Skype died years ago. It was awful and rarely worked.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Only after Microsoft bought it tho
Yep, I was literally coming in to say that Skype was trashed the instant Microsoft bought it.
The merge with the Microsoft account was never done properly and it means I've got like 3 different accounts that don't fully work with Skype, Teams or whatever else you need Microsoft for.
Good thing I rarely need any of them
It was so good before then
... and that was the last Linux version of Skype.
I was trying to figure that out to. The original thing really got messed up. I swear you did not really need an account of any kind originally.
It was decent on computers but they never managed to make a good mobile app. And then Microsoft made it much worse on computers.
My god the unoptimized background pushing shit would just destroy my battery.
It was actually a really slick IM client for like a hot minute.
It was awful and rarely worked.
You may have confused it with Lync, the product derived from MSCommunicator and renamed Skype4biz.
Regular skype was awesome; less so after MS swapped P2P for C2S but meh. Still better than teams, which, ironically, is where skype4biz went.
Skype? Good?
I mean... It basically had no competition in the beginning. Also, its SILK codec was pretty good for voice, and without it, Opus would be worse for speech (Opus is basically two different codes working in tandem, SILK and CELT).
A long time ago, it was actually the best
*The only, kinda
When Skype was new it had FREE calling to land lines. My friends and I would make so many fun calls. So many fun times. Then Microsoft bought it and killed the free calling.
You could do that with net2phone using the internet in 1996. Skype doing it 7 years later wasn't that amazing.
Thankfully, we are beyond long distance phone calls (mostly). In the 80's we did something a little different: traded lists of long distance phone codes and made free calls that way.
Before the dark times... Before the empire
Bohonkey.
Skype was good?
Skype was far from good, but it was the first for me, and I have some nostalgia for it.
Kinda like Zoom during covid.
skype was never good.
skype was never good.
I used it daily. 100% usable. Nothing came close; really. And I used pidgin to consolidate remote YIM, ICQ, AOL, MSN and Jabber contacts.
Yeah this is a new gender neutral restroom.
in addition to up and down arrows,we need a '?' button
Best compliment I've received.
People seeing Skype through rose tinted glasses now that it's dead
Untrue. I regretted its death, Teams and Zoom aren't as simple and clear.
And my client still works. I conversed with a teams contact at 5:39 today.
Copilot isn't working, though:
I remember calling my friends on Skype using my PSP and going βwow, this is the future!β
Fuck I sat there for a good 30 seconds trying to figure out who Sky PE was...
It wasn't particularly good but when it came out it was the coolest game in town. They just failed to keep up with everything that came after it, and nearly burned it down trying to.
Me too, that kerning is just awful
Snicker, first time? Guess yβall never used ICQ.
Uh-oh!
5-digit ID.
And here I am today, still using IRC.
I also occasionally refer to slack as IRC. And then some of the nerdier colleagues snicker.
Man I had a pang of nostalgia and guilt. Google reader was pretty good, and I forgot it existed.
Never forget Google Reader.
Wasn't pre-MS Skype from a company that previously ran a sketchy P2P network that stole your CPU cycles?
Nope. You may have them confused.
You sure? Quoth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa:
Kazaa and FastTrack were originally created and developed by Estonian programmers from BlueMoon Interactive[3] including Jaan Tallinn and sold to Swedish entrepreneur Niklas ZennstrΓΆm and Danish programmer Janus Friis (who were later to create Skype and later still Joost and Rdio). Kazaa was introduced by the Dutch company Consumer Empowerment in March 2001, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks typified by the shutdown of Napster in July 2001. Skype itself was based on Kazaa's P2P backend, which allowed users to make a call by directly connecting them with each other.[4]
...
In 2006 StopBadware.org identified Kazaa as a spyware application.[19] They identified the following components:
- Cydoor (spyware): Collects information on the PC's surfing habits and passes it on to Cydoor Desktop Media.
- B3D (adware): An add-on which causes advertising popups if the PC accesses a website which triggers the B3D code.
- Altnet (adware): A distribution network for paid "gold" files.
- The Best Offers (adware): Tracks user's browsing habits and internet usage to display advertisements similar to their interests.
- InstaFinder (hijacker): Redirects URL typing errors to InstaFinder's web page instead of the standard search page.
- TopSearch (adware): Displays paid songs and media related to a Kazaa search.
- RX Toolbar (spyware): The toolbar monitors all sites visited with Microsoft Internet Explorer and provides links to competitors' websites.
- New.net (hijacker): A browser plugin that allowed users to access several of its own unofficial Top Level Domain names, e.g., .chat and .shop. The main purpose of this was to sell domain names such as www.record.shop which is actually www.record.shop.new.net (ICANN did not allow third-party registration of generic top level domains until 2012).
This was specifically why I was avoiding Skype 20+ years ago. They were sketchy as fuhhhhhhh
Haven't used Skype for years to talk to friends or family, but kept using it until now when I needed to call some place in my home country (usually banks) by "real" phone call, because support via internet either sucks or doesn't exist at all. Now looking for alternatives...