What do you think about discord?

I think it's a chat app popular with gamers. It works as intended.

Fancy irc

I think it is a chat app that is holding on by a thread, that thread being the network effect.
If that cracks and it offers something like Reddit's Community solutions but only to Search Engines, and it will collapse. Too much to manager for the server admins, to complicated for half of the casual users. Not enough income sources. Now it is leaning into ID Checking everyone and that had more than half its user base looking elsewhere.

I have two types of servers I join: 1) small servers with friends where we voice chat while gaming, and 2) organizations where discord is their primary media method (e.g., Harbour Masters). It works great for both of those things.

It works but a bunch of the UI is clunky. A bunch of stuff ends up there when people should've been using a wiki or at least forum, and as always it's pretty stupid to be centralizing on a proprietary platform, let alone one that's run like Discord.

No clue, never used discord or telegram or whatsapp.

Nah, nothing fancy about ads.

[A comment I posted 9mo ago]

I fucking hate Discord and how it’s absorbed what should be forums.

When I’m creating a discussion online about a particular game or project, I’m looking to hear from the broader community over a longer term; not just limited to whomever happens to be online on this one specific platform at the time of posting.

People have different schedules, we’re not all online together at the same times; especially when you factor in timezones. Discord however makes it massively frustrating if not impossible to hold a discussion unless everyone you want to talk to is present and ready to read and reply now. Otherwise your conversation gets burried in the mess of other people having their own conversations and nobody wants to scroll through thousands of messages in the history of when they last logged on.

You can break out conversations into their own rooms, but that only goes so far and at that point you may as well just have a damn forum; that’s what they are for.

Then you get into the problem of repetition and searchability. People often run into common problems or ask the same questions; but with Discord, you’ve got to re-explain the same things every time they’re brought up, instead of just pointing the user to an old forum post that already solves their problem (they may have even found it themselves through a web search, saving them from even having to ask and waste people’s time. Discord isn’t indexed by search engines so old conversations/solutions are lost).

A group chat platform is not an acceptable replacement for a forum and I will die on that god damn hill.

Good for gaming voice chat and screen sharing. Terrible for killing online forums.

People fled one technology and company to get locked in by another technology and company. Instead of learning and going another route.

The naming of discords 'servers' is a hostile naming and misleading misuse especially to non tech people.


So yeah. Big fan.

There are ads now? I guess I should say shitty irc then.

It's really great for playing games (video and table top) with friends I have in real life. Using it for anything else is crazy and is used by crazy people.

Imagine IRC, but monetized and full of pedophiles. Oh, it also has voice and video chat and not just text.

I pretty much just use it because my friends use it. Voice chat, screen sharing, and text chat are all generally really good (though I'm not a member of any massive servers which I imagine would make the text chat a lot worse). If my friends swapped to something else, I'd go with them and never use Discord again.

It looks okay, but the actual UX isn't very good. Simple things like DMing a friend, or making/accepting a friend request are way more arcane than they should be.

I guess I can't really blame Discord itself, but I hate that it killed forums. Its lack of searchability makes it almost completely useless at doing what forums used to do, but almost everybody migrated anyway.