I find Discord to be the worst UX for a chat app I can imagine. And nothing is open source so what few client alternatives there are live in mortal danger of having their API hacks closed.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.
Grown with IRC, Slack replies are awful and so awkward to use. Should I check "Also send reply to #channel?" or not? I check it 50% of the time and I still don't know if I should.
It depends on your channel’s culture, but generally you check the box when you want to draw some of the general channel population into the conversation or just want them to see your reply.
If you want specific others to participate in your thread, you just @ them in your reply. No need to send to channel.
Slack only has an embedded thread feature, not a reply feature.
Stackexchange chat has a proper reply feature. You can reply to a message in the same channel. Your message still goes on the bottom of the current channel, but it pings(highlights) the user and contains a link icon to the original message. Hovering on a reply also highlights the message it responds to (if it's on the screen). This is mainly used when responding to older messages, where it otherwise wouldn't be easy to see what you're responding to.
I agree, Slack replies are awful. The only chat reply feature I've ever enjoyed was Flowdock's. It doesn't create threads it just connects replies with colors. It's great.
Myself, I would not go that far but the UI seems to have fallen a bit into Apple's "discoverability" trap -- just go ahead and touch every square centimeter of application surface to see if anything will happen.
I agree that that the loading messages are silly, and that could be forgiven, but for the fact that when Discord has trouble updating (which happens when Discord feels like it, not you), you just keep seeing them happen over and over, with no sense of progress or ability to debug.
Discord isn't too bad in that sense.
Other critiques about their administration and overall culture aggravate the UI issues in a way that has a similar non-serious tone. It's Bastard Operator From Hell run through I Can Haz Cheeseburger; I have witnessed people banned on the basis of frivolous complaints with messaging that has a tone of "lolz ur acct bann't" that has left some of the Discord servers I am on without some solid admins until things magically straighten out with the same "guess how this works on the inside" attitude.
It's funny because all over the Discord documentation, the "servers" are referred to as "guilds". I'm fairly certain this was the intent in the beginning. But because gamers are used to joining a server to play a game, it became synonymous.
Funny. Discord is the one line I will refuse to cross on yielding my data and metadata. They _are_ downright dangerous. Their CEO's previous project, OpenFeint, already had a privacy scandal lawsuit.
Are you the original author of the article? The article itself seems to be experiencing issues right now, but from what I recall, the author mentions "extensible roles" and "good free tier" as the features that got him to use Discord. I don't consider these features crucial enough to use non-Free Software. If you are not the original author and have other features in mind, please explain which features of Discord are "so incredibly good".
I'm not the author, just agree with the basic argument of the article, if maybe not every detail in it.
The thing is just the incredible ease of use. The easy with which you can join a server and then drop into any text or voice chat you feel like.
There are probably programms that technically replicate the feature set, but I haven't used anything that feels as effortless as discord does. And I can't even pinpoint why exactly that is.
No replies? Why after all this time are there still no replies? Default notification settings are still to flood you every time you add a "server". Attachment limits are tiny. And can I just say as a sysadmin calling your chat rooms "servers" is a huge slap in the face to my profession?
The welcome messages are infantile and spammy. Who knows about any privacy at all on the platform. I could go on and on and on and on.