in the broad sense of the word (though i'm personally opposed to money as a tool/concept). But profit-driven social organization has lead to many avoidable disasters: security in tech, safety in buildings/planes, low durability of products and planned obsolescence, impeding ecological disaster and the next massive extinction of species...
As a species, we have enough production capacity to make sure everyone is well-off, yet a tiny minority grabs resources and ensures most of it is wasted and thrown away (see food/housing supply vs needs). Capitalism is the name of the system which holds such properties as virtuous, and it has proved to be a failed model in many regards over the centuries.
Shareholder who? Why would I, a shareholder, want corporations to pursue business strategies that leads to avoidable disaster and ultimately loss of profit?
What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Note that the context of this conversation is someone blaming capitalism for Discord becoming bloated because Discord’s founders have a goal of increasing their wealth.
It seems alternatives to Discord exist for users that do not wish for this bloat, but users do not want to do the work of hosting it (e.g. teamspeak/ventrilo/matrix).
So what I am wondering is where the obligation for someone else to host these online services comes in, and why they “should” not have the goal of increasing their wealth in exchange for doing the work of hosting and servi the online services.
> I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Well first, we usually don't hear about alternative models because they're mostly erased from dominant narratives (or defaced to the point they make no sense). Famous examples include witch hunting during the renaissance and the abolition of community life (in favor of State/Church control), the Cronstadt and Ukrainian revolts in the USSR... see also "Popular history" as a research field.
Now, whether an alternative model is possible is up to debate. You use "on a large scale" as a premise, so primitivist/individualist approaches will not cut it (although they're valid ways of life for smaller communities). Have you considered the anarcho-syndicalist model? It has strong roots/history in Spain (especially in the colonized region of Catalonia) and was the heart of the popular (armed) uprising against Franco's fascist coup d'État. That is a well-documented historical experience of a large-scale agrarian/industrial (mixed) society operating on a large scale without a capitalist understanding of "profit" involved. Although to be fair it did not last long, as the revolution was eaten from within by Stalin's authoritarian clique (who had smaller numbers but considerably more weapons and resources imported from USSR, and started massacring anyone who disagreed).
We'll probably find common ground in that everyone needs to be valued for their contributions to society, which could be called "profit" in some variants of that concept. However, i would argue that not all activities need to be "profited" from (eg. arts), and that money and private property (in their capitalist interpretations, at the very least) are very bad implementations of that concept, in which a lot of people who are very useful to society are not being remunerated accordingly, while a bunch of parasite who contribute very little to society earn all the benefits.
> What is the better alternative? I have not heard of a society that has succeeded to incentive people on a large scale without the possibility of profit.
Have society really taken on learned helplessness on a mass scale? In a sense that everyone has a defeatist attitude of "we can't think of any system better than current capitalism so why change?"
Or is it more probable that there are some vested interest in keeping the status quo?
- Worker representation on company boards. Meaning that those who work on the product at an everyday level gain influence over the overall direction of the company.
- Progressive taxation of corporations to bias our economy towards small companies that are more likely to care about their users, and to encourage more competitive markets.
- Regulation to enforce interoperability and/or the ability to export data.
None of these things are about abandoning capitalist ideas entirely. There's a lot of merit to them. But they are about tweaking them to that power doesn't solely lie with money and is diluted with power from other sources.
Those are all interesting and viable proposition, but I would not say they have any relation to the “shareholder model” as you called it in your first post I responded to. All of those proposals, and shareholders, seem like they can co exist.
It's not shareholders that I have a problem with, it's giving shareholders exclusive control of companies. They may seem like small tweaks, but you end up with a very different model.
Exactly. It's like game balance: you can have a game scenario where there's an exploit, and everyone ends up simply going with the exploit or being crushed, causing the game to become simplified to an uninteresting, uninvolving mechanical process whereupon it just dies, because it's no fun. There are a few people who think they are the big winners because they're the masters of the exploit, but they're whales in a tiny pond and are themselves stifled by how dead their environment is, and may themselves die off, still being the biggest whale in the drying-up pond, and insisting they've mastered everything that matters.
I don't know about Discord specifically, but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else.
Now, you might think that this still aligns shareholder incentives with the long-term interests of the company, that if the shareholders care about profits over the long term then they should also care about the health of the business rather than just about how much money they are making now. The problem is that the most efficient way for investors to make money (per unit time) is not to care about the long term and instead to "pump and dump" companies by directing them towards (usually destructive) activities that increase profits in the short term, then selling the shares before the value inevitably crashes.
Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time. As such, the system is setup to give power to those who are most destructive to real value creation. Ergo: broken.
> but what is broken is that the people who have ultimate control of large public companies (in 90% of cases - founder controlled companies are a prominent exception) are the shareholders. And these are typically not domain experts, their main interest is in making money. So they generally see fit to appoint executives whose main objective is to make money and to remove those who care about anything else.
What alternatives are there?
> Not everyone is doing that. But those who are often making the most money, and as money = power in capitalist economy, the people who are doing this are continually increasing their control of our companies over time.
The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers.
> The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
The most profitable companies yes, but not necessarily the ones making the most money for their investors. Part of this pattern is that the companies typically end up dying a slow and painful death, meaning that they never get to be as big as the largest companies. But money in investing is made on change in value/profits, not on profits themselves.
I guess I would say that the pattern I have described doesn't describe the entire economy. There is more traditional long-term investing going on too. But it's there. And it's harmful.
Workers have their own interests that are not necessarily aligned with those of the users/society, such as support working hours only from nine to five on business days, higher pensions and fewer new hires, more job security.
If you really want to align the interests of the company with those of the users, you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product.
I don't want to align the interests of the company with users. I want to align them with society. And I think it's worth noting that members of society are not just users but also workers.
> Workers have their own interests that are not necessarily aligned with those of the users/society
Usually you will find that they are, because workers are also users and vice-versa.
> support working hours only from nine to five on business days, higher pensions and fewer new hires, more job security
I guess you're from the US? "Higher pensions" should have nothing to do with a company: that's a public policy matter and pensions can be mutualized across employers as is the case in France (despite past & present governments doing their best to dismantle that public service).
The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now (several centuries in some industries/places), and even when it was not (see Haymarket affair) it was considered a pretty weak/useless demand, more symbolic than anything. Thinkers of the time advocated that given the established technological progress at the time, it should be possible for everyone to work just a few weeks every year and still enjoy modern comfort. Some more modern thinkers believe the same applies today, considering how many resources/efforts are wasted annually.
Moreover, "fewer new hires" is not necessarily correlated to "more job security". It may be true on the scale of a single company, but on the scale of a whole society, a public policy of everyone finding opportunity for their contributions to humanity (that rarely yet sometimes overlaps with what's called a "job") leads to better "job security" for everyone and anyone.
If a government really wanted to tackle unemployment, there's many areas of life that need considerably more workers and resources, including education & health which are pillars of a healthy (pun intended) society. But capitalist policy is to generate misery in order to pit everyone against everyone else so a tiny minority can profit... and in this regard, capitalism works excellently.
> you need something like a cooperative where the users are also the shareholders and you have to buy a membership to use the product
That's how many non-profit organizations operate. You have to be a member (free or < 20€/year) to benefit from services provided by the association.
> Usually you will find that they are, because workers are also users and vice-versa.
I am sure that the owners and managers of Discord are also Discord users themselves, so I don't see any difference here.
> The 8h workday is established minimum standard across industries for over a century now
An 8-hour workday does not rule out employees working shifts so that customers don't have to take a day off to interact with the company.
My point is that, contrary to OP's assumption, the interests of workers and customers are often at odds with each other. Another example would be when more employees are needed to meet increased demand, but the employees do not want their votes and wages to be diluted by the new hires.
> the interests of workers and customers are often at odds with each other
I've never heard any such stories from an actual workers coop. I'm not saying it can't exist from a theoretical perspective, but i don't think workers/users interests are "often at odds" since i can't think of a single real-life example.
I'm also free to give all of my money away to the poor, but that's not going to help solve poverty in any major way because my influence on society as an individual is limited. There can be a much greater benefit in coercing everyone to follow a rule that isn't realised by allowing individuals to choose something.
> Worker representation on boards is one example. Imagine if the board of public companies was 50% shareholders and 50% workers.
Sure, that is an interesting option. But what about Discord, since it is not public? Does anyone that starts a business have to give half of the decision making power to workers from day 1?
I cannot parse the concept you are trying to explain in your second paragraph.
> Does anyone that starts a business have to give half of the decision making power to workers from day 1?
It could be mandated by law, indeed. Or the shareholding model could be outright removed because it's poison for society as a whole, as the history of workers/consumers coops shows.
