[Sparkyte]

When I saw this I was like ooh noes not myspace all over again. I feel this style may actually be a hinderance for adopting more users. People really want something more reactive like Discord. Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good and that is why most people won't abandon it. It is like comparing Slack to Teams. It will be a long time before anything catches immediately up to Slack or Discord in usability. Although I have a short list of things that would be QoL improvements that would make both them soooooo much better.

[sqeaky]

> Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good and that is why most people won't abandon it

I dislike every single one of discord's design decisions, I think the software is garbage, and it is riddled with security problems. Their customer service is a nightmare, a hacker got one of my friends accounts and even though he'd paid up for some kind of Discord extra service for more than 2 years in advance they wouldn't refund him or give him his account back. The API is bad too.

I use it purely because of the network effect. The people I want to communicate with use it, and the instant that changes if Discord isn't better then I'm out.

[llm_trw]

>Their customer service is a nightmare

Having customer service would be a step up.

>>We banned your account for illegal activity.

>But I just signed up and tried logging in?

>>After review we have banned your IP forever for illegal activity.

[juped]

You got an actual useless automated message? The lucky 1%.

[marcus_holmes]

What's the point of banning an IP address?

[michaelt]

I love Tor - but the exit node IP addresses do not have a good reputation, because they're a source of a lot of misbehaviour.

Sure, 'serious' attackers have botnets of home users' PCs and insecure IoT devices and whatnot. But because Tor exit nodes are easily used by even unsophisticated attackers, they quickly get flagged as sources of abuse.

[draxil]

Some people (like me) have a fixed IP for their internet connection. Although this isn't super common any more.

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah, it's really only tech folk who have fixed IP addresses, and they're usually too busy futzing around with servers to post shite on social sites ;)

Most IP connections are dynamic, and always were. Assuming that a person is synonymous with an IP connection makes no sense to me.

[Tijdreiziger]

For most dynamic IP connections, as long as your router doesn’t go offline for days on end, you keep the same IP; so in practice your IP (almost) never changes.

[Kiro]

While I disagree with the parent I personally think Discord is great. I've been on IRC for over 30 years and Discord is what I always imagined IRC 2.0 would be like.

[plufz]

I feel sort of ehh the same but also the opposite. I feel with both slack and discord that they are a little better than IRC. But that I so easily can see those features being implemented in IRC and I feel really sad history didn’t go in that direction. What if IRC had became the standard in the same way email did. IRC was so great and I miss it. I know ppl still use it, but I don’t even think I have a client anymore.

Learning to program as a kid in the 90s and getting that 28.8k modem with direct chat access to adults at Apple and later Sun/Java was amazing.

[multjoy]

What, owned by a single company and monetised within an inch of it’s life?

[emmet]

I would have loved to pay monthly for IRC Nitro™ back in the day to use… uh, forbidden ascii art?

[layer8]

People who liked IRC will generally like Discord. However, there’s a lot of people who prefer asynchronous forums.

[stevage]

Agreed. I like almost everything about discord. I just wish it did threaded replies in a more low key way.

[pjc50]

> Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good

Discord as a text chat app is appalling. Whether on mobile, chromebook or desktop PC it's slow and janky to transition between channels. It is a measurably worse user experience than using IRC on a computer from twenty years ago with 1,000x less raw MIPS.

Maybe it has some advantages for voice chat, but to me it's a lowest common denominator we use because of the people and despite the software.

[password4321]

Discord's back end is amazing and they've blogged about a lot of it over the years (https://hn.algolia.com?query=%22How%20Discord%22). Not as smooth sailing on the front end though, and unfortunately they threaten to ban accounts using alternative clients, though there have been several (https://hn.algolia.com?query=Discord%20client).

Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to fully leverage WebRTC in-browser for voice chat (without requiring an account), the network effect is almost impossible to overcome at this point. This is incredibly unfortunate as closed chat ecosystems are an information black hole (except possibly when user generated content is licensed to the highest bidder for LLM training, what a gold mine!)

PS. It's worth mentioning in any Discord discussion with the (though the usual "could get banned" caveat applies): it is possible to export from Discord using https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

[vunderba]

Unfortunately, personal account automation like this is also in the reasons for "could get banned". Sigh.

I thought about building a scraper using something simplistic like Puppeteer to login to my account since the Discord browser experience is basically the same as the Discord app (which makes sense since its Electron). It would just issue a command to scroll arbitrarily up on a given channel/etc. until a certain earliest date was reached, and scrape all the data.

But.... again I'm sure that they have all sorts of mechanisms to detect unusual user behavior, so this might be JUST as vulnerable to detection as the aforementioned DiscordChatExporter.

Even leviathan walled gardens like Google let you export your data in a reasonable fashion (Google Takeout) - this is probably my biggest issue. On the other hand even if I could find an equivalent user-friendly platform, I'd never be able to convince all my contacts to migrate off Discord.

[mrngm]

It's interesting to see how requesting your data[0] could take up to 30 days! I haven't yet clicked the button, but it would be interesting to see what's in the data dump.

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R...

[Voultapher]

Yes on very fast modern hardware, the textbox sometimes takes dozens of frames to display the character I typed, and it is inconsistent. The tech sucks.

