That's exactly it yes. Discord is ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak, but hosted and with IRC channels.

A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different.

I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:

1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting

2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy

3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people

Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.

All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.

Obviously discord is different than only mumble alone. Discord is not very different from mumble + IRC, which is what we are comparing to and what I said in my post. IRC of course does have history if you keep your client open which most people do.

Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course, there's embedded stuff which is just generally technical iteration (some IRC clients had it). Otherwise IRC always had channels and DMs and mentions and multiple servers. Only setting up your own server wasn't free -- you could easily hop on any network and create as many private channels for you and your friends as you wanted. Yes, older technology wasn't as accessible but at the core it's the same feature set.

> keep your client open which most people do.

[citation needed]

I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.

And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.

Nearly everyone I know has a 24/7 irc bouncer that is connected and stores logs. It does indeed raise the complexity of using irc but you can bet for sure that some subcultures on irc behave this way

I still use mumble

Hosting Mumble for coworkers since Teams feels sluggish and monitored. We could use both simultaneously but Teams takes exclusive control of the microphone... so they actively Extinguished that too.

On macOS, You can try to prevent this by going to midi audio setup, create an aggregate device, add the microphone to it, and then use the aggregate device in teams. This also has the benefit that Teams will not automatically adjust the gain for you.

Many hosting providers specifically disallow hosting of things such as IRC as that protocol has been used by botnets.

okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom

My first modem was 1200 baud. I remember looking with a jealous eye at my friends USRobotics Courier HST, with its awesome looks and blazing 14.4k speeds. I believe it set him back around $1,200 1989 dollars, or about $2,600 in today's terms. He could download a compressed 1.44MB floppy disk image with the latest Leisure Suit Larry game from one of several exclusive pirate BBS'es in just around 15 minutes (as long as mom didn't pick up the phone). Good times.

USR HST was very robust against phone pick-ups, it would quietly blink and resume working as soon as the annoyed would-be caller replaced the handset!

I spent $400 in hard-earned teenage income on a USR refurb and never felt buyer's remorse.

I totally forgot about this issue with dial-up modems. The good ones would temporarily pause a connection when someone picked up the phone and the cheapos would instantly lose the connection. My family was too poor to afford to phone lines and it made me value time online (also made me have to use the Internet at odd hours when people were unlikely to call the house).

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)

I hosted a LAN party for my friends because I wanted to practice setting up a small network. It’s funny to think that was once semi-challenging.

The “DHCP server” for us was a sheet of paper where you’d write down the IP you were going to ifconfig.

Wingate memories coming back

The pain inflicted when someone had to leave the LAN and the BNC chain had to be broken and reconfigured....

Or... Someone getting totally owned in Doom cracking it and disconnecting a terminator.

Great times.

Not funny. Major PTSD coming back!!!

But then it would take 4 hours to figure out Windows networking in your computer. (Been there done that)

Too hard to get a ride on a random weekday night before any of us could drive :D

Yeah, my parents refused to buy a second line so this is what we did.

We stole an insanely long ethernet cord from school and hung it over our joined back fence. Lag? Ha! Broadband sort of existed then, just not in rural Australia, so we improvised.

When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!

Did you have to reconnect to EarthLink multiple times until it gave you 56k instead of 24 or 32? That was living wild baby!!

We didn't have Earthlink, we would dial the other person's modem directly and play Doom 1v1.

At my high school, our CS lab had two Teletype terminals that were connected to a remote HP minicomputer over 110 baud (that's 10 chars/sec) acoustic couplers/modems. You had to dial the computer's number then put the handset into a foam-lined wooden box and close the lid. To upload a game, like Star Trek, we punched the game onto paper tape while not connected, then fed the paper tape back through once we got connected. Getting a connection could take 10-15 minutes of manually redialing after getting a busy signal because the service was so oversubscribed.

Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.

These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.

When I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends you'd meet at a parking lot and do burnouts.

Were your friends burnouts in O shapes while your burnouts were in a D shape? :)

Roger Wilco

I bet you could have fit both on the same connection.

Ventrillo ended up being the defacto voice chat for years in the gaming community I was exposed to.

I think the first big one for voice chat in my friendship circle was "XFire" but when we started having bigger groups it didn't cut it anymore and we all moved to vent!

I remember I first heard about Discord as a Vent/Teamspeak/Raidcall competitor, and I'm pretty sure that was intended from the beginning.

I remember this too but we stuck to Mumble because it was lighter on system resources

Yeah, exactly. Their old motto was "Ditch Skype and Teamspeak" back when they were first emerging.

there's some incredible vent trolling content on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5AkIfgioA4

Shoutout to VideoCompiler if he's still alive. His Ventrilo Harassment videos are still golden.

Wow, that was some wholesome laughter. Brought me back to my high school and college days goofing around on vent.

Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA

The vent join sound is burned into my brain.

pff in my days we used MSN messenger for friends and IRC for girls

"girls"