For the average user, absolutely it's voice and game streaming. But I've found the more I've used discord, is that a lot of online communities, that typically would exist on Reddit or a forum, also have discord servers for communicating and community management.

I have noticed it’s frequently the only outlet for communication with developers and communities, which I find worryingly closed off and hostile to users.

Users are worryingly hostile to developers.

If you've been on a game dev discord, it's usually the opposite.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand, are you claiming that gamers (perhaps one of the most notoriously toxic communities) are not hostile towards game developers?

Ahhh context was missing. I meant in actual game development discords for game developers, not games that have discords from the developers.

My anecdotal data is based on observations from my partner who has boughten several asset packs from itch.io, got on the discord for support, and the artists/game devs have been extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

Of course, gamers (competitive) are generally a toxic bunch.

> extremely unwelcoming to the point of just banning users for simple game dev questions and/or mentions of AI.

This is understandable when you realize that artist are being accused of using AI for every single imperfection in art now. You messed up on perspective? You must be using AI. Anatomy is slightly off? You must be using AI. At a certain point they just get tired of the accusations and choose to ban people.

I can believe that scenario, but I believe in the cases I've seen regarding game dev, It's more pearl clutching from the artists (rightly so) rather than accusations from the asset users.

Not in my experience, either on Discord or any other platform where devs interact with users. Most users are polite enough, but many are toxic as hell; whereas most devs are maybe, at best, brusque - but you would be too if you had to constantly point users to the FAQ or answer the same obvious questions that Google can answer in 5 seconds.

I don’t spend much time on Discord servers (mostly just use it for DM with specific people) but certainly spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s / early 00s; are channel bots not a thing? Especially now with LLM APIs and all that, you’d imagine a lot of the FAQ-level questioning would have automated answers in busy project-based servers

Bots are still a thing, certainly, but much like in IRC, they're still usually triggered by devs (of course some users will use them, but then, those aren't the users who need to be pointed to the FAQ)

There's also stuff like server intro guides and onboarding steps that should deal with most of the low-hanging questions... Should, but don't always :P

As for use of LLMs... probably an interesting use-case, but I'm not aware of any solutions using that quite yet.

Yeah, people never read channel topics so we're forced to use commands & embeds for common things

Okay but I don't blame users for that particular failing - topics are not easily discoverable. They should be shown above the input bar the first time a user visits a channel or until they dismiss it or something.

I'm gonna give it up for that one. Nicely done.

As opposed to IRC? Forums? hell - even an email list... All things that are a lot easier to search then Discord, have much lighter clients, and can be done free.

Do you really think there was 'no way to communicate' for projects before discord ?

You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client. There's a reason they 'just' use Discord. So now you want developers to have to check emails, IRC, forum posts, whatever other outdated communication platform, AND Discord? Why on Earth would they use all that when Discord takes care of all of those features and more.

Having more than one central place to communicate is 'hostile'.

> You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client.

Just because something is old, doesn’t mean it is bad.

Disagree.

>>You're comparing ancient obsolete technology to a streamlined instant messaging client

I'd hardly call discord a 'stream lined' system. Latency (especially in voice which is supposed to be it strong suit) is bad, search is subpar compared to even simple google searches, information is silo'd, its yet another place that can potentially leak PII, and basically the network is a SPOF. SourceForge promised all you mention, and was backed by (at the time) the largest IPO in history..and lasted what 2-3 years before it started decaying? I remember projects scrambling to find hosting after SF - and I remember how fast everyone jumped on GitHub .. I was donating to GH from the beginning just to help prevent another SF scenario...

As for it 'hostile' - its a lot easier to do a google search and find all sorts of information streams about something, rather then having to figure out the discord server for a project, search the discord server, and still miss any info. from outside of discord. That seems more 'hostile' to me then less wall-garden systems.

Edit: last I knew, over 1K oss projects still maintain libera.chat channels

In 2025, a company using IRC to communicate with its users would be like using ham radio. Sure it exists, but it is far too niche to be worth the effort.

How so? You literally just open a web page, and choose a nickname. It's easier than creating a Discord account and verifying your email address and phone number.

Discord has a gradual onboarding process. If your IP isn't poisoned, and your browser looks pretty normal, you just have to enter a username and you're in with an "unclaimed account"

They'll then nag you to fill in more details as you use it. It's honestly a pretty slick way of doing onboarding.

Just to clarify, when I say "hostile to users", I just mean generally "less accessible than alternatives". I'm not making any value judgments about how we treat one another using said access, which I don't imagine is any great panacea.

oh yeah through a reddit bounce that is true, it's their live chat platform in a way :)

Completely depends on the niche. The VRChat party scene is comprised of hundreds of clubs as well as a meta-club for people who like to join as many as possible, which imports events channels from dozens of other servers. Some of them even collaborate on scheduling data and can put together a complete calendar/schedule of all events from various clubs each day.

It was a little bit of everything, really. Discord exploded in popularity because:

1. Its free functionality was more generous than many comparable services. Nobody wants to pay for a Mumble server.

2. Its UI and audio quality and noise cancellation settings put much of the competition to shame.

3. Only needing one account for every Discord server in existance gave it the same kind of appeal that let Reddit/Facebook kill off most individual forums.

4. Good marketing, which gave it the critical mass of users and hobby groups that it needed to succeed initially and now make it harder to move away from.

