Quite sad to see the internet continuously being shrunk down to the lowest common denominator, some federated efforts like the fediverse make me quite hopeful, a shame most of them mimick twitter.
Let's think about discord for a minute, why is everyone using it? And what are they using it for? I think the answers here are rather simple, people have a need for communication with peers; this communication usually takes many forms: text, voice, video, gifs, images. Discord is a platform that offers people a very simple and quick way of building communities capable of providing people will all of these forms of communication but really, now a days, every messenger application does the job. So the differentiating factor for discord is the ability to organise these communities better than any other platform (save for slack, which discord modelled itself after). Now, it's not perfect, it's impossible to build horizontal communities on discord but it does the job.
So functionally, discord offers people seeking to build communities pretty much everything they could want. Now, it still has some problems: mainly that it's not very good for long-form or persistent messaging like a forum. And this is why you usually have discord communities with a reddit counterpart, a forum-like website and a real-time interaction community.
This let discord built a very wide userbase, and once you have that then you really get to enjoy the magic sauce: network effects. To put it simply, people use discord because everyone else uses discord and everyone else uses discord because people use discord.
As the internet grows it becomes increasingly difficult to break network effects even if you have an offering that's better. But even then, it's also extremely difficult to be novel given that these big companies can simply acquire you when they start seeing you as a threat (look at adobe buying figma). Companies are quicker than regulators at seeing potential market disruptions and threats, so in most cases they can stay ahead of the game. Imo, a lot of the failings of these companies come from underestimating the competition and then trying to play catch-up.
There may be some contexts where that's true, but overwhelmingly I've seen Discord replacing forums, particularly for small, closed groups. Wheereas I've never so much as heard of any group adopting a private subreddit! But tons have ended up with a discord as their central social point (whether or not they need or use the voice feature).
I've seen this especially in gaming circles (guilds, clans, etc.) and to a lesser extent in other hobbies or in patient support groups.
I know discord isn't a good match for the technical features of forums, but it seems to be a good fit for how people actually used them.
It was really really awesome.
Technically, reddit and Discourse is more like forums, but a lot of things that would have been a forum 15 years ago are now Discord "servers".
Reddit and Discord piled the dirt on top and added the headstone.
This seems to be fairly common and it seems that as these applications and companies rise and fall that they each bring there own flavor to the mix.
Google maps was concise in 2012, today the app requires a greater number of user inputs to enter a destination for example
Eventually good chat program runs out of runway, gets acquired (wow look at that userbase!) or needs to monetize on their own, and becomes the bad chat program. And the cycle continues.
From my experience there's a split, more "generalist" forums did get "replaced" by reddit, by subs such as technology, games, news, etc. More "in-depth" forums where you expected to see the same guys working on something or having matches together etc I've seen being almost always replaced by discord:fighting games forums(even for games with good MM), dev/security/cracking forums, really anything that isn't "mass appeal".
Discord recently added Forum Channels to try and capture this segment as well.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
I think the best approach to a mix of forum and discord-like communities is the app "aether.app" though it had a weird protocol behind it and has been abandoned. But the UI/UX although still perfectible seemed to hit a very nice sweet-spot for me.
The biggest problem came from the fact that we had been all in a discord server in the past that was deleted by the owner after a political disagreement. So in order for that to not happen again we wanted to have a more "community owned" system so that no one would be able to wield such power without some degree of community acceptance.
Sadly, it was not possible to do such a thing on discord as there ALWAYS has to be an owner to the server that's a single individual. Some of these problems can be solved through bots (you can implement very good voting bots) but you're always fighting against the natural structure of the platform, so no solution is ideal.
Well, for me they were never replaced. I still frequent them regularly for some of the best communities and community-based support around (eg. fortunately vendors of my 3D printing and PCB manufacturing equipment host good ones).
I don't think it's ever been sold as like, a general purpose chat platform like IRC or Discord...it's a shame a bunch of OSS projects decided to settle on Slack for their community chat.
Google was not the giant then that it is now.
Making a social network like Google+ be invite-only when everybody was already on Facebook was an absolutely bone-headed move and I think was THE driving factor for its failure.
