It's basically a generally passable VOIP client with a Slack built in, which AFAIK no other VOIP service has really done well (including Skype).

The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persistent communications outside of games and VOIP, and this rolls all of that into one package that's really easy to use.

I had huge issues with Discord's quality when it was first being publicly used because I was on a latent/lossy connection at the time and it just repeatedly disconnected me and forced me to completely rejoin a Discord server over and over, which implied their engineers had no understanding that the internet is inherently unreliable. That seems to have been well remedied, so actually improving their software immediately puts it 10000 feet above Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc from my perspective. I've watched these applications stagnate over the years and it's bothered me pretty deeply.

This was a long time ago - back in alpha stages of the product. We've since made some pretty big strides to being resilient to network drops, packet loss, network roaming, etc... I was actually one of the engineers who worked on these. We've tested the client under some pretty inclimate network conditions (30% packet loss - high latency - extreme roaming [meaning your IP address keeps changing] - either due to hopping between cell towers, wifi networks, or a dynamic pool of IP addresses). It's super awesome to know these little behind the scene changes are noticed!

I still get more problems on bad connections than other chat clients. The biggest one is probably that messages get sent twice or three times when I have a bad connection (I just had this happen yesterday). Sometimes a message goes red but it's still been sent, and clicking "Resend" makes it appear twice. Another is that while offline (on the desktop/web client), I can't look at past messages, because everything is replaced by a loading screen.

No chat client works _great_ under bad network conditions, but I think overall I tend to try to avoid using Discord more than I try to avoid others when I'm on a bad internet connection.

Do you have plans to address the fundamental unreliability of your chat? It regularly messes up message delivery (failed delivery, delivery multiple times, delivery out of order) at the slightest sign of network instability or server trouble. It's the worst I've seen from any sort of chat application, ever.

Yeah - there are more plans to handle more robust message retry logic. But it's a pretty hard problem to handle. Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though - although there are some rare cases where it can still happen. I don't think out of order delivery is possible as the messages are processed one at a time - but if you have a specific example I'd be more than happy to take a look.

> Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though

Happens to me incredibly often after I lose my connection while sending a message on Android 6.0.1

Just FYI, I've had both out of order delivery and duplicate messages happen semi-recently. Duplicates are far more rare than they were, though.

on desktop, ios or android?

Discord competes with Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, and Skype in the category of gaming voice chat, but it also offers an interface set up like Slack, which has gained popularity for topic-based persistent chat. It hits a sweet spot of good-enough voice & text chat that's cost-free, needs no configuration, is fully hosted with captive servers, uses decent codecs, supports inbound hyperlinks, has a slick UI, has official same-name clients on mobile, has a web client, and the like.

Discord's rise helped by Microsoft's seeming neglect and confusing platform direction of Skype in recent years, even if Discord still doesn't have video chat. For messaging among people who know each other by name, Facebook's offerings are dominant, but for pseudonymous chat Skype remained strong until Microsoft vacillated between making Skype Windows' native messenger or a strong multiplatform freemium network that isn't plagued by an aging UI and the invasion of advertising. Discord won many users by organic word-of-mouth referrals from people who used to use Skype.

As for gaming voice chat, Discord is not as sophisticated as other offerings (edit: maybe that's the wrong wording; let's go instead with "not as configurable"), but offers a smoother out-of-the-box experience.

Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for your WoW raiding or large organized clans, but it spread like wildfire among my friends who play League of Legends or Dota 2, and other games with medium-small groups of players.

The fact that you don't need to install or configure any client (or even have an account) to bring someone in is the biggest single thing.

People come for the easy invites and stay for the (slightly better than) good enough chat, voice, and community features.

My experience has been that Discord has utterly replaced TS/Mumble/Ventrilo for WoW raiding.

I'm sure there's plenty of guilds around that are still happy with their existing setup and haven't bothered switching, but my experience is that many have switched, and new guilds are basically only picking Discord.

Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for WoW raiding because it already happened. Discord doesn't have 100% of the market or anything, but it's definitely the most common.

It _has_ replaced TS/Mumble for ffxiv, voice chat for subreddits, other game communities. WoW is bigger and has more inertia, but the network effects are strong.

I can see it pulling away from pretty much everything except those groups that have spent lots of time on crazy teamspeak setups with lots of ranks, different overlapping groups and so on.

>> except those groups that have spent lots of time on crazy teamspeak setups with lots of ranks, different overlapping groups and so on

Is TeamSpeak an open API? Shouldn't be difficult at all to write an import tool to import a TeamSpeak server's group structure to equivalent Discord roles.

It isn't, and Discord's group structure is less flexible. For example, any rank with the ability to assign ranks can assign any rank below it. In comparison, a teamspeak server has different groups and people can only assign people to their own groups.

Ultimately, I don't think this is as much an obstacle to long term success of Discord. These kind of servers tend to come around because running TS/Mumble servers require expertise certain groups don't have, so groups tend to colocate over some overlap in membership, and may still be colocated over inertia even if the overlap goes away.

