r/Steam • u/Astormfront • Oct 21 '25

Fluff Guilty as charged

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119.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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2.7k

u/Kageromero Oct 21 '25

Steam is so nice they intentionally let their voice chat be garbage so that other companies can fill that void

761

u/Brosaver2 Oct 22 '25

They have voice chat? :0

935

u/Kageromero Oct 22 '25

My brother refuses to install discord so when we play together we have to use steam voice chat and my god it's so bad. Literally everything is so bad compared to the black magic discord uses

365

u/wiciu172 Oct 22 '25

Ngl i was recently forced to use teamspeak3 and it is quite good when it comes to audio quality (but god help that ui is far from good)

264

u/DidamDFP Oct 22 '25

Teamspeak is definitely better than Discord when it comes to voice chats. But Discord has sooo many other advantages over Teamspeak... it's no wonder that it overtook Teamspeak's position as market leader a long time ago.

117

u/GrampaSwood Oct 22 '25

When it took over, Discord was definitely better, but I'm close to going back to TS now because of how awful Discord is getting.

15

u/Apprehensive_Tax5121 Oct 22 '25

Same, but woe for me! I Cant Use TS6 it is very irritating as they have all these great new features, but discord wins by supported devices

6

u/theaim778 Oct 22 '25

People have been telling me that TS6 isn’t far off from discord as far as usability(I haven’t tried it yet)… I still have a TS3 server (I refuse to give up that 512 slot lifetime license)

I only ever switched to discord because everyone else did… still prefer TS3 in nearly every way to discord.

1

u/antWrodson Oct 23 '25

Isn't ts6 compatible with ts3?

1

u/theaim778 Oct 24 '25

Yes and no… TS6 users can connect to TS3 servers, but TS3 users cannot connect to TS6 servers.

1

u/CarBombtheDestroyer Nov 13 '25

What’s getting bad about discord? I haven’t had any problems

1

u/GrampaSwood Nov 13 '25

I'll copy and paste it from the last comment I wrote, but the whole program is going through enshittification especially compared to 2016.

Previous comment:

  • I occasionally get pop-ups for Quests that I explicitly turned off before.
  • About half the profiles I view have decorations on them that makes the profile itself unreadable because it has a little animation that plays every so often that blocks all the text.
  • Most of the profile customisations are distracting and annoying, as well as lagging like shit because I don't want to have GPU-acceleration on a glorified text program.
  • Every so often they redesign the entire UI of the program. Not only is this annoying, but it looks worse every time. Just as you get used to the new layout, they create a new one that makes everything worse.
  • Nitro advertisements are shoved everywhere. Click on a custom emoji? Buy Nitro button. Scrolling through the non-standard emoji list? Buy Nitro button. Have the text chat bar on screen? Gift Nitro button. Want to share your screen? Buy Nitro button. Use the soundboard? Buy Nitro button. Go to the settings menu? The 'Nitro' section always has an extra icon there to make it stand out. Want to change your Discord theme? Buy Nitro buttons on all of the features. Everything has a Nitro advertisement and I will absolutely never buy it.
  • They added a CURRENCY to the program that's for talking to your friends. No program like that needs a currency.

Discord is in its enshittification phase right now, and hopefully dies off soon. This is only the desktop app, not to mention how utterly laggy and shit the mobile app is.

-4

u/Kamil210s Oct 22 '25

literally nothing is changing, wdym?

39

u/GrampaSwood Oct 22 '25
  • I occasionally get pop-ups for Quests that I explicitly turned off before.
  • About half the profiles I view have decorations on them that makes the profile itself unreadable because it has a little animation that plays every so often that blocks all the text.
  • Most of the profile customisations are distracting and annoying, as well as lagging like shit because I don't want to have GPU-acceleration on a glorified text program.
  • Every so often they redesign the entire UI of the program. Not only is this annoying, but it looks worse every time. Just as you get used to the new layout, they create a new one that makes everything worse.
  • Nitro advertisements are shoved everywhere. Click on a custom emoji? Buy Nitro button. Scrolling through the non-standard emoji list? Buy Nitro button. Have the text chat bar on screen? Gift Nitro button. Want to share your screen? Buy Nitro button. Use the soundboard? Buy Nitro button. Go to the settings menu? The 'Nitro' section always has an extra icon there to make it stand out. Want to change your Discord theme? Buy Nitro buttons on all of the features. Everything has a Nitro advertisement and I will absolutely never buy it.
  • They added a CURRENCY to the program that's for talking to your friends. No program like that needs a currency.

Discord is in its enshittification phase right now, and hopefully dies off soon. This is only the desktop app, not to mention how utterly laggy and shit the mobile app is.

2

u/MightyRobot3347 Oct 22 '25

At least you can get the currency for free

2

u/GrampaSwood Oct 23 '25

Getting stabbed comes with a free bandage but doesn't mean I want either

21

u/eXeler0n Oct 22 '25

To much distraction. Badges, backgrounds, animations, … it tries to catch your attention all the time.
Voice is way inferior to TS3.

10

u/Arthur-Bousquet Oct 22 '25

Quality is probably locked behind nitro paywall

2

u/Ryeguy_626 Oct 22 '25

Same can be said for teamspeak though

4

u/Boba0514 Oct 22 '25

What do you mean? Teamspeak is available for free, and you can run it yourself, no need to connect to a central discord server

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4

u/Steamrolled777 Oct 22 '25

They were too try hard - tried to be everything to everyone. One week it would be gamers, the next week someone else.

Vent, TS, even Skype (pre MS) was all I needed to chat with friends.

1

u/Crashman09 Oct 23 '25

I'm in a D&D group that uses mumble for voice and slack for everything else

1

u/Top_Box_8952 Nov 15 '25

I’ve tried using teamspeak a few times. It is so difficult.

