I think if ANY big tech company acquires Discord then it'll only go downhill. It got so popular for allowing so much freedom and creativity among communities, while being completely free (not counting Nitro). I feel like a big tech company will put a lot of features behind a pay wall of some kind. I'd actually be more surprised if things remained relatively unchanged if one of those companies acquires Discord, but it never goes well.
I agree it seems bad for Discords future. I have been activly trying to move to Guilded and so I am not sure I will mind all that much what happens to Discord. I like Discord in that it works and lots of people I know use it but to be honest it was never all that amazing. Even Guilded as cool as it is has a lot of room to grow. I hope some day we look back at all these chat programs and laugh at how bad they are.
starblight said: I hope some day we look back at all these chat programs and laugh at how bad they are.
I'm already 'looking back' LoL. I started ingame voice chat almost 20 years ago with Ventrillo in AC. The 'cool kids' were using Teamspeak, but Vent used less bandwidth and would lag my game client (some people actually DID play MMORPGs on AoL dialup) *shudder*
Jothany said:starblight said: I hope some day we look back at all these chat programs and laugh at how bad they are.I'm already 'looking back' LoL. I started ingame voice chat almost 20 years ago with Ventrillo in AC. The 'cool kids' were using Teamspeak, but Vent used less bandwidth and would lag my game client (some people actually DID play MMORPGs on AoL dialup) *shudder*
Started with Ventrillo? Newbie. I started with Roger Wilco.
Roger wilco was one of the first voice over IP programs released back in '99, a month or so after EQ released in March. I used it myself until Ventrilo was released a couple of years later.
Vandraad said:Started with Ventrillo? Newbie. I started with Roger Wilco.
Well yeah, I never heard of Roger Wilco either.
But I did start learning to program in 1972 on a Digital Equipment PDP-1145 mainframe using a teletype machine serving as a computer terminal in my high school. So only half a newbie :)
Back in Vanilla EQ we used to use something called 'Battle Chat' which was similar to Roger Wilco and may have actually used the same engine as Roger Wilco. Not sure which came first though. We were all on Dialup back then though and so we couldn't host more than 8 - 10 people without it getting to overloaded and people started breaking up when speaking.
There was no official hosting so you had to run your own servers, and since none of us had access to high bandwidth servers we had to run local hosts on our home computers.
As for Discord being 'Aquired'; We already have http://Guilded.gg as a very similar Discord clone although with some extra features, and it's very likely that others will pop up with very similar usage and features to compete.
Discord itself origionally was mearly competition to things like Skype, Ventrillo, Teamspeak and Mumble. So if Microsoft does purchase Discord and it goes down hill, it will be very likely that something else would pop up to give them competition and be less corporately controlled.