I have no idea who is talking, what is being talked about, are you and how are you suppose to follow anything, how to find information that took place 1 min ago and let alone few weeks ago, how each message somehow takes so much vertical space.
The UI contrast doesn't help, as there is none. Everything just looks like vomit of UI elements on page, that's what came to be the interface of discord.
But people seem to be using it? who is using it? and how are they managing to 'get' it?
It feels like artistic rendition of millions of people chats combined into one, but meant to be appreciated from distance not to be interacted with.
Any important announcement like release notes will be in announcements. Announcement channels have no discussion directly inside them.
The conversation channels are like message rooms of old. Usually the conversation channels have important or common questions answered in pinned posts. Unless you want to talk now, they are kind of useless. Also you need to spend some time in them before you know people and how best to use them. You can jump in and ask a question, you might get an answer.
It's a power use interface, and takes some time to learn. Once you learn it, you will miss features in other apps.
You join a programming Discord, there's a general, meme, spam, announcements channels, like on that gaming discord, like on my friends' Discord, etc.
It's incredibly hard to navigate. And they're complete siloes. Previously someone on #programming could join #friends-channel. Now you need to explicitly invite them. So there's no cross-pollination possible.
It's nothing like IRC.
Getting one’s account stolen on IRC because of NickServ was common occurrence with new users.
I couldn't care less about my ephemeral IRC account getting used (not sure why you call it stolen, if it's just there for anyone to take) by someone else, it's for sure much less important to me than sharing my email AND phone with some corporation, especially considering email would be more than enough to verify the user.
Discord tries to make chat searchable so they encourage splitting conversations to 1000 channels, and a more asynchronous way of replying. It s a searchable live news feed rathr than a chat transcript.
IRC is simple live stream, if something is not noted immediately, it gets lost and you have to repeat it. It's meant to be ephemeral
IRC frontends can be and are hosted on web pages, but that's not the same thing.
Discord is hosted on port 443, uses HTTPS as a transport protocol, and is entirely a web application.
anyway, I feel that discord is meant to be just as ephemeral as plain IRC is, given that nearly every IRC server I have ever used automatically logged everything that happened to a searchable web interface.
Maybe you joined a discord with too much traffic. But I'm in the most popular discord that covers my entire state and #general can go hours without anyone talking.
If you think its too complicated, maybe you're over thinking things.
For any kind of social tool, there's presumably a reason you're using it, so go pursue that reason. For me, Discord is primarily about casual competitive gaming. It helps organize races, tournaments, etc.
I wouldn't execute their software on my machine for money. They may not deserve this, just my feeling and opinion.
As it stands I can't say I see where you're coming from. It's a chat room, or really a series of chat rooms. If you have something to say or ask you find the appropriate channel and post a message there. If someone needs your attention specifically they'll @ you.
I'd say a chat room like this is strictly transient. Think "call", not "e-mail". Don't expect it to serve as an index of information, just treat it as more-or-less real-timely communication.
And there-in lies the rub. It's a medium that asks us to use it synchronously, when it has none of the supporting features that make synchronous communication work.
Clicking on a channel name normally shows you the content of that channel. But clicking on some channel names automatically start an audio connection, and if you're on several Discord servers with many dozens of channels each, it's easy to miss which are which. Once the audio connection is started, assuming you realize what happened, the method for dropping the connection is a single unintuitive (for me, and apparently others) icon. If you instead switch away from the channel, thinking that just as the text for a channel disappears when you switch away from it, perhaps so does the audio, then you'll remain connected.
If you're focused on what you're doing, it's relatively easy to see what's happening and undo it. The icon is a monochromatic old-school phone handset with a tiny X in the corner, and recent versions of the Discord desktop client now include a reasonably large message on the lower-left telling you that you're part of an audio call. But if you're treating Discord like another chat app, then it is easy to accidentally end up broadcasting audio without realizing it, and I think Discord's design is to blame.
My comment about Discord’s inculpability was quite unfair anyway because even though I use Discord, I’ve never used the voice channel. It’s foolish of me to make that comment.
On another note, I wonder how many times those kinds of accidents had happened? And if it’s relatively high, is Discord aware of them?