[vunderba]

The disparate experiences people have on the same piece of software is interesting. I'm on a Mac M1 (so definitely a higher end laptop) and have had zero issues with the Discord app. It sits comfortably on my second monitor and I use the Cmd-K shortcut to quickly snap to the correct channel/user when I want to chat. While I wouldn't call the app "blazingly fast", I don't really notice any meaningful latency.

I mean it's not like it's a low-level ASIO driver for pete's sake.

Memory usage is also reasonable. Continuous uptime is over 4 days now, and combined real mem shows it's using about ~400mb which honestly is about what I would have expected from an Electron app.

I think some of it comes down to user expectations. When I'm playing a game, we're primed to look/notice choppiness and dropped frames particularly since the graphics are constantly animated. When I'm using my DAW, I'm primed to hear latency between my interacting with a midi controller and the audio output. I don't have any such expectations when I'm using a glorified text messaging platform, so while there might indeed be some latency, it would have to be significant for me to notice.

That being said, I'm not a fan of the Android app - the UI/UX experience is rather rough.

[Mashimo]

What makes it appalling?

You can press ctrl + K to jump to any channel from anywhere. Feels snappy.

[pjc50]

> Feels snappy.

I wonder if this is just everyone else using it on massive gamer PCs and me using it on mobile/chromebook, but .. no. It it is not snappy. The process of fetching all the new messages and rendering them takes up to a second.

I don't understand why people who insist on 60fps games are happy with a 1fps chat app, but I guess they don't have that experience.

[sigseg1v]

I'm using a $6000 gaming rig I put together and Discord is one of the worst performing apps I use, so I'm with you on this one.

[Mashimo]

Could this be an internet connection issue?

Do you even have slow performance when switching between two channels that are "loaded"?

[Mashimo]

Even on mobile switching channel feels snappy to me. The images can take a while if they are not cached yet.

[RunSet]

Hexchat feels snappy. Discord feels like an Electron app.

[KingMob]

And yet the one thing I can't do is automatically jump to the top of a question. One of my Discord servers loves doing FAQs as separate conversations, and once they get too many replies, I have to scroll endlessly (PgUp, etc) to see the first few comments. It's maddening.

[jazzyjackson]

Discord always had a unique way of making me feel old

I avoided it because when when a ding occurred there is no indication which channel had just donged, just left me confused as to what was happening

[courseofaction]

Likewise - a notification history feature would help, the confusion really cripples the real-time experience.

[RheingoldRiver]

it has a notification history feature (at least on PC), it's just impossible to find and deleted messages disappear from it. Upper-right corner is your "inbox" which is totally worthless, and tabbed behind that is your notification history. I use it to find totally buried @Mods pings that I missed by thousands of messages and that's about it, it's not good.

You can usually get most of your notifications with Ctrl+[T or K] and then going through the menu here, but for reasons I've yet to figure out sometimes DMs don't show up here even when they have unread messages. I think there is some incorrect logic that kicks in when you have a high number of unread channels and it can't show as many "previous channels" as it wants to.

None of this is to defend Discord, I think their UI is bad and I've hated the way DMs function since day 1, and every single part of their app that relies on frecency (or doesn't but should) is abysmal (reaction autocomplete, the reaction pop-up menu, ctrl+T when you start typing something, the mention autocomplete behavior in any channel)

But once you learn the poorly-documented navigation flow of ctrl+T and then using @, #, or * to filter users/channels/servers it gets easier to use. My current biggest complaint is lack of a "previous channel within this server" hotkey, "previous channel that you visited globally" exists but you can't restrict it within one server, and it makes navigating some of my servers an absolute nightmare.

[Mashimo]

It's there. Top right corner. "Inbox" then select mentions.

[damaya1982]

I get on Discord here and there to discuss Linux, programming and so on. It is definitely much different than IRC. The demographic seems to be 14 year olds trying to customize their WM.

[saagarjha]

It might be that someone sent a message and then deleted it.

[lelanthran]

> People really want something more reactive like Discord. Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good and that is why most people won't abandon it.

This probably comes as a surprise to Discord users, but it really is a niche social network.

We're talking fractions of a percent of users compared to existing social networks.

People don't really want something like Discord - the downsides by far outweigh any upside of "a closed-off private network of people", biggest one being lack of visibility and consistency.

[rcxdude]

Lack of visibility is kind of the point for most of those users. Discord's a replacement for a group chat, not a facebook/myspace page. It was literally designed so those groups of 5-10 friends who play video games together online didn't need to faff about with a private forum, an IRC, and a voice chat server. The primary competition was Skype until Microsoft killed it. The last thing they want is randos butting in.

[twobitshifter]

why would they want discord when they have emacs?

[pavo-etc]

Go use facebook then. This project seems fun.

[BLKNSLVR]

> hinderance for adopting more users

Promotes a smaller, more tightly knit community.

One person's X is another's Y.

[creesch]

> People really want something more reactive like Discord.

Citation needed :) This feels like you are parroting either your own preference or something you have heard other people state as fact.

[SubiculumCode]

I think there is enough space for lots of styles.

[cdelsolar]

Hmm.. I love Discord?

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Ah yes, because real time chatting and a wall to post stuff on like early facebook surely are the exact same hting.