Discord targets gaming which absolutely prioritizes low-latency. Zoom has a very noticeable amount of latency which makes it really awkward to have multiple people talking at the same time.

Does anyone have more details on Zoom vs. Discord latency? We've been experimenting with Zoom and Discord for online trivia tournaments where if one participant had better latency than another that would give a big advantage. I'm sure that has to happen on any platform, but if there's a bigger variance on one platform vs. the other that would be good to know.

If you read trough other comment threads, you can learn all kinds of things adding/reducing latency.

No matter which software you use, some people will be at an advantage simply due to their isp/wired connection/wired mic.

This could be a business idea though: Conferencing software which equalizes everyone’s latency.

We're trying karaoke through Zoom tomorrow as a standup gag, wonder how that will work with the delay haha.

my perception with zoom (only based use, not actual knowledge of how it works) is that it has two modes: one where it tries to isolate the speaker and auto-mute everybody else, and another where it can't figure out who the speaker is and just lets all audio through. so if everybody on the call is singing together, it should all come through.

Is Zoom picking some other point on an optimization curve, and if so, what's more important to it?

Or is it just worse?

Zoom seems to be optimizing for bandwidth use, and by extension, cost to them. Its typical use case is a shared office internet connection.

Discord users are more likely to have a dedicated fast internet connection and doesn't seem to care about profitability at the moment.

It's just the difference in designing for a 100/10 connection to yourself vs sharing a 100/100 connection with 20 other people. Zoom reasonably gracefully degrades on choppy/slow connections while Discord becomes straight up unusable.

Ah, this makes sense. I have noticed that Zoom never quite gives up for participants on slow / bursty networks. When something becomes that bad I expect it to be headed towards failure, but Zoom is happy to just sit there at 0.5fps.