Right, so it has nothing to do with the software and its value is entirely the network momentum. Reddit is a perfect example of how software can be made worse and worse while maintaining user growth.

Discord is 5 years old. The reason more and more people and projects use it over competition is that it offers better experience. It's not about some magic momentum they luckily got. I use it and moved my project to it. Last time I played a video game was about 20 years ago. Quoting one other commenter here: it's much better than Zoom, Slack and Teams combined and it's not a small margin. They delivered while everyone else failed. That's why people love it.

Nope. I only finally signed up because my friends are on it for gaming. Don’t give a shit about it otherwise.

Your use case of “putting a project” on it is a minority. Most users are there for gaming communities.

Yeah, the open-source project I'm on moved all of our dev communications (†all of them) to discord, several years ago, and gladly left IRC without the dignity of a burial.

† Email and mailing lists were something we forbade from day 1. There are a variety of sociological reasons why they're vile, but I think a lot of it has to do with bikeshedding, via "low-cost involvement" - people who care more about potstirring than actually getting work done have a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on big announcement and pick fights. I've experienced a huge number of people who've earned a 'stake in the discussion' by making some small contribution, and then jumped in on every discussion trying to exercise some informal kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto (insofar as such a thing arises naturally from the basic human decency of giving people the benefit of the doubt). What I like about realtime comms - especially ones with nice, logged discussions in multiple, visible rooms, is you don't have to be plugged-in 24/7 to keep up with stuff like you would on IRC (without a bouncer), but at least you have to have some real "skin in the game" of paying attention and being involved - which generally biases towards the folks doing the real work. Decisions get made without the armchair generals; occasionally they'll show up after some big decision got executed on and something was built, with an angry assertion of "Why wasn't I consulted?!?"††, but usually the existence of the actual finished work, fait accompli, tends to to stifle that nonsense real fast.

After multiple decades of dealing with that petty squabbling on email, I don't miss it at all. It was a huge source of burnout.

†† https://www.ftrain.com/wwic

> so it has nothing to do with the software

Of course it does, because software is part of the overall customer experience that built that network momentum and is inexorably linked. Users would not have tolerated, promoted, and evangelized otherwise. It may not be the primary ingredient, but in Discord's case I think it helped.

That's his point. The main value is the userbase and not the software itself.

That's about as profound as saying the value in Coke is the people buying it and not their secret formula and bottling machines.

You say that like that's not an interesting observation. On the contrary -- that is a common observation that people frequently make about Coke in particular. It doesn't taste good, but people buy it anyway because it's Coke.

The actual form of the saying is something like "if every Coke factory burned down, Coke would be back in business the next day. If you hit every Coke customer on the head, Coke would be out of business the next day". (The idea being that if Coke's customers all forgot they were Coke customers, Coca-Cola wouldn't be able to grow a new customer base on the strength of their product.)

Coke was a business success because they're probably the best-tasting cola when you've already drank at least half of a can.

Lots of other soda makers, especially the bargain-bin "generic store brand" stuff, taste pretty gross after a can or two, by comparison. Pepsi's alright in that department, but this is a huge market differentiator for Coke.

I never said it was profound, in fact, I said it was obvious. I called it a "trivial observation" - but it matters if you don't realize it. The Discord software isn't being bought and isn't worth 10 billion, probably not even 1 billion, but rather the totality of what Discord is (brand, users, data, etc).

That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain).

"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)

It’s not profound, but it’s important to point out in a conversation where people are actively denying it.

As a Dr Pepper drinker, I have no doubt that that is actually literally unironically the case.

You don't get a userbase if you have shitty software.

SVN, CVS, Perforce, etc still exist, alongside git. Software features and quality are not the only reasons people adopt software.

Yes and compared to git they probably have a smaller userbase. Or a used for historic reasons.

> You don't get a userbase if you have shitty software.

You're moving the goalpost. Your assertion is wrong. Revise it, because I really can't understand what you're trying to say other than "you aren't popular unless you're good, because popular means good!" or some other tautology.

Think again.