Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I think Microsoft would be a good steward of Discord. If Discord goes public I’d be concerned about ham-handed efforts to monetize the platform from shareholder pressure.
Anecdotally, Discord is one of those platforms I pay money to regardless of the perks. I use the service extensively almost every day. For me, it has combined the best assets of classic IRC, web forum, and Skype into one stack that my less nerdy friends are comfortable with. That’s huge.
When Google started being wishy-washy about the future of Hangouts, I convinced almost all of the people I interacted with there to switch to Discord for our communication. Most nights we’ll do a group video chat if not to play games, then just to hang out and shoot the breeze.
Not to mention it’s easily the best Electron-based program I’ve ever used. Microsoft could stand to learn a thing or two from Discord’s app developers. Especially the dumpster fire that is Teams.
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I agree with a lot of what knewman said in the previous comment.
Discord is a great platform.
I use it literally daily.
I pay for it (and a bit extra through server boosting).
Everyone I know is okay using it.
Also
I thoroughly enjoy solving problems on the platform by using the API to write bots for it.
It is always the first place I look for a community of any sort.
It’s got plenty of stability problems, but it’s stable enough to make it my default form of communication for literally everyone, including my wife.
I think Microsoft has proven itself capable at taking over an IP and letting it flourish. GitHub had a massive personal impact. LinkedIn is something I only ever heard of after the MS purchase. Mojang/Minecraft has gotten 100x better with Bedrock. Skype might get made fun of a lot, but it’s massively larger than it was before MS bought it (just not as larger as other platforms). Half a dozen game studios, not to mention the new ZeniMax acquisition, which I expect to operate well.
Long way to say that I think Microsoft has proven it’s chops at managing acquisitions in a way that benefits literally everyone (except those that refuse to use anything Microsoft owns…).
I also don’t think Discord want’s to sell. If they do I could see them being most comfortable with current day Microsoft, but I still don’t see it happening.
If it does happen, I’d like to see the failed Discord game store reworked to work with game pass. Game streaming added directly into the client, and a path for indy devs to sell their games, add to the game pass, or both.
I would like to see the drastically better Teams code sharing experience added to Discord, as well as a VSCode LiveShare feature (optional on a guild/server), and a simple view to see uploaded images and files in a channel.
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Also, I really appreciated the attempts of three people that have never used Discord to attempt to explain what it was and why people use it.
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I didn’t even think of that, I forgot Discord had a marketplace for a little while! Pretty sure I actually bought some games through there.
Microsoft adopting Discord as their digital games store would be an absolutely stellar move. They’re currently trying to pull their gaming stuff out of the built-in Windows Store app and into a dedicated Xbox app. The app is in beta, but it’s an absolutely abysmal experience with little signs of improvement. They’d be wise to use what Discord has already built.
Pretty sure game streaming already works in Discord? I was sharing my CoD session with some friends last night.
Yes!
I believe the Xbox app is using Electron anyway, since it’ll port to mobile, web, iOS, etc.
So it should be a plug in to Discord, and Discord has 99% of it wired up (minus any sort of marketing strategy that could compete with Fortnite news).
I finally listened to the whole episode, and I hope there’s more to come around a Discord server! I’d clean out a spot on my server list for this for sure.
When I found out TWiT didn’t have one (I looked years ago), I thought about starting an ‘unofficial fans’ server for it, but then thought about getting a cease and desist from Leo and decided against it.
I would love to see a Discord server set up to talk to others about the shows!
As a former visitor to the TWiT Brick House I was disappointed to hear @Leo say he won’t be welcoming guests again. I totally understand but it’s unfortunate that’s what it’s come to.
I hope when all this craziness subsides we’ll get another NYC meetup. I don’t know if @MaryJo stuck around for this but Paul vanquished a challenger at a prior meetup at Rattle n Hum.
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He says that now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he changes his mind in a couple of years. It’s easier to do when the pandemic isn’t in the front of everyone’s mind and the ad money comes back. I think he said he laid off 10 people because of the pandemic and the loss of ad money. That hurts any small business owner.
I totally love having visitors, and if it were up to me we would. Unfortunately, in order to do that we need an additional full time employee to sit at the front desk, welcome guests, get them to sign waivers, and escort them back. Thanks to a couple of a-holes who have issued death and bomb threats, that employee also has to be a bonded, armed, security guard. It’s not that I believe the threats, it’s that, as a business owner, I can’t disregard them.
We just can’t afford it right now. But you’re right, maybe some day!
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Leo, totally understand. Let’s hope that as we are rounding the corner on the pandemic things start to turn around for you.
You probably won’t be allowed to make people get vaccinated to come back to work. I remember reading that UK employers were considering it but I’m not sure that you’d legally be able to do that,
Even though you might prefer everyone to be vaccinated, there will be people who, due to medical reasons, cannot have the vaccine. Would you really tell those people they must work from home? Another point would be what if having the vaccine triggers your death, do you really want to be responsible for that?
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I’d love for the ads to come back so that Twit can afford the luxury of having the security guard on the staff. Thus allowing visitors back into the studio again. I have a friend who runs small wine camps for a few of us folks on the east side of the US through our burn camp network. I’ve always said when/if I make it out to California for Wine Camp I want to swing by Petaluma and visit the TWIT studios.
Again I understand where you are coming from as a business owner and I’m wishing the best for your business in the future.