Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily.

Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters.

Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

"despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype.

Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.

I don't like browser based desktop apps. They have all the disadvantages of native apps but lose most advantages of HTML5 apps by being platform specific (apparently these is no discord desktop for linux) and require you to download an entire browser engine along with your app. You have to install them as opposed to just visiting an URL. They are not as lightweight as conventional desktop applications and don't perform as well. I'd rather see the browser getting more powerful. The cat is out of the bag already. If they're going to use a browser anyway, why can't they just run in my browser of choice along with all the other websites?

> apparently these is no discord desktop for linux

The Discord developers are working on this. It's not just web components but also native dependencies as well, so it's understandable I think if the Linux version comes in a little bit behind macOS and Windows versions where the majority of the gamer market is.

Next up, I'm starting to like when companies use desktop HTML5 apps. HTML and JavaScript does enable developers to move quickly with their interfaces, and I find them to be generally much more well-kept than native counterparts, where there's more inertia in making interface changes. A good comparison gamers will be familiar with is Steam. The Steam UI is written in a valve-proprietary, CSS-like language that I imagine is less performant than CSS. It's also REALLY buggy, so much so that I'm surprised that Valve has not already moved to an Electron app for Steam. If they did they'd be able to iterate quickly on interface improvements which they certainly don't do now.

Disclosure: I'm a Discord developer.

Discord works in a browser or with the native apps. Just visit the website and click 'Open Discord in your browser'

I'm on the same boat, the only complaint being the lack of history search. And I like Discord so much that I switched our office from Hipchat to Discord, despite it being exclusively marketed towards gamers.

We have been completely happy with the switch, in special the ability to hop into voice chat with remote coworkers with one mouse click.

(Discord Dev here) Awesome to hear Discords a good fit for workplace environments too, we've heard a couple success stories around remote teams swapping. Search is a huge priority for us, but its also something we wanna spend time getting right. e.g. soon!

I haven't used Discord but if it's better than Slack you are sitting on a huge opportunity. I know your focus is gamers but the market Slack is targeting is huge. Their mobile app is garbage (at least on android). Always 'reconnecting'. Doesn't keep the recent chats offline and has to always fetch it from server. Missing/delayed notifications. Desktop app on OS X is better but it too has 'connection issues'.

It looks like we will be able to use Discord when you add search. Seriously, tell the management to think about it being an alternative to Slack. We are a paying Slack customer and while they are better than hipchat/IRC, it is far from perfect.

I've said it before and I'll say it a thousand times more, a 'business-oriented' rebrand of discord (basically ditch all the gamery shit and allow people to host their own servers on their own hardware) would basically be pure profit.

This is a long shot, but if you could sign a HIPPA waver, I could convince the bureaucrats at my workplace to jump in.

Drop me a line (andrei @ discordapp.com) and I'll at least take a look.

Ditto to this!

Remote startup checking in here - we're in the gaming industry and Discord has been a perfect fit for us. We love it.

Our top "wanted" features right now are video chat/screenshare, so that we can drop Hangouts entirely, and search. We wish we could pay you guys. Seriously.

I stated that transparently just to say that it was one, not that it isn't a well done one. I actually am running a Canary build for Linux of Discord and have had almost no issues with it, and any problems have been fixed very transparently.

Discord is also arguably a better implementation for team chat than Slack. Being able to jump in a room and have audio session out of the box alone is huge advantage compared to Slack.

I'm pretty sure that's a feature in slack, used it just yesterday actually

Discord is by far the best communication app I've used. For chat and for voice.

> Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

Better documented APIs and libraries than IRC? That’s not just quite a stretch, it’s literally a lie.

There’s IRC libs in every language you can imagine, usually dozens per language, with many perfectly documented ones, for every possible purpose.

And about all of them work for Twitch chat.

IRC libraries are often gnarly and quirky at the best of times, and Twitch isn't all that close to standard IRC and never has been (plus, they've changed their proprietary extensions in non-backwards-compatible ways from time to time).

Twitch has been trying to hire front end devs and they're failing at hosting anything more than a video stream. They should have acquired discord, but instead the two failing companies curse and twitch are teaming up

Can you expand upon the "failing" nature of these companies? On first sniff, I'm catching the same scent that rises from the last several decades of people proclaiming Microsoft is on the way out.

Twitch won the war of becoming the go to video game streaming app, but didn't do so by being a great innovator. It just got there first and now is a monopoly due to it having all the audience. Discord is clearly a passionate endeavor made by gamers. They may have a way of really changing the video game streaming business if they would be willing.

Requiring flash for streaming in this day and age is unforgivable.

Twitch at least "won out" over competitors by just being the least terrible streaming site for the most part. Now it's gliding along purely on inertia. They haven't innovated or brought anything important to the table, they're just the biggest player at that table

Curse I'm admittedly more than slightly biased on, since I used it basically from its inception back in the World of Warcraft days, because that's all it was initially

Curse was the least awful way to manage a bucket load of WoW addons, almost like how there are package managers for Linux today. It simply provided some central place to manage and keep mods updated, especially ones that would break whenever Blizzard patched it

Curse at least, slowly evolved into this hydra-like monster, trying to split itself off into as many different things as it could. The most insidious one I remember was when I reinstalled it (for trying out the newest World of Warcraft expansion at the time) it'd evolved far beyond what I expected

Upon relaunching my system it prompted me to add literally every friend I had across Skype, Steam and League of Legends. While also overlaying its voice chat system when playing certain games (League and TF2 come to mind)

Keep in mind I never used any of these features, it was simply new garbage that Curse added to try and stay "relevant"

TDLR The site is riddled with glitches and they've done the bare minimum with their pipeline. They literally cannot fix their chat system, but somehow their video streaming works? That's like the first thing you learn how to make using JavaScript.. I feel like they have so little to offer, it's only a matter of time before gamer, tech-savvy, word of mouth, linking type of people use another platform where browsing for channels is easy, there are featured streams, aggregate streams, non-gaming streams, forums, profiles, private messages, and all the normal stuff you see on a website nowadays. Hacker news is yet another example of a bad front-end. Amazon and facebook are bloated, and soundcloud is in the same boat too, they literally just cannot realize what users want, and at this point the higher-ups will only focus on squeezing revenue out while the app is still relevant. Lost all startup mentality before they actually made something great. Sure it's viral but so is the "blue or yellow dress" and tons of other bs

It looks like they do have "whispering" but I still literally cannot browse the site without it crashing. I feel like users are just abusing the free bandwidth and hosting capability, similar to soundcloud and youtube