Discord UI rule : 196

[–] [email protected] 138 points 11 months ago (13 children)

Discord should be avoided as a communications platform. I don't see a single point that makes me want to use it.

It has no customization or designing flexibility, you are forced to stick to one design unless you pay for a stupeid & an expensive subscription. Otherwise you need to use potentially unsafe third party tools for it and even those go against Discord's ToS.

It is a non-private, non-secure and overtly commercialized product that should be put in the bin. But thanks to the virtual monopoly in creating a social platform (also thanks to the tech-illiterate influencers for promoting it) for more than just "Chatting for gamers", as it was originally intended for. Discord in its current state is nothing more than just a commercial market where you are the commodity. Its not a social platform.

I don't want to give out my data and message history for some company to sell to be able to discuss about your project on GitHub, or even be able to communicate with you.

The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.

I abandoned Discord completely more than half an year ago with the vow of never registering again. I completely shifted my comms to Matrix & Signal. I have not been more at peace since.

If you manage a public project you wish for people to interact with. I request you to at least keep a mirror/bridge on XMPP, Matrix or even Revolt. Please choose something open source, private and secure for the sake of other people.

[–] [email protected] 141 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Counterpoint: it's free and easy to use.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So are the others I mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 11 months ago (2 children)

But no one uses them.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (1 children)

According to data dating June de 2022. Matrix had at least 64 Millon users.

That is not a small number. So yeah, people do use it. While it is significantly low compared to Discord. Keep in mind that Discord has had much more advertisement done for it than Matrix did.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Counterpoint: My friends don't use them (and won't switch)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Matrix allows bridging chats so you can set up a bot in your / your friends server(s) and it'll forward their messages to Matrix and yours back to Discord. As for DMs you need to set up channels for that afaik (Future me: It seems that some bots support it). The big drawback is that you need to disable Matrix' E2E-Encryption in the rooms you want to bridge your chats to.

Here's a link to the Discord bridge if you are interested. It's not that hard to set up imo.

As for voice chat, you can use Jitsi (works like zoom but without the need of an account) as long as your friends aren't too lazy to open a link in their browser to chat with you.

As for Matrix clients there's Element, FluffyChat, Cinny & others. Element & Cinny are closer to Discord's UI whilst FluffyChat feels more like WhatsApp Web or Telegram Web. Element has cool features like web widgets you can pin to rooms whilst Cinny & FluffyChat are simple (and have MUCH better custom emoji / sticker management)

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (3 children)

That's great but this does not account for the dynamics of a Discord server.

Let's say 8 people are hanging out in Discord, playing games or whatever. Should I then message all 8 of them a link to join a separate voice chat? The response would be "no, just join Discord of you want to talk". That also requires me to know who are in the call (therefore already using Discord anyways), since if I just message one or two of them I would be splitting the party, which they won't do.

The whole "hanging out in Discord and whoever wants to join just joins" dynamic is difficult to replace with a zoom-type voice chat that requires you to initiate a call with a link.

I have already tried switching people to signal from Facebook messenger. Didn't work. All it takes is one person to not want to switch and the whole group will end up going back. And that's just a messaging service. Discord is way more complicated to switch from since it is more of an all-in-one thing.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (3 children)

it's just a circlejerk of gamers pointing to each other to justify why they won't take the miniscule effort of switching platforms

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I've gone through this shit back in the days of MSN Messenger, ICQ, and AIM. I didn't exactly switch then, either. Instead I went with Trillian and later Pigin to just use all of them at the same time under one account. Same thing is happening now with everyone I know on different apps. Except there isn't anything like Trillian or Pigin for any of 'em.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Effort is not really a part of the equation for a lot of people. Usually it's just "I don't want to switch".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

It's not a circlejerk. It's called the network effect and it's a legitimate phenomenon.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How is that going to change if you don't try using them?

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The client is garbage as well unless you own a super expensive rig.

What are you on about with this? Discord has its criticisms but this is stretching it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

This is not at all stretching it. Discord's client is very poorly optimized and bloated and it is known since a long time. I could never run it on my hardware with a comfortable experience. Even some of my friends would ask me to look for and provide them older versions of the app because each update would make it laggier for them to use. I don't live in a First or Second world country with a good paying job. Most electronics are imported here and cost a lot.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Ever look at it's resource usage? It's so bloated and resource heavy for nothing more than a chat client.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I don't deny discord comes with bloat. But the idea that discord needs a "super expensive rig" seems a bit hyperbolic. If you can browse this site, your hardware can probably deal with discord.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have a 12 year old CPU and I can flawlessly stream video while I play games to my chat group. Discord is doing petty good.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (7 children)

I yet have to find another platform that implements screen sharing with sound in group chats as good as discord does

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As good as discord does? Then Microsoft Teams qualifies.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I mean discord's screensharing is good for windows users imo. Has good enough quality, sound and while the linux client is terrible there are unofficial clients that reintroduce the sound sharing, which is what I am using.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The one and only reason I use discord is because it's pretty ubiquitous in the tech industry, and I'm a union organizer at a tech company.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Then do better. If you're a Union organiser, you should know to push the better options rather than kneel to the "WELL MOST PEOPLE DO X" BS.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is a very juvenile response. If you're trying to organize people, it's hard enough to get them to do one specific action, you don't add in a bunch of other steps that don't directly contribute to the goal. You want to remove every barrier.

