Technology

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