There were so many memes about people finally getting an invite to Google+ and then discovering nobody was there. Without your friends on it, you're not going to make it part of your daily routine, and eventually just forget about it entirely. By the time it wasn't invite-only anymore, the hype was gone and Google+ had already been considered to be a joke.
It quickly became a cesspool of racism, child porn, and other illegal activity, mostly by Brazilians, who bullied everyone else off the platform
Google tries many new products (in-house developed or acquired). If it does not reach a user base of several 100 million users (or 10's of billions of revenue) after a few years then they will scrap it.
> Original skype would probably work better than zoom does today with a few tweaks
When it came out, Skype was amazing because it let you get video calls on your computer. The audio was flaky (I paid for a number for a work line and yeah - wasn't good!), the video broke up all the time, and it dropped out a lot. But we were new to video calls that worked at all and it seemed like a miracle!
Now a few years later there's a zillion ways to do a video call, and Skype itself doesn't seem to be as good as it once was. I really wonder what on earth happened.
A lot of things really, really were. Some weren't.
Generally speaking, I do think that modern software tends to be worse in terms of usability, robustness, and resource usage. But it tends to be prettier and have more "features", so that's something.
15 years ago I'd reboot nightly because things were more stable.
20 years ago I debugged an issue in the JVM where it was deleting any file it touched (http://nicklothian.com/blog/2003/08/13/a-java-bug-worthy-of-...).
25 years ago it was normal for a computer to crash multiple times a day and wasn't uncommon for files that had been saved to get corrupted by a crash.
So yeah, very happy with modern software reliability.
What made Facebook great was that it encouraged users to share personal information (including pictures and bio items) and then made it easy for everyone to anonymously take part of this information.
You could look at pictures of your crush in cute outfits or co-workers in embarrassing situations. You could read about the layoff your ex' new partner had to endure. You could see where the cool kids had their coffee. All of this at any time of day, and nobody but you would know that you knew.
It's the ultimate low-key stalking tool and it was designed this way from the start, because early on they understood that's what people want.
I don't remember the exact quote but I do know one of the early decisions was that photos ought to be open by default and you shouldn't be able to tell who has looked at them -- in contrast to many other social networks at the time.
I think a large part of it was also the digital photo and smartphone revolution. Instagram did that a little better, but posting straight to Facebook was a little better than what... Photobucket? Personal hosting? Emails with mass CC? It just solved that problem so well for not only the big event pictures we'd traditionally throw in an album, but also adhoc slice-of-life moments.
It also gave that power to businesses, humanising them in a way that hadn't been possible before, and that's where the money came in.
Yes, precisely. This is my point entirely, that ego, vanity, pride, conceit and narcissism is what motivates these individuals to want and need to share personal details with complete strangers, and this is the entire point of Facebook, to beguile its members with a platform of opportunity to indulge in symptoms of personality disorder and character flaw.
It was just ripe for when internet became a plausible soil for society.
ning?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting
A very good VOIP / videoconferencing / white-boarding / application sharing client present on almost all Windows computers, open standards interoperable, with an official ActiveX Control and public API. You could easily embed it into your HTML site (IE compatible only), or drag and drop it into your Visual Basic / Delphi / Microsoft Office script application and thus effortlessly embed and control the functionality into your own website/application.
https://news.microsoft.com/1996/09/30/microsoft-ships-netmee...
I remember using NetMeeting in late 97 or early 98 on a 33.6 kbps modem. One of the most memorable parts was the area were you could find other random people to chat with on audio. I had many enjoyable conversations with various people on there, something that I don't think would work well today with the increased number of horrible netizens.
And that's ignoring that niche it filled where people were identified by emails, and the particular social rules of knowing that if you went online, it meant you wanted to spend a while talking to people and were available to do so. Discord is kind of similar in that last aspect, but it's enormously complex for the average user and intended for servers, not for 1 on 1 conversations with your contacts. I've always wanted to build a clone of Messenger just because of how much I miss it.
THAT was what was needed for mobile devices. I remember trying to use MSN messenger when I was on WAP and it sucked. And then I remember Skype on iPhone sucked for messages too. SMS also wasn't great if you were remotely international and had friends and family not in the same country as you.