On the contrary, something very obvious stops workers from buying enough shares to appoint someone to the board: access to capital. What you say is true in theory, I suppose, but is far from true in practice for any reasonably-sized publicly-traded company. How can an average worker at Walmart practically voice any opinion via shares?
Just spitballing, but an independent auditor that puts a dollar value on the expected long term gains/losses to a company's brand portfolio based on recent management decisions could help reduce certain types of short-term "cashing in" behaviour.
>The most profitable public companies seem to invest quite heavily in long term investments and have long term planning. This does not seem to square with your statement.
Maybe not the largest companies, but he's basically described the default behaviour of private equity firms.
I know a lot of people who do that using IRC/XMPP/Matrix protocols, and contribute to the joinjabber.org website. That i'm free not to exploit people is not the point, the point is that nobody should be "free" (in capitalist newspeak) to exploit other people.
Capitalism has done an exceptional job though for instant messaging. Discord is an incredible bit of software and through just being better, it has won the market.
It’s basically a picture perfect example of the market working.
> It’s basically a picture perfect example of the market working.
Yet most times across all fields, better technical approaches are shutdown due to misaligned economic incentives. So while this is an example of the market working, its fame is due to going against the trend of profitable crappy engineering and planned obsolescence that plague industries.
EDIT: We could also argue that accounting for "privacy" and "autonomy", Discord is not a good solution to the group communications problem and therefore the market is not working.
> the fun, gamery loading messages with something more "formal".
It may be worse for you, but it feels way better to me. It has been very annoying to introduce Discord in work/casual settings and see it labelled as "a gamer thing". Right call by Discord.
It didn't matter to me that half of the loading messages weren't funny. I could tell from the moment I opened the app that they understood who I was and why I was there. I was there to have fun, and they got me. Now they have started the journey to be all things to all people, and I will not be surprised if they end up as nothing to anyone.
You had fun because of a little bit of stupid jokes during loading?
Did that define your experience, or was you experience defined by what you did inside of discord after the loading screen had passed?
Why is all this bullshit important to people? Dumb gifs, emoticons everywhere, wannabe cute gamey jokes.
If you get invited to a whine tasting party with a bunch of boring stuck up people, but there is a kids-ball-pool thingie in the entrance, is the party awesome?
>>It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs.
It's a general approach seen here on HN. Unless a company is growing every year by 10% or more, it's a failure. Like.....what's wrong with just making few million dollars a year for years, without taking a billion dollar investment and growing into the stratosphere?
Discord enumerates processes to discover OBS to turn on streamer mode, as well as being able to display what game you're playing. Disable the "share my current game" feature and there is no longer any ptracing
Are you absolutely sure that's the case? The OP in that reddit post seemed to suggest that he had toggled off game detection and whatnot. Scroll down to the thread where the deleted comments are.
I'd say it does more than one thing well, but yeah it's always sad to see every company chase forever growth and often ruin their core product in doing so.
> I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.
IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.
No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.
It's always worked for me. I've never used a bouncer. Maybe the "one thing" is not what you think it is. Think of it like a real room. When you're in the room you hear what's going on. When you're not, you don't.
Unfortunately, the one thing that it does well (chat, and nothing else) is supported by a dozen things that it does terribly, and support for them has been hacked on top of the chat features in most places.
Bouncers, persistency, rich media (youtube/twitter/image embeds come to mind), mobile accessibility, presence, the ease of channel ownership... these are all things that IRC lacks. Users don't want to switch from their chat app to their imaging sharing app to send a friend a picture inline. IRC works great where people are willing to put in the work to make it great for themselves individually, but the people Discord appeals to aren't really like that.
If Discord just solved some of IRCs problems I'd be with it. But it's such a regression. I don't want to run another browser process just for chat. I don't want to see people's pictures (on IRC, everyone is equal). I don't want embedded videos or childish stickers or anything else.
Are you kidding? IRC doesn’t let you update or remove your messages, doesn’t have a permanent history, doesn’t even properly handle accounts and chan owners, doesn’t support any kind of rich text by itself, has netsplits, … what does it do well exactly?
The protocol is simple and I had fun speaking on IRC through telnet when I was younger but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it
You mentioned many things. IRC does one thing. I don't want any of that stuff. Netsplits aren't a huge problem. I'd rather have that than a centralised system that does down all at once.
> It makes me despair of business models which require growth to be chased at all costs. I wish more businesses could be content to just get to the point where they are making money, and then just keep making that much money and being ok with that.
