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by nunodonato 967 days ago
Oh no, not another "join our discord to use it".
5 comments

Its a weird choice of UI.

Why do companies do this? Is it a development shortcut or something?

Image generation needs moderation and file storage, and Discord gives you that for free.
More importantly, it is a built in way to show lots of generated content to a large audience, which can then thumbs-up content they like, which gets fed back into the model that X result was better than Y result.
No, that's not it. Nobody's doing that on Luma and I think Midjourney put ratings on their website instead.
Using discord would save you a lot on hosting costs, especially when dealing with huge quantities of assets like images and videos.
Probably. If your small team is competent at ML model development, why spend time building a web app?

One time I participated in a small local event that required submitting photos via tagged Instagram posts. I was annoyed at that, until I realized it completely eliminated the need for any technical expertise for the organizers.

It's like Reddit but with functionality. Same benefits:

- single sign-on

- abuse protection

- has sign-on flow for later if you want to migrate

- someone else hosts assets

- existing account flow means low friction to join for existing account holders (common in the space)

- allows users to see other users at same time as use product

- bot easy to spin up and async functionality is inherent

> Its a weird choice of UI.

Yeah for sure. I guess one advantage is that since it's already in a chat, people can react and talk about it as it's happening.

Much more direct connection with users and the community can be built in the same place the tool exists.

It's annoying but I can see why its happening

Both a dev shortcut as well as a stickiness play. Adding a Discord server is like installing a smartphone app.
These are decidedly not like the one on the homepage.
There's nothing on the homepage for me except a big logo and a join discord button...
The graphic on the homepage is animated, it changes shape as you drag on it with your mouse or finger. Worked fine on my phone.
The main problem you're not mentioning is lack of ability to disable notifications. There's just no way to opt out of the @everyone notifications.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can do that, if you right click a server under Notification Settings there is an option "Suppress @everywhere and @here" you can toggle.

It's annoying to have to do this for every server though, I agree.

you're the hero I needed. I hope this keeps the red "1+" numbers gone.
I believe it does
Discord is aggressively horrible.
To be "that guy" I like this trend. It combines product usage w/ discussion. That said, I believe a web UI would be strictly better.
Discord as an open protocol we could all build our service around would be sick.

There would still have to be hosting, moderation controls, high availability, low latency, etc. etc. engineering that "someone" would have to handle and own (ideally decentralized / p2p), but I believe it could be solved if ever incentives could align and a will could arise.