To function well - leave all the channels you're not actively interested in. You'll be pinged if anyone needs you there. Turn off notifications for things you don't have to know about immediately. (basically all non-@ messages)
For conversations, just treat it like walking into a room - of course you don't know what's been going on while you were gone. You can scroll up some arbitrary number of messages and get to catch up though if you want to.
That works for Slack, but you can’t leave channels in Discord. That to me is what makes it too busy. I’m in servers with tons and tons of channels and I get pinged for every single inappropriately used @here.
You can also change this for channel groups or entire servers.
Having people on #your-channel referencing something written on #other-channel that you tried to avoid is not leaving.
It seems like everyone is promoting their discord servers these days, and some to the point of only Discord (or maybe Reddit) and nothing else.
It's even worse when a large part of the community is in a different time zone. I just come back every day with too big a pile of discussions and no way for me to make sense of what happened.
I understand the sentiment that I'm not supposed to read everything, but that's just not how I roll.
As a great example of a chat service that works well for me, take a look at Zulip. The UI takes some time of getting used to, but the way how all conversations are grouped into "topics" makes it so much easier to filter.
Discord threads could be used in a similar way, but they just never are. I blame it on the UI.
So, you're looking for a forum. :)
Zulip is more of a hybrid between a forum and a chat service, and I think it does that really well.
1. Turned off all notifications
2. Left / muted all the channels I didn't care about
3. Use the web app only
The need to mute is annoying, and the search function is garbage, but otherwise Discord is pretty great.
The way I manage Discord is: 1) Join as few servers as possible. There are even some servers I will join, chat, and leave. Customer support servers are a common case for that. 2) 99% of servers you join total mute. Only go to them when there is an intentional reason to go to them. 3) There are maybe 1 or 2 servers that are "my home". The close friends Discord. The Discord server that I run. Places like that. Even in those places I mute the channels I don't regularly participate in.
In the end, even though I am in 15ish servers, I only have 15ish unmuted channels that have any significant amount of activity. It's not any different than having irssi open with 15 channels across the bottom. Hardly unmanageable.
Now with Discord serving as the platform for massive communities and interest groups outside of gaming a lot of people will have their first experience be a clusterfuck server with dozens each of channels, roles, voice channels, rules, emotes, etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is but I think that's how we got here.
I just ignore all the power user tools and the stuff I need seems pretty well exposed. When I start a game, a little thing comes up asking if I want to stream it, etc. It all just seems to do what I want while ignoring everything else.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the program. I prefer the UI of Telegram for basic chat and media but Discord does communities better.
Also for OP: you can right click on any server or channel you don't need all the time and mute it so you don't get notification spam.
In Discord, DMs are outside of servers, or rather they're on your server, which has the appearance of being outside any server. So all DMs are together, unrelated to any of the servers you may know someone from.
you aren't meant to read it all, I think people miss that as well.
Channel muting (and category muting, and server muting) is very important.
I also recommend visiting the "Appearance" and "Accessibility" sections in the settings: perhaps you prefer "Compact" mode, or would like to disable all animations (including GIFs).
I’ve zero clue what the hell is going on in that interface.
Long conversations happen in what seem like ephemeral spaces. There’s a bazillion channels… I don’t know where my attention should be.
Apparently the discord channel for the sub involves a lot of drama and BS but hell if I see it / I don’t really care…
I might end up just not being a mod so I don’t have to figure it out.
Ironically, MS Teams suffers from this as well, as do some IRC clients that try to aggregate interfaces on top of the network+channel concept.
Most classic chat clients used to have a user-managed interface for 'people' and 'groups' and while the service decides what a user is, everything else is left to the user, and all the concepts of communication are inside each 'chat' instead of extracted into the main interface. It's almost like the hierarchy is broken down where elements of different detail level are just mixed together. Not even Internet forum software is messy that way.
On Slack you can get the same issue when you use Slack Grid, and in certain scenarios with non-local participants as well (i.e. Slack Connect).
As for the idea of using it as a social network or giant chat room, that’s not something I’m interested in to begin with, largely because of this terrible UX.
