Discord's down (I told you so)

[starseerdrgn]

Okay, I don't normally do this sort of "I told you so" with anything, but... You know how some people seem to think that Discord is the real answer to Skype's problems? I mean, with some people, it's like the holy app to beat all other chat apps. And yet, it keeps going down and having problems. Massive growing pains, feature creep, and the like.

I said quite a while back that I felt deja vu with this, and of course I did. People pushing others to go from XFire and Mumble to Skype, and from various other platforms to Telegram and Discord... You get the drill. This is something that keeps happening, and will keep happening as long as people are 1) unhappy with the imperfection of their current chat app, and 2) willing to buy into the hype that "something new is usually better".

People, all chat apps will suck in some form or another. There will be outages, and often major outages. There will be features where the company behind it will just give the middle finger to some of its users so they can consolidate their development (Skype with Linux users, Discord with people trying to use Firefox instead of their app). And eventually, if the app is good enough, they'll be bought by someone that most people hate, leading to another app trying to take over. Some people will stay, most people will practically drag their friends at gunpoint to using the new system.

Of course, the big companies are partially to blame as well. Microsoft fucked everyone over when they killed MSN/Windows Live Messenger (something with a very good reputation) in favor of Skype (with a failing reputation), and Google keeps fucking all of their users over with Google Talk (open XMPP-based thing with very good reputation) becoming Google Hangouts (which still had somewhat good reputation), then giving a middle finger to those users by saying "This is for business now. Use our phone-oriented Duo and Allo apps, since they're new and you like new shiny things."

(Aside: Google can't fucking do anything social!!! Seriously, never trust anything regarding social from Google. They will always find a way to fuck it up, sometimes intentionally out of spite for the previous project management.)

This is a cycle that's happened since the days of AIM and ICQ. It's complete and utter bullshit, but it's not something anyone can really stop. Not unless you can educate a large number of people about the fact that this keeps happening, and that it's frustrating beyond reason.

 

And people wonder why I prefer XMPP, IRC, and Mumble... They're open, you can set up your own, and outages will only be the fault of you, your hardware, or your ISP/hosting provider. Just saying.