Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app
A new mobile refresh includes performance boosts, a separate tab for servers and messages, “Midnight” mode, and more.
Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don't want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
Yeah, it really bugs me that it's basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don't reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it's about 50-100 ish people interested in it. But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and found it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I'm happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I'll give it another go from time to time
Edit: grammar
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Jup, it's terrible. Where information goes to die. I wish devs would not use it as much as they do.
You nailed it.
Don't even get me started on people actively chatting in public discord servers
I'm always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can't imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they're trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
It's an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers, voice chats, kitchen sink ....
I just can't force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it's so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
Happened with doujin style, it used to be a great site to search for indie albums but then they moved to discord and now it's a nightmare to browse unless you already know what you are looking for.
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
EDIT: don’t get why the downvotes. It’s a question, not a statement.
Good point, and I think there isn't a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.
They have forums within discord. Searching takes moments.
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It's not an improvement IMHO.
Discord does not allow you to search well. Discord's search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).
Bullshit. Its on a quest to monetize the platform, thats all its doing.
If it wanted to be a better communication platform it wouldnt be adding all this pointless superfluous shit that exists only for nickle and diming.
Yeah the app is bloated as shit
And somehow making the UI worse every single update. HOW?
Taking lessons from Valve and steam, I suspect.
I genuinely don't understand how these companies go "Okay, we have a very elegant, simple, sleek, and fast interface here..Heres what we should do, we should completely fuck it up, make it slower, and make it require more resources for absolutely no reason"
As long as they allow for free streaming and file sharing, they will need to monetize. That stuff gets real expensive real fast.
idk how else to put it, but discord feels like an information black hole with adhd
Once it scrolls past the top of the screen it's gone.
Once one person gets a bit too giddy and posts 2 memes, your chat is now all garbage. Half of the people involved will have muted it already.
The UI/UX is a convoluted mess. Whenever I say this elsewhere I get downvoted to oblivion and people tell me you just gotta learn it.
Well, yea, that's the problem. I shouldn't have to "learn" a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
There's not even a useful intro the first time you launch it. Yea, it shows you what the buttons are for, but never explains the concept behind things. Guess you're supposed to intuit that stuff?
What do you mean? Having three seperate settings buttons with options divvyed between them makes perfect sense
Well, yea, that's the problem. I shouldn't have to "learn" a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
Counterpoint: vim is very well liked for it's UI, but there's a very steep learning curve.
To your point, though, the learning process ideally ought to be seamless and linear; each new thing you can do with the application should be mostly obvious given what you already know about the UI, not force you to learn everything from scratch or do work to learn it (unless you're into that kind of thing). I don't think Discord is the worst offender of this rule, but they could make it better.
I do agree with this, however I also have to say being someone who's been on the canary branch and has the newest version of the new UI once you learn it it's so much better mobile wise doing literally anything it just makes sense and goes with the mobile flow a lot better then the old ui was, plus it has a side bar which is really nice... The beginning new ui with the guildbar at the bottom was atrocious though, so glad they scrapped that model.
Sorry how did it steal communities? If communities migrated to Discord, the communities saw value in using it.
It was a great messaging app, before all the extra bullshit was added to it. The focus was on doing one thing, and doing it right. Now they do 35 different things, and abandon them in favor of mtx for profiles
If they could stop trying to foist nitro on me that would be great.
Bandwidth isn't free, they gotta make money somehow
P2P is the answer, Matrix has been doing this for a few years
I thought about getting Nitro once, till I noticed it was a monthly subscription
It's a single ad.
Every time the damn thing opens. That’s too much
Walled-gardens are fundamentally bad for communication. Discord is not a solution, it’s a problem.
We had IRC for years. Still do, for that matter. But we have to do every goddamn thing over ports 80 and 443 now.
I miss the early days of Discord. Nowadays it's just a lot of advertising for their Nitro service.
Not even their marketing videos are fun anymore. Why can't they just bring Zencha back?
You usually know a company is slowly going to shit when they start to be serious and stop doing fun in their products and ads. Then you know lawyers and shareholders and people who think you can only do business with a straight face started to take over the company. Which is just sad.
As long as they don't start adding actual third party adverts in their 'free' version, I don't care how much they advertise Nitro.
I keep getting stressed about my trial running out, then remembering I didn't start one, then reading closely and hating them bc it's just my window to start a trial ending, the 10th window this month.
I mean, it's a single notification that only comes up when you launch discord from scratch. It's not really intrusive.