The example I'm thinking of is a server I'm still on which is nominally owned by a battlefield clan, but also has a ffxiv guild, wildstar guild, eve corp and minecraft server chat on it. Each of these are effectively seperate entities and need to manage their own permissions, and if they were setting up fresh now, they'd all be seperate discord servers. The battlefield guys have some crazy rank structure based on time on the server or some such, the ffxiv group just has admin or not, and the minecraft group is a yes/no access perm.

The colocation is particularly not ideal as the battlefield clan and minecraft server tend to bring occasional DDoS attempts on the server, and there's not really much overlap in membership nowadays.

It has recently become the ease-of-use choice for our RPG group. Being a mixed group not everyone is used to configuring clients etc. so the out of the box usability is definitely what works for us.

From the DM point of view he can still send us pictures, it is free and we don't really use maps so don't need Roll20 (or equivalent). Also direct messaging players secret messages is really easy and handy.

Good UI, cloud based, no servers, slick UI, integrated (good) chat, invite links, solid quality, and free.

Mumble is a solid product but there's a lot more friction. First you need to host a server, and for most people that means paying for it. And then to get people to join they have to install a client, and the website can be confusing, and it's not clear which version they need to install, and it keeps prompting you to update which requires it to restart, and the client's UI is clunky, and the integrated text chat is very poor. And then when I need to join someone else's Mumble they have to tell me the host...and the port, and I've got to copy and paste it and go through Mumble's annoying UI to add another server, etc., etc.

Plus Discord's chat is good enough that it makes sense to start building small communities around it; it's also competing with Twitter group chats, Facebook groups, etc. I play World of Warcraft, and some guilds have started using Discord as their main "hub", instead of forums or whatever. And then there's the bots, and the emoji support, and so on, and so forth. Mumble competes pretty well with the core of Discord, but Discord does more than Mumble.

Ultimately, I think it's the same "why did Slack get so big when it's just IRC with some of the irritations filed off and a slightly better UI" question all over again. If you take a product people need, and make it very slightly better and really easy to adopt, then it's not surprising that it will get huge. Yes, you could technically use IRC instead of Slack, but there's a reason why a ton of companies adopted Slack but never adopted IRC.

Pretty much, except it's a horrible hub since there's no indexing of the content. It makes as much sense as trying to run a company through Snapchat.

It's bad enough that, even disregarding Discord's hilariously incompetent voice chat, Mumble will be a hard requirement the next time I'm looking for a new guild.

It seems like indexing was implemented: https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-indexes-billions-of-...

I meant thread separation that humans can use as an index, not useless search indexing.

It's free. That's the only reason it's hot right now. Mumble/TS are superior, but cost money. Ventrilo is very expensive and Skype sucks (for gaming).

Don't get me wrong, Discord is a pretty solid product, but the only reason it has such a huge market share is because it's burning VC money and offering its services for free.

Because Discord is so extremely easy to set up and get going. In the past, we either used skype, or one of us would set up a mumble server, but Skype has gone to complete shit lately (like, oh, you can't make a group call if there are more than 20 people in the room, even if most of them aren't online) and mumble requires devops-level skills to set up. Discord, in comparison, is just "download this file, click new server, done". I do feel disgust about how it's a hundred megabytes of a bundled browser with mountains of javascript, but it works so much better than anything else. And it works on Linux and Mac just as well as it does on Windows, which is more than you can say for Skype. If it ever also gets P2P file transfer, it would be the absolute undisputed best chat program in existence.

Mumble never really took off, so Discord was competing against Teamspeak and Ventrilo, both of which stopped innovating long ago. Discord came in with a great design, good voice quality, low barrier to entry (free, browser client), and enough settings and features to make it viable.

its just hyper-targeted towards twitch streamers. it integrates with all the twitch functionality, like channel subscriptions etc.

most streamers have a discord channel now and they bring their entire audience. thats why its growing at such a broken rate.

for every even medium sized streamer they convert, they get thousands of active users.

That makes a lot of sense. I don't really interact on twitch at all so those features of Discord are lost on me.

It's really popular with the Twitch community now, but Discord has been a solid alternative to Skype for a very long time. The twitch integration is relatively recent.

Twitch was the tipping point though. Their twitch advertising they started doing in late 2014 early 2015 was key to their rapid growth.

I used to use Mumble and Discord's superiority in almost every regard is so obvious that all I can say is "you need to adjust your glasses".

I'll accept the 'adjust your glasses' for Discord's memory footprint. The fact that discord takes up 3x-10x more space than Mumble really isn't a big deal with a modern machine in 2017.

My real gripe is with all the small things.

Mumble can text-to-speech the names of people as they join/leave the voice channel.

Mumble includes timestamps on chat messages.

Mumble timestamps messages when users join/leave/mute/unmute.

Mumble has 'advanced' input options for voice-detection.

Discord doesn't currently do any of that. Unless I just can't find the right configuration.

For me, these small "Only notice when they aren't there" things are not outweighed by Discord's general ease-of-use.

One click links to join a text or voice channel is HUGE. No more copy pasting/manually typing IPs/Passwords/phonetic user names.

The barrier to entry for a user to join your discord is insanely easy. Don't have the client? They can easily join through the browser.

Great design.