It took two whole years for Skype to rearchitect away from peer to peer (understandably so).
To this day, when you want guaranteed delivery, in order and without duplicates WhatsApp runs circles around its competitors.
Compare that with Slack which both on desktop and mobile regularly has weird issues with successfully delivering a message.
Ultimately avatars are nice to have and later on top of a reliable messaging service but otherwise I'd take boring old text over flaky rich messaging every day of the week.
idk about slack et.al. but telegram does that with native clients for linux, android, ios and windows. even media-sync is pretty much flawless ime.
What do you mean "end"? We still use it!
I can't believe they managed to kill this amazing product.
I do feel like FB is being killed in the same way, as it was an amazing product for many years and has slowly become ads and unrelated content in a noisy newsfeed :( I really think FB should go back to its roots and simplify the interface and go back to the chronological timeline.
I don't understand why product feel that they need to change to stay relevant. They should just launch other products instead of changing what works well.
God, why do PMs push this crap. Like users are picking their communication software of the day based on what pops up into their face.
If I don't think some company's messenger application should run in the background on startup, it should not run in the background on startup.
There are many people who need more personal discipline to not contact people constantly, but the software itself should be ready for the times when they should contact you, interrupting whatever it is you were doing.
For the majority of people it makes sense to have a comms app always running as they come to expect that from the smartphones.
Granted, there should be an easy way to configure this behavior for advanced users.
In contrast, I see a computer as a general purpose machine. Sure, I don't turn off the WiFi of my laptop, or the router/AP from my house, but those are means to many ends. When I want to check mails on my computer, I launch Thunderbird, and when I want instant mesaaging, I use whatever program/WebApp I need.
[0] As I am now doing, writing a comment in HN is a PITA in a smartphone.
Same thing with Signal. I routinely take/place calls with friends and family through the desktop client. If I'm on my computer and I've got my computer headset on, I might as well take the call on the computer instead of taking off the headset and using yet another device.
As my computer is a general purpose device, one of its many purposes is also a communications device.
Or do you leave it connected for long stretches of time to be ready to take an incoming call?
If you had a desk phone did you unplug it until you were going to make a call?
That would be a slightly different way of accomplishing what I already do (silence everything on my phone, and in general, try to prevent it from bugging me when I'm not actively using it).
It wouldn't be a bad approach at all if it made the phone shut the fuck up. The smartphone is one of the best examples on the market of product managers mistaking addiction triggers and "engagement" metrics for evidence of good user experience.
Yes, I do (effectively). My phone spends a large percentage of the day in airplane mode.
Regardless of software, I decide when I'm available to be contacted... not somebody else.
I already mute all notifications/ringtones on the phone when I want to focus, why should we also start doing this on computers?
You will get less done in total, but what you do get done is so much more valuable to humans as a whole that it is worth the loss of focus. It was a real mind blower when I realized that, I still get frustrated at times with my inability to get hard things done quickly, but in return I get much more important things done with the help of others.
I hope every time you are in public (and even in your private life) that you are accosted by randos who are over eager to share whatever drivel comes to their mind. And if you complain they will retort with "as a human you need to be available to communicate with others the vast majority of the time".
Please answer ever spam caller, every JW/door-to-door salesman. You _need_ this. Please post your personal contact details in every public space. Everyone NEEDS to communicate with you. It's not up to you. It's up to them. They must be able to communicate with you whenever it suits them.
That's a nice hypothesis. do you happen to have some research or such regarding this. that could be a nice read :)
And it seems you agree with the original intent of my message. There is a time a place for being focused/left alone. And it's not up to a piece of software (or other humans) to decide this on a permanent basis.
also regarding "You will get less done in total, but what you do get done is so much more valuable to humans as a whole that it is worth the loss of focus."
It's funny because I have the opposite experience. Guess everybody is different in this regard.
Pessimist view: Companies gain the ability to covertly track presence, which isn't feasible if Teams is left to the user to open.
What they turned it into / replaced it with was such a depressing step backwards.