I get them constantly in the form of a new message.
"Better messaging app" my bubble ass
Keeps changing ui every month for no reason Keeps adding disgracting prolife fluff that looks like shit. (Neither can be turned off) Support is abbysmal. Linux client is garbage. (Screenshare anyone) Bloated mess. Hates mods and custom clients. Too big ( had a server of 3k people, know how many people I got to switch?90) Their team us a bunch of pedophile furry porn lovers.
Fuck. Them.
tell me more about this Mods and Custom Clients? What should I search?
Look up betterdiscord
Armcord
I literally don't even install it on Linux because the screen share works more often through Firefox than through their native app. That doesn't mean it works consistently, and there's never any sound, but at least I can sometimes make it work in the Firefox webapp. The native app is worthless.
When did the UI change? I'm on discord pretty much constantly
They keep adding a ton of random shit to the app that constantly clutters the screen. Nobody gives a fuck about nitro or the constant flashing, in your face animations they’ve been adding recently
Yesterday
Are they? How? This article doesn't explain anything about functioning, just some design changes.
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it's not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don't understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it's spyware. The company doesn't have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that's not economically sustainable at all. I don't understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that's wrong with Discord: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
The problem is convincing other people to switch as well. There's no point in me using Matrix if all of the people I want to communicate with only want to use Discord.
But hope this would be the last time we would need to do it.
I don't understand why Revolt decided to reinvent the wheel and not use Matrix. They could've been a great alternative server and/or UI.
Why don't you ask the Matrix team why they decided to re-invent XMPP and add a stupid HTTP API?
I agree
Sadly, can't get my server to make the jump. Doesn't help that Revolt is missing a few features and Matrix just... Doesn't work at all for the flow of the server
Right now a bridge bot does heavy lifting for when Discord does piss off enough users to cause everybody to jump over
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
it's a good message app, it's how I stay in contact with the person I asked for commission artwork. So you are wrong
Good may mean different things for different people. Lemmy user base are mostly those who outside of pure practical usage look at how service treats users.
Here's an idea to start making it better: ditch fucking electron. There are alternatives that won't need complete code rewrite or language change (tauri, neutralino). Better yet, actually go ahead with a full language change and pick Dart + Flutter, that shit is crossplat.
But we all know they won't, because fuck you, "ram is cheap". Good luck upgrading the ram on your phone.
It run fine on my 7 years old phone. Sure, native would be better, but electron mean they can make the website, the windows app and the android app all at once. So it's worth it. Everyone on Lemmy is a programmer, so you should know how hard it is to support multiple version of a service with as much active developpement as discord.
The point of Tauri and Neutralino is to do what Electron does without needing to bundle a whole, isolated chrome browser to make it pretend it is a native app
They used to be native with Kotlin on Android and IDK on iOS. Now they use React Native, which isn’t really electron or native. I’m not sure if it bundles a browser but it sounds like the same as Tauri and Neutralino
Is it becoming FOSS or supporting any meaningful level privacy?
They need to try way harder.
Just curious. I have Signal, Element (FOSS version of Discord), GroupMe, Slack, Snapchat, Messenger, I have tried WhatsApp, Guilded, Telegram. I have tried a sleuth of messaging apps over the years from Web based, to niche apps that don't exist anymore, things that would let you message users around the world. I have even tried things like taste buds and app for users with specific tastes in music.
No matter what the case I find I prefer Discord. All of my groups and communities are there. I am 28 and my friends and being weird kids at heart use things like Discords soundboard for stupid annoying sounds, to stream our gameplay, and to even venture out to our own communities for things we love. Point being Discord has had all of what I personally want and enjoy for years and more. I mean I loved Google Plus when it was around because of the communities. I use Reddit because of the communities for things I enjoy and I wish Lemmy had more of them for that matter.
My only question being, what do you think they need more off to already be better than the platform most people consider the best? Encryption? Not to charge money for subs? It's not that Discord can't get better. It's that I end up on Lemmy looking for alternatives and see comments like this and people will talk about FOSS, cool I found things like amephyst and Element for my fill of FOSS apps. Even down to niche FOSS apps that I love for other things Lemmy has provided but there are apps like Discord that FOSS apps still don't fill every need for me no matter how hard I try to pull myself away from these massive companies.
