Discord proximity chat

[bvisness]

Large voice calls don't work very well. They seem to either result in 10 people talking over each other, or two people talking while everyone else is muted.

In my opinion this occurs because real-life conversations don't really happen that way. When 20 people go out to a restaurant, they don't try to have a single conversation across the whole table. Instead, they naturally cluster into smaller conversations. This is aided by the convenient real-life property that people farther away from you are quieter.

Game and VR social spaces solve this problem rather well with proximity audio. By embedding your avatar in a physical space, you bring back the same kind of conversational dynamics that occur in real life, and allow many more people to join a virtual conversation.

However, I've always thought that the "game" construct is pretty unnecessary. Why do I need to create a character and a virtual space? Couldn't I just...drag my avatar closer to someone else's avatar? I imagine something like the ARMS matchmaking lobby, where players' avatars wander around and interact with each other as they engage in matches:

Furthermore, Discord already does full client-side audio mixing. Users can individually change the volume of any other user. So, could you make a browser extension that tracks the 2D positions of everyone in a Discord call and lets you drag people around in some kind of simple 2D space? That way, we could perhaps get proximity audio very easily on top of Discord's already solid voice call system.

[bvisness]

Previous Discord discussion of this idea: https://discord.com/channels/239737791225790464/239737791225790464/966816117861548063