Interchange was a java client, that fundamentally spoke standard IRC to IRC servers, but also used extra external databases to auto-connect users to channels and secure sensitive channels. The client also forced real names (via Active Directory), and was hardcoded to only connect to the UBS IRC servers.
The IRC servers themselves were altered to only allow Interchange clients to connect[1] and to only allow approved bots in channels most of which did full chat logging for compliance purposes.
Interchange was so slow it was nicknamed 'Interchug'.
The IRC server network spanned the UBS WAN network globally, and all staff were encouraged to use it. For the era, no other large banking corporate had anything similar running (officially).
Source: I worked in UBS IT during this period.
---
[1] Although the more enterprising of us just HEX edited mIRC to report the Interchange client name.
I was at Skype at the time, working on this very migration, so maybe I can shed some light on what happened.
There were a number of failures (on Microsoft part mainly) that made the whole thing collapse:
- The original Skype developers were used to program in C++ with on-premise Linux servers. When the migration plan came in, the tech stack switched to C# on Azure. Most developers were not really keen or experienced working with C# and Windows. Azure was very much beta at the time, I remember the philosophy was "eat your own dog food" which created an insane amount of frustration working with sub-par tooling, little to no documentation, plenty of bugs on Azure. There is also a mentality/philosophy shift of working with C#/Windows coming from C++/Linux which was not great for team morale.
- Support for group chat was paramount, which meant there was a need of transition from peer to peer to client server.
- The original Lync team was very much annoyed with the rebranding and migration plan and was not really keen on helping Skype developers. I remember us receiving a "dump" of the Lync VCS as tech reference, in the form of a big fat multi GB archive. There were tons of binaries, even videos in there... Lot of fun...
- MS/Lync used a _huge_ amount of proprietary SIP extensions to have Lync work.
- The migration to the cloud and client-server model was accompanied by a huge migration to a brand new microservices in C# project. It meant recoding everything in a new language, a new platform, a new protocol, dealing with hundreds of half baked microservices in a half baked cloud platform. It was slow, buggy, and an architect astronaut fest.
- Overall 99% of the original Skype calling team resigned and joined Twilio.
- Pretty much every manager from MS that I have seen at Skype stayed no more than a year then rotated to a new role, at one point we had 4 changes of management in 2 years.
- Every single interaction with Microsoft management was surreal. Pardon my language, but they were not technical at all, unable to understand the most basic architecture proposals, bullshitting tech talk 9 words out of 10,and overall they were living in an other planet in terms of market share and branding. You could definitely tell that they were talking "product" and "objectives" for Skype, but never used it, understand it's competition, challenges, etc. Pure bozos.
In the end I think Microsoft still extracted some value from Skype, mainly:
- Skype had good PSTN contracts worth a lot of value. The matching engine to select the cheaper one dynamically had value too, and historical data.
- The brand itself had value for customers.
We were folded into the Skype org, with Tony Bates -who I maintain had no idea what he was doing- reporting to Ballmer. Fine. But he and his henchman (Mark something?) embarked on a quest to make everyone do by-the-book Scrum. That, screwing around with corelib, and the ill-omened liveid migration process meant that Skype didn't improve in any way users cared about for several years. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape changed and the only Skype feature anyone ever used - being able to call your grandma in another country for cheap or free - lost its differentiation. It was clearly over by the time my mom told me she had whatsapp.
Nobody I knew had any animus towards Skype engineers and we were entirely willing to help... but what anyone actually wanted was kind of unclear.
Depth of org in a company is logN(number of employees) where N is the number of reports a manager has. At Microsoft there's order of 100K full time employees and N is about 10, so depth is about 6. This seems fairly unremarkable to me, though obviously there are other ways to do it.
I still remember older versions of Skype, which felt usable and rock solid. I actually used some from I think http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ back in the day for my personal stuff, because the reworked UI was just worse.
But nowadays, I don't really care that much, whether I have to use Skype, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else - all of the communication tools out there feel viable, just none are excellent.