I will make comments on Lemmy, knowing where I am at. Saying things like this and saying I am okay with spending money on things I enjoy and don't mind continuing to do so but it is usually met with comments like, "what is wrong with you." To the point my comments and posts have either tried to bring up valid call outs that some Lemmy users don't disagree with or me just stating we are all different and don't have to like what others like.
I am not in disagreement with our data being hogged, our private lives being at risk and not am I opposed to try different methods and even still use methods like Mullvad, Proton products, Tor, etc.
Yet no matter how much I try these products the separate Duck address accounts I have, Firefox, etc. I still primarily use Chrome, Google, Discord. Because despite the hate and reasonable hate mind you. Those products provide what I want and work better for me for regular use and certain FOSS or even competing apps just don't do that for me. Yet there are always comments like yours, "they need to try harder." Just vague statements made to justify some personal belief that these companies will rupture and fall apart but they are still successful and they doing exactly what you are saying they should do, trying harder.
I don't mean to poke or prod, start and argument because it will end in one with someone on here which just pushes users like me looking for answers farther away because I want to have discussion but turn to just that more than likely on Lemmy. I just don't know what Lemmy users want or think they are getting at by making statements like this?
honestly, i don't even want to use discord. i'd like to use mumble, irc, xmpp, email, jami, and jitsi. if discord were just a client that wrapped all of these into one user interface, i'd use it.
Discord is quickly becoming a dying service the way skype did. How did skype become a dying service?
Google ad services integration (Discord already has this): when you chat on discord about anything, your text and recent text from your friends are used to supply GAS keywords. Talk about the voice actor for the blue beetle on discord then type blue beetle in the search bar and check your suggestions.
Inserting ads INTO the chat client (Discord is beginning to do this): through activities first, then total corporation capitulation, Skype delivered ads to users. Discord has ads in activities already, and won't allow youtube premium users to skip ads on the watch together activity because they cannot log in. It's an ad delivery pipeline they nuked user created bots for.
If you are worried about privacy, discord is literally destroying yours as you use it. Sure, it isn't bought out entirely by google or microsoft yet, but it might as well be with how much of your data is used to deliver ads rather than enhance your experience. Game a lot? Discord will NEVER suggest new communities on discord to you based on your chat, just advertise to you based on it. Aside from that, discord has obfuscated information that was readily being added to wikis, so wikis that are straight up shit and wrong like fextralife are THRIVING. Seriously, their Nioh wikis are misinformation, their BG3 wiki was wrong on release for a lot of things like shopkeeper inventories and hasn't been updated whatsoever. DaS3 and elden ring info? Mostly straight up plagiarized info from other sites and a lot of it incorrect.
Interested in learning specific info for a game? Discord forums on invite only servers have destroyed this. Specific class information for your favorite MMO? Join that class discord from the game's community discord, wait for someone to give you the role (or if you are extremely lucky, react role in), and PRAY the pinned info is in date. Specific character in a fighting game? Better hope it's in anime airdasher, because outside of dustloop (which also has a discord you must weather for up to date info) all that shit is in discord forums you have to daisy-chain to get info.
TL;DR discord has pushed a bunch of features exclusively to destroy privacy and obtain google money, and a bunch of others are clearly "well the developers need to be working on SOMETHING" changes, like username ID reassignments. The numbered usernames are still visible. They weren't removed. Why did they change? Not for security or ease of use, that's for sure
I mean, still better image quality than messenger
sorry gotta pay for that simple ability
Oof
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
plus doesn't it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn't matter....
lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it's just like...this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.
I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?
I'm not sure it's correct to call Discord spyware, but it certainly has privacy implications. https://nerdbot.com/2023/02/24/using-discord-consider-these-security-and-privacy-factors/
So the basics of what I've read is:
I know its different now because Discord has nitro and there are lots if good reasons to subscribe. But Discord ran without all if that subscriber funding and in that time they probably found ways to make money off of what resources they had at the time... Information.
Alright, replies to my initial comment got me motivated to look for the receipts:
https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_never_use_discord_and_heres_why/
https://meaww.com/discord-who-owns-jason-citron-microsoft-acquisition-company-net-worth-10-b-talks
I heard this argument so long ago that basically Discord doesnt sell data but instead shares it with shareholders, which includes many ad companies, including tencent. They probably give this data to their linked partners like twitch and Microsoft. Discord still isnt profitable and they are a public company, they are expected to exhaust every opportunity to give value to those shareholders.