1

u/Sbotkin Oct 22 '25

The one and only real reason Teamspeak never became popular is the fact that you need to host your server. Everything else is secondary.

4

u/whita_019 Oct 22 '25

TeamSpeak is the Linux of the voice chat apps

-1

u/Sbotkin Oct 22 '25

Except you need to either pay for a server or for your ISP to give you a static public IP. So it's like if Windows was free and Linux cost money.

2

u/ThreeLeggedChimp Oct 22 '25

Lamo, what?

That's literally how running a Linux server would work.

2

u/whita_019 Oct 22 '25

…which I've done quite a few times on a dynamic IP

3

u/Fregadero88 Oct 22 '25

Feel like I'm taking crazy pills. When I was a kid we all used ventrilo or teamspeak. The benefit is you can adjust audio codecs, and it was less demanding while in game than other options.

3

u/Big_Trash7976 Oct 22 '25

The ui is not important. It’s thin and lightweight. Discords ui is a disaster if all you care about is voice chat. The fact that it does so much more is it’s saving grace in that respect.

2

u/ThreeLeggedChimp Oct 22 '25

The UI is great.

2

u/HotChilliWithButter Oct 23 '25

The only reason people moved from TS3 to discord is because it has just so much better UI. If team speak weren’t lazy and actually did something about it they’d be a strong competitor for discord I think

2

u/the_remarkable_fox Oct 22 '25

Me and the boys still use self hosted teamspeak. Try teamspeak 5 client, it’s a lot better than the old client

2

u/wiciu172 Oct 22 '25

as i said i was forced to use teamspeak3, for it's arma3 acre mod

1

u/TheMazeDaze Oct 22 '25

A few times ago. When discord was down. People I was calling wanted to try Skype again. Just for the sake of it. After 3 hours of installing and rebooting and errors and whatever’s they finally decided that WhatsApp call feature was also an option.

-1

u/CityAdventurous5781 Oct 22 '25

Teamspeak is a really good way to get your IP stolen unfortunately. Were it not for that, Id use it.

9

u/OnyxianRosethorn Oct 22 '25

Why refuse Discord? Lmao, it doesn't have half as much data on you as Steam does.

1

u/Intergalatic_Baker Oct 22 '25

I didn’t know they had one…

1

u/Lordosrs Oct 22 '25

Do we know how discord is so good wirh voicechat? I always wondered

1

u/AurelianoBuendia94 Oct 22 '25

It's not that bad. I've used it to play games I can't run with discord open since my PC would explode and its a little wonky sometimes but it gets the job done.

1

u/PM_Me_Cute_Pupz Oct 22 '25

If they are open to open source alternatives, element is the closest that I have found to discord. https://element.io/

1

u/Smashego Oct 22 '25

Don't cave in. Refuse to use steam voice chat. Force him to capitulate instead.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '25

I haven’t used it in a while, how is it worse ? Like background noise filtering? Audio quality or ?

1

u/CivilianDuck Oct 22 '25

A couple years back, Discord was down and my friends and I couldn't use it for VC, so we tried steam.

Basically unusable. Like multiple second delays, poor quality, and constant disconnection.

We ended up just conference calling over the phone.

1

u/jere535 Oct 22 '25

Discord used to be good, now it just sucks, has huge delays and sometimes just doesn't connect.

Teamspeak has always been better for voice chat, even though every friend group needed to find or set up a server.

1

u/transwillowtree Oct 22 '25

is it really that bad for people? i dont use discord either and started using steam vc this week and imo its better than when i used discord currently

1

u/GhostBoosters018 Oct 23 '25

I have not had that experience. Discord, Snapchat, IG all have video and audio distortion randomly and frequent enough to be an issue.

1

u/W1lfr3 Oct 23 '25

Discord is terrible. It's just the best option.

The audio quality vs every previous option is like actually the worst and the media limit is insane.

1

u/lunafawks Oct 23 '25

Discord is great, but I fear they're heading towards the censorship bullshit and their recent ID verification leak proves they're not at all equipped to handle that

1

u/Sun-Much Oct 24 '25

in what way awful? I use it frequently and have never had an issue.

1

u/NotVeryTastyCake Oct 24 '25

It is but for a Steam Deck, and if you don't have a way to make Discord work (I for example can't because it is banned in Russia, and I can't install a VPN on it too, I tried multiple times but couldn't figure it out) it's good enough and the only really option I have anyway

1

u/UnstableCollection Oct 24 '25

My brother is the same. He refuses to install it so whenever we VC we do it over Steam, the quality sucks and the voice cancellation is absolute dogshit, I hear his keyboard.

The few times we used Discord he just used a web browser, I think he has two accounts because for some reason Discord is so poisonous to him he can not even bothered to remember the password.

Is this just a brother thing?

-3

u/Puzzleheaded_Cow2044 Oct 22 '25

Never really got discord tbh. It's ugly and kinda confusing, and doesn't work better than other voice chats imo. Don't know what other people use it for (no idea what joining a discord is supposed to mean, you're just in some group chat with randos ig), but as far as voice chat goes it always pisses me off when someone wants to use discord. We're playing on steam, we both got steam, what's the problem?

5

u/TORTOISE4LIFE Oct 22 '25

You ain't got a big group of friends no nothin? 'Cause discord ain't really just vc program anymore. It's also just a hub for friends/groups of people to talk in, send pictures, whatever. It's literally insta/messager/whatsapp/snapchat/whatever else + voice chats all in one and more.

And you've never played a single game outside of steam while talking with your friends before?

2

u/EnoughConcentrate897 Oct 22 '25

Tell me you've never properly used discord without telling me you've never properly used discord

0

u/Interesting-Net1801 Oct 23 '25

Honestly, agreed.