I really wish anti-capitalist sentiment would grow louder in IT. This is pretty much capitalist critique 101. Companies chasing profit are often blind not only to the negative effects of their businesses, but even to the needs of their customers.
It's extremely difficult for companies to stay content in their current business model without growing. If the company is not willing to be sold to a larger company, a larger company (often FAANG) will pump nearly limitless capital into building a free competitor that will eat your userbase. This happens over and over again, so it's not very practical to just say "companies should stay where they are good at". The system disincentivizes this, and companies staying still will always get knocked down.
Idk, one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers. Sometimes that means replacing one customer with another whos willing to pay more.
> one could argue that if doing so increases profits, then on average, you actually solved the needs of your customers
Which often isn't the case.
Companies have lots of priorities that have nothing to do with end users at all. For example:
- it does not matter how good your product is, if your company dies because there's a competitor that does not need to make profit and can temporarily offer their services for free, until your company is driven out of the market
- dark patterns are well documented examples how working directly against good user experience can increase profits
- lobbying politicians to drive out competition is extremely profitable, and does not take interests of the userbase into account at all
There are probably numerous other, obvious examples how capitalism disincentivises companies from serving their customers well, but instead incentivizes gaming the system.
The correlation between user experience and profitability is shaky at best. One could argue that user experience has almost nothing to with how businesses operate.
Of course. But I'm talking about being rewarded due to inherent rewards associated in the system by gaming it. There is a difference between a system that punishes bad behavior vs. a system that rewards it.
different systems will punish / reward different kinds of bad behaviour so its tit for tat. the only system that could uniformly punish bad behaviour and reward good would be one controlled by a god like being.
No system is perfect, of course, but I do think the people need a stronger democratic voice. A few big consolidated megacorporations make countless non-democratic decisions that affect huge amounts of people. Companies having are too much power in our society, considering that their motives mainly with the shareholders, not the population as a whole. I think we could at least do a bit better on it, even if its through slow reforms. Politics is probably complicated enough subject that I doubt we'll ever be perfect at it, but at least we could do a better job in mitigating their worst behaviours through legislation? I mean, the ultra-rich don't even pay any taxes, how fair is that?
Discord doesn't even do its one thing all that well.
The client is buggy and slow.
It makes the terrible, lazy choice of blanking the window when it has a connectivity problem.
Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.
It's not the worst among the current stable of chat solutions. I would give that award to Teams, because wow, Teams fails in just about every way, it's a spectacle really.
Each day, I am a bit surprised at how all of the major platforms fall short of expectations, because superficially it seems like a pretty tractable problem space.
> Non-standard for-pay emojis are a terrible idea. Text should be copyable, by everyone, exactly as it is.
I agree from a moral standpoint but because of the general use of emoji in servers, it really doesn't prove to be that much of an issue. People also enjoy using their own emoji, which is generally good for communities.
I think you'll find that as users find platforms to coalesce and try and build communities on, they'll want those customizations. Being able to use them anywhere on the platform is just a bonus - unpaid users can still use those emoji within the servers they come from.
Growth and change is why they exist. Its why they might replace things in other sectors and so make those sectors better.
Its why they might fail and make things worse, at which point, it is why someone else will come along to try and make things better.
Sometimes things are best left alone, but if this is attempted generally, then it'll probably lead to a stagnant pond, rather than a pleasant lake. Fresh flowing water is key.
Also, not sure how many agree with you on the cutesy humour. Maybe, it was just time for that to go.
What does discord do really well? I’ve had channels mysteriously become inaccessible until whoever posted something deletes it. The “stay on top” feature for watching a stream never seems to work very well. For some stupid reason, chat and streams aren’t integrated, so you have to chat in an associated channel which is different from where you’re watching the stream. All kinds of icons are hidden until you happen to mouse over them, which is objectively bad design. If you receive an @ and the chat continues on significantly before you see it, clicking on that channel doesn’t take you to the mention, but rather some other, seemingly random location in chat history (sometimes I don’t find it and just give up).
Discord doesn’t seem to do anything well except sign users up quickly.
Honest question here. What is so good about discord? It reminds me more if IRC than a modern chat app. I really don't get it. Maybe I am missing something?
Voice, video and text chat with unlimited bandwidth, streaming resolution and storage space all for free, and all much, _much_ easier to use for the average user than any other voice and video communication client ever made.
Voice chat. It is superior to any other platform on this aspect other than TeamSpeak. We regularly have 40+ people in voice channels without people suffering from connection issues, bad audio quality, and lot's of noise.