Yeah, there is one way to make it better, but it won't happen until they're forced to change: force them to integrate with the matrix protocol
yes, I know that it's possible to use a bridge, and I do it, but it still requires a discord account, it would be great if discord rooms were just accessible with the matrix protocol
It’s owned by Tencent btw , they absolutely don’t want matrix C
(X) Doubt
I can not find anything in there. I can not favorite messages to find them again. It is a hole where everything your write is virtually there, but practically lost.
You can pin msgs. But. There is a limit lmao
Take those paywalls down.
They have to make money somehow. Let's be realistic.
If I wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here.
Discord is the primary voice chat platform for a lot of my gaming groups, and half the time it can’t even detect the correct mic or output. Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
I don’t need another messaging app, I need an actual seamless voice chat experience.
discord is also the main place for reporting bugs related to the linux driver for xbox controllers, xone. I do not appreciate it.
Wait, am I seeing correctly? Did they really go so far as to completely disable the issue system in GitHub in favor of Discord?
That's certainly a... choice.
Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
And the opposite problem when you don't get message notifications on your phone because you forgot to close it on your PC.
I already have too many chat apps. STAHP
one day it will need to become profitable and suddenly it will be a pile of shit
They could fucking start by going bankrupt so open source alternatives that actually give a shit about privacy can take over. Revolt chat is objectively superior to discord
It's going the complete wrong way if so.
Just read the headline... Will it stop spying on me o und which Servers i am?
I'm not sure what everyone is complaining about in the comments. I use discord pretty much constantly and at all times.
Nitro ads? It's 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there's no more ads.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
Can't find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side. Okay, some of the options are a little obscured, but it's not like Discord is doing anything except connecting like minded people via text and voice/video chat.
I sincerely don't know what anyone is talking about. But part of me thinks it's because discord doesn't have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
Discord has gotten much worse about pushing Nitro everywhere, and I can't be the only one that sees it more than just on launch.
Can’t find information?
Right. Discord itself is another silo, and a public forum is going to be better for just about any non-ephemeral type of info (pretty much everything Discord gets used for that is not messaging.) There are a lot of communities that decided with the fucking of reddit to move to Discord, which just changes which silo the info is at, and in this case is less accessible because it's not publicly searchable, indexable, etc. Things like the Internet Archive exist for a reason and have massive utility, and they can glean nothing from Discord. If Discord dies, so dies all of the info with it.
Bloated?
Discord, and like basically all of the modern Electron messaging apps (Slack's probably hiding in a corner trying to avoid getting noticed in this conversation) are massively bloated. These are basically ridiculously overgrown IRC clients which we had back in 1998 that cover about 90% of the functionality of Discord, except those IRC clients used to run in single digit mb's of RAM and CPU use was basically negligible and they launched more or less instantly. Can't launch Discord on either an M1 MacBook nor my I9 PC without it taking long enough to load for me to grab a coffee.
Anyway, Discord's original intended use of like realtime conversation is fine, but yeah the clients are garbage and as a replacement for reddit/lemmy/other forum software, it's just choosing the wrong tool for the job. Even for the use cases it does have, it's been a solved problem since the 90's, but those solutions didn't allow for some tech bros or VCs to make a bunch of money. It's always been amazing to me that either Discord or Slack even have a business model.
Oh, and personally I find Discord in particular atrociously designed, and Slack not much better. How either handle threading are enough to make me not want to bother with threading, for example. Discord is fantastically ugly also imo.
Nitro ads? It's 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there's no more ads.
Recently I launched Discord on desktop and got big splash screen screaming about new shop items. Earlier, I've got constant popups about new nitro perks, new avatar decorations, new app icons.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
You may get an answer immediately, but this answer will be lost after some messages. Someone with the same question may ask it again instead of searching. People in chat may get tired to answer over and over. On forums you have one question 10 years ago and answer to it. No need to ask again.
Can't find information? Discord has integrated forums with a search feature in each server.
Discord's internal search is very limited, not as good as Google. Discord is very hard to archive, so at some point information will be lost.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side.
If you have many servers, you'll get many notifications and new messages badges. You'll also have many useless channels, which you need to manually mute or hide.
it's because discord doesn't have E2E encryption and yall wanna discuss some naughty shit.
I don't really think encryption is mandatory for every chat app, it has some problems with transferring messages to other devices. If you're working on some project, you probably don't want it to be leaked, so you'll encrypt your messages.
I think the biggest issue atm is that discord doesn’t/can’t get indexed by search engines
Who the hell uses the inbox
It's only useful when some random person pings you that got buried by hundreds of messages