Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)

The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.

It also absolutely needed:

- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*

- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)

- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)

- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc

- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)

- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early

*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.

There are discord communities around hobbies and shared interests that have nothing to do with gaming and have thousands of users.

But half the good is that they are not some wide-open, forever-indexed forum like reddit.

Out of 24 discord servers I am on, only 4 are related to games.

Most are software related, or why not genealogy or mesh networking?

I never started using discord for gaming, I just find its everywhere.

The platforms before discord were very bad (and still are). Discord was such a god send back then simply for being reliable free voice chat for gamers.

Gaming was the original use-case because historically every gaming clan had a teamspeak server, a forum, and an IM group chat, each of which was a pain to set up and administer. But it just so happens that this is also a pretty good set of features for basically any kind of small-ish online community, so it's taken off across a huge number of areas (my hot take is that feature wise it's actually better than Teams/Slack/etc, especially in terms of how the voice call UX works, and inertia and general reputation/theming are the main reasons it hasn't taken off for internal company communications).

The UI has lots of issues everywhere and constantly, but unfortunately it's by far the best if you look at the competition.

what bloat? unless you're specifically looking for it, default view has none of it, it's just chat, video and memes

forums do not have voice chat or screensharing.

i did not claim it is "lower friction for text-only searches than forums" or anything of that sort.

Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.

But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that

- Can't be found in search engines

- Abysmal search functionality

- Abysmal discoverability

But NixOS is not obscure once you get into it.

Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.

And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...

But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.

Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)

Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.

A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.

The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.

If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.

Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.

yep, many previous discussions on discord tend to result in many HNers poo pooing discord. All the things they say would happen never happened.

Slack and hangouts were both functionally worse than discord for a long time. I haven't used them in quite a while, but even if they have now caught up, network effect is already in play.

Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.

my comment was not a claim that discord is completely unique in its offering. it was directed at the "genuinely zero idea why anyone uses it" part of the comment

For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.

What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.

I guess its all subjective.

none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.

That stuff is so easy to ignore I struggle to understand how it could make it unusable

You can openly be a white supremacist on Twitter now. The reason some people still aren't happy is because what they really want is to be able to have terrible opinions and not be disliked and shunned, which isn't possible. Social repercussions and censorship are different things.

i doubt it is true for the majority, though.

in any case, i dont think the "hunter biden laptop" discord group is opting into this feature.

That it is used for other things is not in dispute by anyone.

Sure, but there are listings of the most popular Discords. Just scroll through them: https://top.gg/discord/servers/list/largest

The themes are pretty clear, and having a political discussion does not appear prominent.

Newer platforms will tend to skew younger for sure. I was too young to get into irc really but even when I was young instant messaging services like MSN Messenger were vastly more mainstream than forums. So maybe it's not really based on age.

But I do see, generally young, people join niche discords that don't necessarily see 24/7 activity say something like "Hey anyone here?" then a few minutes later "lol dead server". I think it's because for a lot of younger people they mostly want the socialization aspect over just a place to share about a hobby. They go on discord when they want to talk to people.

Hell, some of the dev groups ban any discussion of USING llm's in code development. It's intentionally alienating and driving people away. Many of which I have found on Discord. Though even Discord seems to be having a moment of thought policing.