In an office setting (whether remote or not) , I think something like Discord or Slack is useful. I'm on the clock, and I know others are, too. I'm there for several hours of my day and I always have the chat window up.
Outside of that type of environment, chat room style discussion don't fit well with my life. I'm busy and I value asynchronous discussion, so I want to spend 15 minutes catching up on whatever happened, say whatever I need to say, and then not be present until the next day. Trying to make that work in Discord is fatiguing if the community is active. If I'm feeling overwhelmed by life, I start trimming things that send me notifications on my phone, and Discord is always the first to be culled. Currently my Discord app sends me 0 notifications, which is the way I need it, but it's not what people tend to expect. It's hard for me to participate.
I get that Discord/Slack are not at all analogous to forums, I just wish more communities gravitated to forums instead Discord. Discord obviously has its place.
Once you mute very nearly every channel and just pop in manually to see what you want, Discord works very well!
This makes me realize something: between the 50+ channel discord servers and the twitter X/20 chain posts, people are slowly rediscovering the superior usability of the "old internet", i.e. traditional forums and blogs. Each discord channel is one long poorly-indexed thread, and each twitter chain post is a blog. People are naturally gravitating back toward these traditional patterns because they work very well for the kind of communicating we do on the internet.
Add a voice chat channel to a traditional forum and you have discord with better usability (and index-ability). Put your twitter chain post on your Substack or regular blog and now it's infinitely more readable.
I guess the problem with going from twitter to blog though is that you lose discoverability and the momentum and network effect that twitter has.
And with discord, it's just visually more appealing than both traditional forums and IRC, especially with all the vector cartoon animals and soft edges. I suppose if a traditional forum started rounding its corners, adding anime kitsune vector art, and using several shades of purple, maybe they'd become popular again. That and add some voice channels.
This complaint or descriptions of this experience and Discord and other platforms use comes up around here anytime someone asks 'what happened to forums' or why are we using reddit and stuff to answer questions etc.
> I have no idea who is talking, what is being talked about, are you and how are you suppose to follow anything, how to find information that took place 1 min ago and let alone few weeks ago
You tell what is being talked about by reading the conversation. And information that is old is not relevant. Chats are basically ephemeral. You can search for info if you know relevant keywords.
> how each message somehow takes so much vertical space.
User Settings -> Appearance: * Message display: Compact * Adjust chat font scaling * Adjust space between message groups
Discord also has a “inbox” summarising new posts since you last checked, along with “mentions” which lists posts mentioning you or any role you have eg @here, @everyone, @sunos_admins, @team_orange_rocket)
There are many tools to help cope with information overload. What I have mentioned here are just the low hanging fruit
I dislike the discord UI as well FWIW. But it might be a feature and not a big. I think it’s designed for chaotic ephemeral informal impermanent communication.
Someone else here mentioned it’s a power use interface. This makes sense too - you’re not supposed to feel at home immediately…
It's a gamer-focused UI, if anything.
Old UIs from the days of text-based Internet were also 'flat'- the main difference is that Discord supports voice/video, no?
I walk away from most OSS projects that use it for discussions.
I also belong to two small (10-20 people) servers that are just friend groups. The message volume is low enough that I can follow all conversations 100% when I want to. It's just like a replacement for group chats/email threads.
Discord has a compact mode https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/217047657-How-...
"Servers" are supposed to be identifiable just by their image. Great idea when you're in a lot of them and visit them rarely.
Adding someone or joining a server has become less hellish recently as they combined some things in a general search, but it's still not exactly nice.
The whole @everyone thing is a mess. No, I don't want to be notified for this funny cat picture.
I don't open it anymore so I don't know about now, but I used to regularly disable all notifications just for it to keep turning them on and bombarding me with them.
You're calling a means of interacting with users Clyde? Well that's weird since it makes it hard to tell it's Discord talking.
Discord is a piece of software that gives me empathy for (generally old) people who dread using computers because they just don't get how the hell they work. I generally don't have problems with anything else, only Discord.
For context: I'm a part of generation Z, but not a gamer.
It'll be ok. Just ride it out. Everyone's just riding theirs, too . . .