Speaking from being very early on the train for Discord, it also had an extremely solid userbase right from the start because much of the early pre-marketing pull into it was for raid groups in the then-new Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. People really needed a chat client to coordinate a big number of players and it was totally free, functional, and new on the scene. It spread a ton in the community and the people working on it were players as well from what I remember, though it's been a long time. So as the game grew in popularity, and everyone who was in a large group was starting to use Discord more, it cemented friend groups that formed in the increasingly popular game along with the Heavensward release and helped solidify a foundation in the gaming community imo.

Teamspeak and others were so well entrenched at the time. Wouldn't players of WoW, CS, etc. have brought those tools to FFXIV? What made that special?

Teamspeak had a ton of friction. When I was playing FFXIV and made my discord account, someone literally just sent a link in the text chat of our Free Company, I opened it in browser, made an account and used it right there immediately. To timestamp this, it was the summer of 2015, a little under a decade ago, iirc.

Not sure about now, but back then Teamspeak meant installing an application, setting it all up, having someone in the Free Company (almost always more than the limit for a free server on TS at the time) pay for a server or self-host (even more friction). With Discord there was no debate or decisions, just one step: Click link, sign up.

Its killer feature was how frictionless it was to adopt initially. If I sent you a Discord link, back then you could just click it and be going in under a minute.

Same reason Zoom quickly took over video chat. It was so easy to use that you didn't have to convince your friends to sign up for it, you just sent them a link and it just worked.

You did have to sign up and login, right? I believe this is one of the major things that make it much less frictionless for people.

If I recall correctly, yes, but it was like, enter your email and username BAM now you have an account.

It's not quite so easy anymore, partly because when you reach a certain size, it's all about controlling bots and whatnot.

Agreed. You now have to verify your phone number to have access to many guilds.

Yeah, didn't even verify emails. I got a surprise discord account back in 2015 because someone else used my email. I guess this xkcd[1] applies to younger people too.

1: https://xkcd.com/1279/

I’ll never cease to be amazed that there’s an XKCD for literally everything.

I bet there’s even one related to using the word literally as hyperbole…

Discord's killer feature for my money has always been that ever user in a call gets a slider bar (and mute button) to control the volume they hear ever other individual user in the call

Zoom, in 2025, still makes you wait for the host to figure out which of the 30 other people has a dog incessantly barking or is causing the echo or has horrible feedback, and then try to talk them through fixing it before finally muting them.

We had that in Teamspeak/mumble/vent, but the chat functionality on those platforms were definitely an afterthought. Not a place you'd cultivate a community.

Hilarious how in The Year of Our Lord 2025, so many video conferencing apps have not figured out how to implement something similar to the Dugan automatic microphone mixing algorithm. http://www.protechaudio.com/products/PDFFiles/DuganMixing.pd...

I mean, what do you want, it's only been around for 50 years.

Every action had more friction and the ability to post images was game changing.

Those tools were all, comparatively, trash. Literally ALL of the gamer groups I was familiar with switched en masse. You can’t compare Mumble and Discord IMO. There was so much setup friction that anything was better than what we had at the time.

Gaming was becoming less and less the domain of the tech-savvy crowd, strongly curbing the public's appetite for such host-it-yourself services. Teamspeak/Mumble were already dying at the hands of (inferior) free/easy chat platforms like Steam & Skype, so it's really no wonder that Discord was able to swoop in and clobber all of them by simply being free and featureful.

If you can handle a ton of users on not much hardware it’s quite easy to offer a generous free tier. The more “high touch” (resources per interaction) your SaaS is the more VC money you’re setting on fire trying to achieve a network effect.

And during a downturn the high touch services lose customers faster because part of the virtue signaling of cost cutting is choosing cheaper options that take a bit more work.

The UI is awful, Discord volume isn't exposed, no option to do it, either, so you have to adjust game audio or individual user audio. They put the whole kitchen sink in, for some reason, too, there's a text chat in the voice rooms that needs to be user-revealed for some reason, instead of being exposed by default. Most of it is unintuitive at first use.

Then there's the many contraindications e.g. privacy policy, walled garden, and the dog shit internal indexing and the fact that it isn't externally indexed, there's a lot of pertinent information on there from skilled individuals that could serve society a la the BBS era that will never be surfaced again because it's now being posted to Discord, though that's tangential. I hate it, but it's easy enough to use, though negligibly dofferent compared to Skype, which had many of the same issues.

I think the biggest attractor for my friends was being able to idle in a server so it was easy to start a party vs starting a call on Skype which requires a little more arrangement. Lower cost less friction.

I don't remember marketing, though.

Weird, I have never noticed a single one of the issues you mention. There really isn't much I don't like about discord, though I wished threads worked more like Slack.

Funny. Every day at work, I lament that Slack's threads don't work like Discord's. What do you like about them?

I like that they are unobtrusive and low cost. Easy to spin off a small discussion without bothering others.

In discord, a thread becomes a big visible thing in the sidebar. More than a couple and you're annoying everyone on the whole server. Completely the opposite of what I want.

You cannot search in discord threads. Until recently, there wasn't even a way to go to the first message in a discord thread without scrolling up manually.

If I haven't used discord in a while I will get stuck in a voice chat and cannot for the life of me figure out how to exit. I clicked on the channel name to enter, but I can't exit from there. Clicking on other channels doesn't get me out etc etc.

Just funny to find myself knowing I've got this wrong before and being annoyed at myself _and_ at them