Just started using it over the past year and was wondering how it rose to such prominance.
Prominence compared to what, IRC? It’s easier to set up voice & text communications, share pictures, emotes, and integrate with games than IRC. I’m not sure what other alternatives there are out there for Discord nowadays, Teamspeak? IRC? Reddit? Pornhub?
I remember when Teamspeak was all the rage, then suddenly no one used it anymore and it was all Discord.
For the WoW scene it was Ventrillo.
Oh yea, I forgot about that one.
Ventrillo (and Teamspeak, and Mumble) was a pain in the ass to setup and use compared to just clicking a Discord link and accepting an invite though. Honestly, I can’t think of a much better benefit right off the bat than ease of use. Especially for Console gamers.
I know for the fighitng game folks, it was largely because a lot of the IRC rooms got metooed, and a lot of folks started refusing to use Facebook for political reasons. Discord was the best alternative.
Discord is a cinch to set up. You can run all the channels you want. It works well with text and voice on your phone and PC. It rose to prominence because, if you want to play with someone, it’s the perfect software. No hassle. Click on a link and you are in.
I just read this article a couple weeks ago…sort of the origins of Discord:
Like others have said, at the time it was way easier to use and more feature filled than any of its competitors. Not sure if anyone new has entered the market since.
Discord is easy to setup and use like others have said, but it also lets you create a one stop shop for an entire community. It used to be you’d have a website with forums, then Teamspeak, then whatever instant messenger program, etc. Now I can create chat/voice/notifications/direct messages/etc for whatever game/topic/etc that I want with a couple of clicks and its free. That’s pretty great!
It’s easy to set up and use compared to other services, and makes it pretty easy to create a vibrant community. It’s my most active community and I love it. I wish it had some features that Guilded has, but whuddyagonnado? Ask hundreds of people to move just for a calendar? Feh.
I don’t mind that it became the go-to voice chat, although I don’t like it as much as mumble, but it didn’t just do that; it also practically took over for forums, for which is it a terrible replacement, as I’ve bitched and moaned about elsewhere.
We used mumble for a while for both voice chat and our podcast, and as much as I love our guests, we had DOZENS of people who could never figure Mumble out. Smart people. Game devs. Who could not log onto the damned thing. That made the switch to Discord even easier.
I know we all love destinations like QT3, but we’re dinosaurs. Kids don’t go to forums anymore.
Also yeah it’s a terrible replacement for forums. I wish it would steal Guilded’s forums. Maybe someday.
Yes, just more ephemeralization of the internet. Stupid kids!
Lol, so true. It’s not threaded. Replies and quotes are super awkward. And in any channel with any volume you have no chance of following a conversation. It’s set up to facilitate many quick chats rather than fewer more substantial ones.
That said, it is really great for managing voice channels. We use it at work to manage the operation of our facility when most folks are remote due to COVID and it works pretty well.
I will say, with the phone app at least, that my friends and I frequently sound like garbled robots doing Daft Punk impressions. Sometimes this is the case with the desktop program too, and it annoys the crap out of us. Doesn’t seem like any setting that I’m aware of makes much difference unfortunately. Contrast this with Xbox voice chat cross-platform and it’s pretty damn near perfect aside from the odd drop. This was always the case with Skype too, which gamers seemed to hate. I always heard that it gobbled up bandwidth but I never had issues using it over my woeful 1.2Mbps connection while playing L4D.
Yeah, my heart sinks whenever I find out that the real source of info for a game is Discord.