That said, WhatsApp feels like it's an order of magnitude faster (on mobile) than Signal and Telegram somehow (privacy implications aside, it's still one of the more popular ways to chat with people in the EU), which I found interesting. Of course, it's generally for chatting, not necessarily team collaboration (where you'd want channels and workspaces). On the desktop, however, generally you're just dealing with packaged browser apps most of the time.
I do feel like mentioning how nice having self-hostable non-cloud options is when you need them, be it Nextcloud Talk or the aforementioned Jitsi, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat or something else.
But since it is mostly a network effects game and the setup of keys may be somewhat of putting I am not very optimistic.
Its' a shame though...
I have gone to the trouble of installing a Sharepoint application. The idea that people are doing this who do not want a directory tree as 99.99999% of what they do is insane.
Luckily, there was Pidgin/Adium, so we could have one app to talk all the protocols.
I'd go back to those days in a heartbeat, and I was there.
Trillian (propritary) released July 1, 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software)
Although there was a little bit of integration between SfB and Skype, (and between SfB and Teams as well) - so could communicate from one to the other.
Although Skype for Business Online was phased out in favour of Teams, the on-prem version still exists, probably for those customers that cannot/will not use Teams for regulatory/compliance reasons, and no end of life date has been announced for the on-prem version yet.
It's way better than teams in core features, although integrations are missing, and it doesn't have call functionality.
It's also why iMessage hasn't taken off. We are used to things working cross platform, the iMessage lock-in doesn't interest people as it isn't providing much convenience for its limitations.
In italy we do ample use of sending audio messages. This doesn't work with sms.
I add a data point on costs and volumes. I have a 90 GB monthly data cap on my phone but I have only either 100 or 1000 free SMS per month, can't remember because I don't use them. I'm probably not sending 1000 messages per month (but it's only 33 per day), definitely more than 100. I don't want to discover that I run out of messages on the 22nd of September so I won't be using them as a hidden transport in a chat app.
I heard that originally sms wasn't meant to be a consumer product, it was just so technicians could test or communicate. Then the telco's realized people like texting more than calling (people prefer async sometimes, weird because comms mainly developed from async to sync), and decided to charge a limb for it.
I do remember everybody using Skype, it was so popular it created a verb of its own, we used to skype with each other. Microsoft paid what was an enormous amount for it back then, then basically let it rot. Really surprising.
The exception for this, is private channels (the ones with little padlocks next to their names). These are created in their own isolated SharePoint site outside of the parent "teams" SharePoint site. It's done this way because the access security around teams/channels is the SharePoint security system. It's a totally nuts way to do it.
Teams is basically built using existing MS technologies in the same way that incorrect LEGO bricks can be forced together if you try hard enough.
I don't think MS have the ability to build an application from ground up anymore.
---
[1] The one upside of this, is that if you only care about the files held in Teams, you can "Sync" the site to your PC, and it appears as a virtual folder in File Explorer.
They didn't just let it rot. They actively ruined it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks?wprov=sfla1
Even today they feel modern.
I still remember the jingle : " ta-dat-dat " with the screen shaking.
The tube monitors with that square screens, that could heat a whole room.
I remember using cheat engine and sending infinite nudges to friends. Good times.
Then Microsoft came out with Communicator, renamed it to Lync, which was a corporate messenger/meeting software. It used its own server, that could federate outside. It worked very well. They added LiveMeeting as a separate app for meetings, built on the same protocols. Our company used it with the "roundtable" camera from 2008, and it all worked amazingly well. We had meetings with people joining in from home and other offices over the internet using inexpensive webcams, 15 years ago.
Then they bought Skype and it went downhill from there. I don't know what happened, but they took a lot of time integrating technologies from Skype (peer-to-peer) with their own tech (which was more telecom/server based) and tried competing with ever-changing perceived competitors by copying parts of their features and UI, without ever making any feature really good. They integrated everything into a single program, Skype for Business, now renamed Teams, and made it bloated and obnoxious. Just try to get it to not start at login... It's like MSN all over again.
I think the Communicator/LiveMeeting software combo they had 15 years ago would still (conceptually) do pretty well as messenger/meeting software now, when modernized. It was much less intrusive and behaved like nice software that you actually wanted to use.