99.9% of users don't care about any of that. Users want embedded media, custom emotes, free fully featured clients on every device they use (any client that needs a bouncer doesn't count), integration with desktop software such as games, video streaming / screen sharing, and voice calls.

Notice that every single chat software used by normal humans (iMessage, Google chat, FB messenger, etc) has most of these features, just with much lower bitrates than Discord.

For the very few users that don't need any feature they didn't have in the 90s, IRC is still around. The rest of us just add one of many text logging bots to our discord servers.

You only let users design a product or tool if they are better at it or more correctly if you are even worse at it. Users don't want fire exits or seat belts. They basically want tasty food that kills them. It if can be more tasty and kill them faster they all want it. Even better if the product kills other people but silently and far away. If it can be slightly cheaper and kill many more people you've done well in their opinion.

Of course sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens.

That's a funny comparison (with fire exits and seat belts), because IRC is none of it

Plain text protocol with poor (and optional) auth? Please where are the adults in the room

"oh but extension XYZ etc" yes and how many servers do implement that in a mandatory (and user friendly) way?

The user wants their images and reactions and I can't blame them because it's the 2020's and IRC was already limited 20 years ago

haha, I use IRC all the time but don't necessarily disagree. Imagine if we could post images to HN! Or wait...

> They basically want tasty food that kills them

What do you mean "they"? I'm the dev in this scenario and I also prefer to eat tasty food that supposedly kills me. I know how to count my calories.

> sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens

I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

> I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

Somewhere, the ghost of the man responsible for the iPod and iPhone is laughing at you.

Let me try...

Besides clients/users you have (not in any order): investors, employees, security, stability, sustainability, usability, education, learning curve, ethics, morality, honesty(?), the community, the environment, the economy, humanity, history...

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things.

We already had that with Jabber.

Jabber had custom emotes and integration with desktop software including video games? I don't remember that.

Pidgin had lots of plugins (emotes too) and on integration with video games, that depended on the game and protocol. Twitch uses IRC for instance. You could use any IRC client to comment on your channel, and you could broadcast to Twitch with common tools too, by just using FFMPEG to encode your video stream to h264.

> Pidgin had lots of plugins

Maybe if they spent 1 minute thinking about their software as a product and decided to enable those plugins by default, Pidgin would be relevant in 2023.

>Twitch uses IRC for instance

That's not at all what I'm talking about, Twitch has nothing to do with Discord.

Eg your friend's Discord status shows you what they are doing in-game and many games let you join your friend's team directly from discord.

>Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

It's worse. Official Twitter account: >All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

In practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.

Like I said: Accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

Discord standards include "official Discord", which doesn't take away from the point.

It doesn't take away from the point but it adds to it. Proprietary chat protocols are nothing new but in the past alternative clients were either ignored or blocked. Now it is getting more common to punish the individual users of such clients, like Discord here threatening to nuke your account. This is a much worse situation than just "closed and proprietary standards".

In actual Discord practice, that clause acts more as a liability disclaimer. They do not actively look for and kill third party clients like, say, WhatsApp. However they have an antispam with a high false positive rate, which is tuned to almost always produce a non-spam result with their first party client.

Nah, Free Software is better than proprietary. Discord's attack on privacy and user safety are there to see.