My main thought about discord is that the UX doesn’t work well for me. It is primarily focused on “communities” which I’ve never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a “server” that we use for chat during games because everyone knows it but then I have to do a couple clicks to switch to my friends “server” to see a new message, then a couple clicks back. Having two conversions in different communities is incredibly painful. There is also just as much awkwardness if you want to swap between DMs as well.
For me I much prefer the Element, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp… approach where I just have rooms in a big long list (or sorted in a way that works for me). I don’t like this Discord, Slack forced 2-level hierarchy. I actually think Matrix+Element is killing it here with Spaces. Spaces provide a lot of the good parts of the Discord Server or Slack Workspace while still allowing you to get a big long list of rooms so that switching between a DM, room in one community and a room in a different one. You can even just link all of the rooms you are interested in to a private space to organize them however you want. I can’t wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.
I also don’t see the draw of separated voice and text channels. You always end up needing to share links or images anyways and have to awkwardly explain what channel you dumped it in. Eventually this leads to the #voice-spam channel which is effectively creating a voice+text channel with an awkward UX because the software doesn’t actually know that they are linked.
I also don’t get why people like doing a lot of communication in chat over things like websites and forms. Especially for communities like speedrunning where it is actually nice to have documentation on strategies. They end up getting asked the same question every day then get mad that people didn’t read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isn’t visible to Google). I guess it does create a “friendlier” atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.
But these are all UX arguments that don’t work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is “wrong” here. Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to avoid it.
UX aside I don’t like that it is centralized. I definitely try to stick to decentralized services where possible so that I am not beholden to the whim of a single operator.
Most of the other complains I see don’t bother me:
phone number requirement: IIUC this is up to the mods of a particular community. I’m 99% sure that Discord doesn’t have my number. I don’t blame Discord for providing the option. It is also hard to blame mods for using it when it clearly solves real problems that they have. (It significantly reduces spam)
Pedos, MAPs, groomers, razor sharp edgy kids, cyberbullying etc: Meh, I’m a fan of free speech. These people are going to chat somewhere so I don’t see why it can’t be the same software that I use. It isn’t like discord is a single chat room where you need to see all of this stuff. Just don’t hang out in communities that allow this stuff.
I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people can’t figure it out quickly without any help. That is an important point for any popular service. Unfortunately Element Android is still about 50% unguided success rate from my experience. I hope they keep streamlining it.
My main thought about discord is that the UX doesn’t work well for me. It is primarily focused on “communities” which I’ve never had the desire to organize my life into. I have a “server” that we use for chat during games because everyone knows it but then I have to do a couple clicks to switch to my friends “server” to see a new message, then a couple clicks back. Having two conversions in different communities is incredibly painful. There is also just as much awkwardness if you want to swap between DMs as well.
For me I much prefer the Element, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp… approach where I just have rooms in a big long list (or sorted in a way that works for me). I don’t like this Discord, Slack forced 2-level hierarchy. I actually think Matrix+Element is killing it here with Spaces. Spaces provide a lot of the good parts of the Discord Server or Slack Workspace while still allowing you to get a big long list of rooms so that switching between a DM, room in one community and a room in a different one. You can even just link all of the rooms you are interested in to a private space to organize them however you want. I can’t wait for them to have a bit more time to polish the UX here.
I also don’t see the draw of separated voice and text channels. You always end up needing to share links or images anyways and have to awkwardly explain what channel you dumped it in. Eventually this leads to the
#voice-spamchannel which is effectively creating a voice+text channel with an awkward UX because the software doesn’t actually know that they are linked.I also don’t get why people like doing a lot of communication in chat over things like websites and forms. Especially for communities like speedrunning where it is actually nice to have documentation on strategies. They end up getting asked the same question every day then get mad that people didn’t read the 8th pinned entry in the 3rd FAQ room (which of course isn’t visible to Google). I guess it does create a “friendlier” atmosphere in theory since everyone is constantly helping everyone, but again, not my preference.
But these are all UX arguments that don’t work for me. They appear to resonate well with a wide group of people so I guess it is me who is “wrong” here. Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to avoid it.
UX aside I don’t like that it is centralized. I definitely try to stick to decentralized services where possible so that I am not beholden to the whim of a single operator.
Most of the other complains I see don’t bother me:
I think the main upside is that it is easy enough to use that most people can’t figure it out quickly without any help. That is an important point for any popular service. Unfortunately Element Android is still about 50% unguided success rate from my experience. I hope they keep streamlining it.