I'm frequently on a mumble server that can have 1000 people on it at the same time. A channel hierarchy is vital to global broadcasts from command, allowing foot soldiers to shout important information to command, allowing platoon leaders to communicate to their subordinates, allowing squad leaders to communicate to just their subordinates, and allowing the foot soldiers to chit chat to just their squads.
Discord is fine for playing video games with friends, but its voip is a nightmare for actually organized groups who are voip power users.
Maybe it's because I mostly use free Discord servers, but the sound quality is much worse and, more crucially, Discord is apparently completely unable to automatically filter out any system sounds that get picked up by my microphone. My headset is really not the best, but in many years of TeamSpeak use I never once had a problem with my sounds playing back to other users, even on default settings.
In Discord, if I use automatic voice activation levels, other users can hear practically my entire system sound and I have to crank the activation threshold up so high that apparently sometimes my voice will cut off. Even then, particularly loud sounds on my headset still get picked up by Discord.
It's really been a subpar experience.
In MS Teams, Zoom ... you are probably paid to use that software. So it unforunateley is made to be noob compatible.
As soon as it gets Microsoft all over it we'll all move on to the next Discord
You are expected (maybe it's a "gamer" thing) to setup properly. No echo, no loopback, no shitty microphone. Which in turn makes using audio communication a joy to use. MS Teams on the other hand is a pure shitshow because of all the people who can't setup their stuff.
You can adjust other people's volume on your end and mute people. That's something a lot of these pay for voice apps lack and it really sucks.
But searching is hard to do with encrypted text.
You can search on the client with the decrypted text.
1. Making it actually secure. 2. How does a user logging in to multiple locations share the key. 3. Full text search.
It would be hard for discord to do 1 and make everything e2ee. But the casual nature of discord users makes 2 and 3 a deal breaker.
Competitors are plentiful. Remember Digg had the largest user base among news aggregators? People moves when there is a better service available... or more like existing service is getting worse.
I'd hard argue
I've been using various VoIPs / Voice apps over last 15 years almost everyday - ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, skype and I must say that Discord is unparalleled.
It fucking eats competition by it's quality, design and technology (API, BOTS). It offers also some kind of innovation because none of those most popular VoIPs / Voice apps combined Voice+Chat+Screen Streaming!
Things like Skype, MS Teams and probably similar CANNOT EVEN IMPLEMENT BASIC FEATURE LIKE PUSH 2 TALK THAT VENTRILO (or software that's aware of gaming users) HAD LIKE 15 OR MORE YEARS AGO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429842
So how is it that "No one wants to buy the actual chat application itself, because they could build equivalent technology on their own." yet nobody can some with something that's even cloes to Discord?