PART 3 OF A SERIES ON DISCORD. READ PART 1 HERE, AND PART 2 HERE.
remember this marketing campaign? i certainly do. it's always been part of my distain, my distaste, my discomfort around Discord.
it's late 2015. when i'm not hanging out with IRL friends doing perks, i was playing Video Games. i used two platforms to chat with my friends. one was Steam, where i had met a lot of my Gamer Friends, the other was Skype, which was very much secondary for me.
until i met my boyfriend, now fiancé, Austin. he didn't like Steam very much.
i didn't have a mobile at the time. so i would call with him every night on the Skype app on my playstation vita. i would fall asleep listening to him coming thru those crappy speakers. it was lovely.
eventually, Microsoft discontinued Skype support for the Sony product. i still didn't have a phone. so along comes one of my besties, Xander, sayin' "hey, you should get on Discord. i'm trying to get Steam and Skype friends together on there to make it easier to hang"
sounded nice to me! but keep in mind, this was 2015. this was early Discord era. meaning that when i downloaded the app, on first launching this was my loading screen prompt:
i groaned so hard i uninstalled it immediately and didn't reinstall for another couple months, when i was left going with the crowd to a new platform of choice
now, the above is a recreation. i can promise you this is what my loading screen said, and that screenshot is probably still floating around somewhere. but in researching, i couldn't find it.
instead i found a bunch of other nothing, dated-at-the-time memes:
later on, Discord started taking user submissions, and while they were still lame, at least it felt community-driven lame instead of corporate-driven lame.
i'm Scots-Irish and grew up in Diet Canada, so i won't litigate if it made sense for the Hanzo one to include the romanization, as opposed to the kanji. if they got it wrong, it'd make great cross-branding, considering!
the loading screen memes made me cringe, but like. whatever, right? it was pretty dumb of me to bounce off so fast, but i think i was out of uppers at the time.
bottom line: while i still had Skype i didn't see a reason to use Discord.
So then, what happened to Skype?
i will give you one guess.
skype tried to become The Social Media Platform of choice, including recording other people's conversations for clout, emoji purportedly designed by, uh, paul mccartney, public chatrooms etc etc
in fact, here's a list of discontinued Skype features from their website, which reads like an obituary of venture capital dollars
this isn't even close to all of them. anyways, as it turns out, people really didn't like their messaging and calling app being converted into a vehicle for monetizing conversation itself.
Sometimes when big companies develop products they just
have a bit of feature creep. They just managed to muck it up
all along. It was so terrible, that was the last time I used
Skype. I just got fed up of trying to use that application.
The whole thing got convoluted, the interface got worse,
and the performance got terrible. It just lost the ease of
use it used to have.
-Om Malik, Journalist & Venture Capitalist, as quoted in Wired
yeah i wonder how that happened, "partner emeritus" of silicon-valley's own True Ventures firm. i can't even afford a house and this guy is holding a stone-throwing contest in his glass mcmansion
anyways. in late 2019, you know, a couple months before the world had to go indoors, Microsoft announced that they'd be merging Skype for Business into their proprietary platform, Teams.
just in time for "business calls" and "casual calls" to become, sadly, merged in our minds
Zoom & Our Collective Corporate Nightmare
contrary to what funny internet man says in this funny internet video, Zoom very much did not "come out of nowhere"
Zoom was around since late 2011, as it turns out! and yes, during the pandemic it became synonymous with "conversation" for a while, if you wanted to see your friends or family without potentially infecting them, with a virus or malware.
credibility is key! Zoom had the edge, while Skype just has Edge.
lots of schools, including my public school growing up, secured their tech using IT grants for apple products specifically, which don't always play nice with skype- given that Microsoft acquired Skype in the early 2010s, that's hardly surprising
on top of this, zoom was already being used in college/higher education settings for years. it offered features like selective screen sharing and live local recordings, very useful for giving lectures!
then once the Funny Virus hit, the CEO played savior by giving away free licenses to schools
or more accurately, Zoom temporarily removed the 40-minute time limit from larger group calls for schools that reached out to the CEO, often personally, before re-adding it later
it amuses me that they throw out "as most students have returned to in-person instruction" (framing it around the students making this call, as opposed to it being a largely governmental choice) without even beginning to address their partial fault in that
now, consider: one of the biggest sticking points for getting people to switch off Discord to something new, is a lack of a simpler, better alternative. why would i learn to hack the g shell or script the newman (i am not a programmer), when i could just install a quick app, or even not have to install it at all?
skype, chance to respond?
well, it's okay, you go when you feel like it. such a Team(s) Player! speaking of-
Now what about Teamspeak?
i love my barebones messaging apps! finally, an app just for chatting! assuming, you know, you're a Pro Gamer™
i love being audio-bombed by strangers joining my call! i love spending money on servers to talk to my friends! i love there being 5 different versions of this goddamn app and nobody can agree on which one to use!
look, once teamspeak is up and running it looks... fine? i guess? if you're someone who just needs a chat service while Gaming, and doesn't mind scripting. i hated it every time i used it growing up, and it by no means fits my use case today.
i can't hack the github to get the dachshund out of the jar or whatever just to talk to my family. ease of use is a massive driver in moving to a new platform, and TeamSpeak saw the writing on the wall of venture-capital-backed feature creep and went:
"not us, we're here for The Gamers!".
a famously popular and understanding group of people to pander to.
as it turns out, of all the terrible branding decisions Discord made, removing the meme loading screen text was probably the best one. gamers are easy to pander to, but oh so very difficult to get away from.
Please take us seriously.
is this... legal? like, they aren't citing ANY sources here. can you really just claim your competitor "sells your data to third parties" with literally no proof? also, the check marks still being greyed out in comparisons is hilariously blatant
what do all these chat platforms have in common? Skype, Zoom, TeamSpeak, and indeed Discord? is it feature creep? well no, teamspeak seems pretty content where its at, E-sports Aesthetic as it all is.
their common thread is that they all crave legitimacy.
Discord, TeamSpeak, and TeamSkype all want, above all else, to be taken seriously by the general public. because the fewer people who see your app as for 'somebody else', the more potential users customers
wait, what about Zoom? are they actually staying in their lane?
of course not, they're funded by venture capital after all. they literally can't stop making new features or this incredibly successful, ubiquitous, famous company will go bankrupt
it's time to "ditch" Venture Capital and VC Firms; in the side-of-the-road sense.