Discord has been pissing me off recently, it’s buggy, with drop outs and weird behaviour when connected to WiFi.
That’s not Zwift’s fault… But, given that so many users rely on 3rd party apps to make their rides more social isn’t it about time Zwift stop leaning on other apps and make their own voice chat?
This would be much more user friendly. It’s not a clean solution to have so many users download and log in to additional apps every time they do a ride.
Thanks
Sam
On the other hand the more zwift tries to do the more things there are to go wrong. 
If more people use Discord then I would say yes there is a need. But when there are 13000 people riding and only 100 on discord then it does not look like there is a need yet.
Discord is so easy to setup and it is being used in so many online games.
Lets have Zwift fix the text chat first, so that group ride chat stay in group rides before having all the riders breathing in our headphones.
Interesting, what are your stats based on?
So it’s a bad idea because you don’t trust Zwift to be able to implement it properly?
Ben didn’t say it was a bad idea, just not Zwift’s core competency. I think Zwift should focus on the core product, fix all the bugs, fix racing, give us more roads to ride. Not try and duplicate what others can already do like discord, or streaming music and video.
It is a rough estimate, I follow about 15 Zwift discord channels, so when I ride I like to chat to those people.
So currently there are 13,800 people on Zwift. And 25 on the discord channels that I follow.
That seems about right, I was doing a DIRT Dadurday chase race a few weekends ago with about 500 people and only 4 were on the discord channel for the race.
It would be interesting to see how that number would potentially go up if the service were integrated into Zwift, I’m sure the fact that you need a 3rd party app is causing low numbers too.
I completely agree with that. But if you look back at racing in the early days 100’s of people raced event before there were starting pens or results.
So if the need was that high we would see lots more people use it even if it is a bit trick to setup.
I do like voice chat. So I am not against the idea.
I’m not against it either. I just go back to the focus on the core product. It’s like In and Out Burger, if you’ve ever had the pleasure to eat there, we don’t have any on the east side of the USA, only out west. They have like 3 things on the menu: burgers, fries, and shakes. The point is, do one thing really well, focus on your core competency.
I see what you’re saying but I respectfully disagree, I’d say the product is all about the social, compared to other competitors.
I also don’t understand how people can type and ride but maybe that’s just me.
LOL, O that is pretty easy with the right setup. I have a KB mounted on my handle bars. I answer a lot of Forum questions in the morning while warming up on my bike. 
Actually from Zwift’s point of view it’s extremely clean. As an admin for a gaming league and owner of a TeamSpeak server I have some experience here. To add chat, Zwift needs additional infrastructure and code to handle thousands of audio streams in hundreds of channels (so additional cost, bandwidth, coding, and hardware… [Discord is, of course, collecting your personal information and harvesting that data which offsets their expenses]) then needs to set up protocols to handle abuse, harassment, etc. Then they have to support the myriad of hardware that the users use… this is perhaps the only MMO I know of that spans PC/Mac/Apple TV/tablets/phones/etc. That’s gotta be a nightmare to support chat issues.
None of this is insurmountable, but when there are other chat options available, I’d rather see Zwift’s resources going into the core game than chat.
Also, I use Discord a lot… never had a problem with it. It works flawlessly, I just don’t like it much.
I think this is not a good Methode to measure the usage and need of a Voice Service.
I’m using also Voice Services like Discord for Zwift to communicate during a ride, but I only want to speak with my friends. So I use a small private Group for that. I think there are a lot of people like me, who using it privat.
Also I image a Voice Service with thousand of people really messy and can’t imagine that it would fun.
Maybe it’s also a reason there are not more persons.
I see the usage more for smaller groups.
I agree with the point of core competence. There are a lot of good Services to use for Voice Communication. But Maybe there are possibility’s to build some kind of integrations of external Voice Services, so that it is more comfortable to use them in combination with Zwift. Maybe someone with knowledge can say if there are possibility’s.