For example, if you want people to sign a petition and you're going door to door, you bring a clipboard with the paper, pens, and supporting literature. You don't tell them to go to a website, or print out a document themselves. You definitely don't demand they move to a new neighborhood where the doors are closer together and all at street level.

Discord is bullshit, and I'd love to see everyone move away from it. But you've got to keep things in perspective and think about what your primary goals are.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Took the words right out of my mouth. We tried to migrate to signal, it was an abject failure.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's more important to reach people, don't you think?
Although I agree a bridge would be the nice thing to do

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

I wish it was more simple.

The official matrix.org server is completely stripped down and removes a lot of features, and Element as a client is nowhere near as good as anything else.

Element X (with the sliding sync support) does fix the massive issue of absolutely horrifically slow syncing.

None of Matrix comes anywhere near the levels of usability Discord has and nor does Element, Discord's server-chat model is unbeatable in this aspect.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

as much as i agree,

accessibility is usually pretty horrendous on most matrix clients, none i could find have full, proper reduced motion support, which i need to properly use pretty much any piece of software. discord is far from perfect in this regard, and getting worse and worse, but still miles ahead of most chat apps i've tried, especially proprietary ones. I have barely used revolt, and in my memory it's far worse than discord, and i have yet to figure out how xmpp works...
none of my friends are on it. while i could convince some to move, here discord is already a quite "niche" chat service, and as a student, i'm more or less required to be on any chat service whatever group project i need to do is organised. same with friend groups, i'm usually not a "group leader", and join in friend groups that already exist, so it's much harder to insist on moving anyone over to a new thing no one but me has ever used before
ux isn't great. it's improving, but i've had quite a few "key exchange" issues with matrix especially... Also, i found most clients quite messy, but that's more to personal taste!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I use discord because my two friends use it when we talk every once in a while and its the tool they know and are comfortable with. They don't live at their computers and do not bother. I don't use it other than that.

I'm gonna look into matrix though. If no one adopts an alternative, it will never be standard. And matrix is a cool name.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Gimme IRC "2.0" and I'll be happy.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I can send messages, images, files, links, it supports youtube miniplayer for links, and I can start audio calls all in a singular app, and I can control which members of a channel see those messages or access that call very simply with roles. They also store that message history for years and years, idk what the limit is for channels but for DMs I can scroll back at least 5 years no problem. This works both on Desktop and Smartphones. I don't know of any other programs or apps that do all of that, please correct me if I'm wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’m gonna preface this with I haven’t used discord in a year or so.

It’s kinda fun watching a new generation go through their first redesign outrage.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Youtube should still have the description over there👉. Putting it down there 👇 will always suck

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I use theatre mode so I don't care about that, but I remember back when you could customize YT Channel background art and set colors and transparency values, cool times.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

what's wrong with it
if you mean the mobile one, it's a pretty great upgrade

[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (1 children)

One of my favorite things about discord was the fact that your experience was similar on both mobile and desktop. I honestly thought it was fantastic from a UX perspective since your knowledge of the app transferred easily between platforms. The new update destroys that and tosses out a large amount of shared knowledge.

Another, more important, complaint is the changes to the colors/themes makes the accessibility significantly worse no matter what theme you use for anyone with eye issues. They changed the light mode font to gray???? They reduced the contrast on the other modes significantly making it genuinely difficult to read text on a MESSAGING APP.

To me this whole thing, and the earlier username changes, feel like changing for the sake of changing rather than actually improving anything. This is just for the shareholders and not because literally anyone asked for it.

Also why is dms it's own tab I really liked that they were listed next to the servers!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Mobile apps aren't supposed to work like desktop ones tho.

text is already impossible to read for me due to the font. idk every time i try to switch to the new react native version i go back because text takes me like 4-6 attempts to read.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

It annoys me to no extent when there's something I could do in 5 seconds on the desktop version of an app but I can't find it on the mobile version because they hid things. Microsoft is soooo annoying with this (and many other things because fuck them)! Every version of each of their apps on every platform is an entirely different program with the same name that barely even does the same functions.

As for the text, this is a problem they could've solved! And instead they made it worse while also making the UX worse! Every update from discord recently has made the app more and more buggy and slow. I genuinely don't understand how they manage it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Seems very ok, did not give me any strong opinions after a minute.

Update:
Did they get rid of the server user list?

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago

Good advice, I'd follow it

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This app is awful now. There was literally nothing wrong about the old UI. They went and messed it all up.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

Didn't even know it changed until I saw this thread. Opened it up, saw that chats and servers are sensibly separated and on the bottom now where they're easy to reach with a thumb. Also way easier to reply to messages now that the swipe doesn't show who's online (to see who's online, tap the channel name at the top of the screen).

I like it.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Make sure you use an open source tool to download any important conversation or channel history.

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

You'll have to use the browser version of Discord to grab your unique Token since they've disabled the inspector console on the application and also removed the ability to turn it back on in the ini file. Don't ever share it with anybody, either.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (6 children)

u may use Aliucord

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly I like the new UI. Takes a bit of getting used to after knowing the old one for so long but it makes more sense in the end.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If it works just the same, why would they just outright delete the UI most of us like? There's no good reason not to have options.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (2 children)

not saying that i don't hate the UI changes with my entire being, but there is absolutely a good reason to not keep the old one. that would mean that discord would have to support two entirely different codebases that would both have to be modified independently whenever they wanted to e.g. add a new feature

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