Bullshit. Its on a quest to monetize the platform, thats all its doing.
If it wanted to be a better communication platform it wouldnt be adding all this pointless superfluous shit that exists only for nickle and diming.
Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app
Submitted 11 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/5/23989155/discord-mobile-app-refresh-midnight-view
Comments
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
nicetriangle@kbin.social 11 months ago
Yeah the app is bloated as shit
Snowpix@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
And somehow making the UI worse every single update. HOW?
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Taking lessons from Valve and steam, I suspect.
I genuinely don’t understand how these companies go “Okay, we have a very elegant, simple, sleek, and fast interface here…Heres what we should do, we should completely fuck it up, make it slower, and make it require more resources for absolutely no reason”
rbesfe@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
As long as they allow for free streaming and file sharing, they will need to monetize. That stuff gets real expensive real fast.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I mean, it is a company that employs people that gives away its product for free. Aside from Nitro, would you like them to monetize your personal info and sell it to 3rd parties?
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
discord feels like an information black hole with adhd
Patches@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Once it scrolls past the top of the screen it’s gone.
Once one person gets a bit too giddy and posts 2 memes, your chat is now all garbage. Half of the people involved will have muted it already.
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Fuck Discord.
Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Also it used to be fast, but got bloated and lost its greatest advantage. They abandoned every design choice that made them popular in the first place.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
My discord client (the official app on both PC and android) are blazing fast.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The UI/UX is a convoluted mess. Whenever I say this elsewhere I get downvoted to oblivion and people tell me you just gotta learn it.
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
There’s not even a useful intro the first time you launch it. Yea, it shows you what the buttons are for, but never explains the concept behind things. Guess you’re supposed to intuit that stuff?
ExFed@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Well, yea, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t have to “learn” a UI, things should be apparent and obvious.
Counterpoint: vim is very well liked for it’s UI, but there’s a very steep learning curve.
To your point, though, the learning process ideally ought to be seamless and linear; each new thing you can do with the application should be mostly obvious given what you already know about the UI, not force you to learn everything from scratch or do work to learn it (unless you’re into that kind of thing). I don’t think Discord is the worst offender of this rule, but they could make it better.
Kirca@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What do you mean? Having three seperate settings buttons with options divvyed between them makes perfect sense
Pika@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I do agree with this, however I also have to say being someone who’s been on the canary branch and has the newest version of the new UI once you learn it it’s so much better mobile wise doing literally anything it just makes sense and goes with the mobile flow a lot better then the old ui was, plus it has a side bar which is really nice… The beginning new ui with the guildbar at the bottom was atrocious though, so glad they scrapped that model.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sorry how did it steal communities? If communities migrated to Discord, the communities saw value in using it.
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Supposedly by providing a better service than the existing tools :-|
Mandy@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
“Better messaging app” my bubble ass
Keeps changing ui every month for no reason Keeps adding disgracting prolife fluff that looks like shit. (Neither can be turned off) Support is abbysmal. Linux client is garbage. (Screenshare anyone) Bloated mess. Hates mods and custom clients. Too big ( had a server of 3k people, know how many people I got to switch?90) Their team us a bunch of pedophile furry porn lovers.
Fuck. Them.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
When did the UI change? I’m on discord pretty much constantly
snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Yesterday
Brutticus@lemm.ee 11 months ago
tell me more about this Mods and Custom Clients? What should I search?
bobbyjoegreen@lemmings.world 11 months ago
Look up betterdiscord
4onen@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I literally don’t even install it on Linux because the screen share works more often through Firefox than through their native app. That doesn’t mean it works consistently, and there’s never any sound, but at least I can sometimes make it work in the Firefox webapp. The native app is worthless.
dinckelman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It was a great messaging app, before all the extra bullshit was added to it. The focus was on doing one thing, and doing it right. Now they do 35 different things, and abandon them in favor of mtx for profiles
Fluid@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Walled-gardens are fundamentally bad for communication. Discord is not a solution, it’s a problem.
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
We had IRC for years. Still do, for that matter. But we have to do every goddamn thing over ports 80 and 443 now.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If they could stop trying to foist nitro on me that would be great.
rbesfe@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Bandwidth isn’t free, they gotta make money somehow
atrielienz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Funny how when someone bring this up for a streaming service it’s all “the ads are intrusive”, “I don’t want to pay this company”. Etc. But when it’s discord all the sudden “they gotta pay for bandwidth”.
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
P2P is the answer, Matrix has been doing this for a few years
DepthCharge@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I thought about getting Nitro once, till I noticed it was a monthly subscription
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s a single ad.
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Discord is an absolute piece of garbage, it’s not a good messaging app, definitely not a good place to host a community (seriously, I don’t understand why some communities saw Discord as an alternative after the Reddit API changes), and most importantly, it’s spyware. The company doesn’t have a business model and it was founded by a guy who is notorious for creating random shit that’s not economically sustainable at all. I don’t understand why anyone would use this shit. This video outlines everything that’s wrong with Discord: youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
BaldProphet@kbin.social 11 months ago
The problem is convincing other people to switch as well. There's no point in me using Matrix if all of the people I want to communicate with only want to use Discord.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
I don’t understand why Revolt decided to reinvent the wheel and not use Matrix. They could’ve been a great alternative server and/or UI.
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I agree
Icalasari@kbin.social 11 months ago
Sadly, can't get my server to make the jump. Doesn't help that Revolt is missing a few features and Matrix just... Doesn't work at all for the flow of the server
Right now a bridge bot does heavy lifting for when Discord does piss off enough users to cause everybody to jump over
helenslunch@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Switch to Revolt or Matrix
Why switch from 1 proprietary app to another?
Matrix is terrible, disorganized and incredibly slow.
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
What part of Matrix is proprietary? It’s not an app, instead, it’s an open protocol that can be used by anyone to build a messaging app or host a server.
Destraight@lemm.ee 11 months ago
it’s a good message app, it’s how I stay in contact with the person I asked for commission artwork. So you are wrong
ICastFist@programming.dev 11 months ago
Here’s an idea to start making it better: ditch fucking electron. There are alternatives that won’t need complete code rewrite or language change (tauri, neutralino). Better yet, actually go ahead with a full language change and pick Dart + Flutter, that shit is crossplat.
But we all know they won’t, because fuck you, “ram is cheap”. Good luck upgrading the ram on your phone.
ByGourou@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
It run fine on my 7 years old phone. Sure, native would be better, but electron mean they can make the website, the windows app and the android app all at one. So it’s worth it. Everyone on Lemmy is a programmer, so you should know how hard it is to support multiple version of a service with as much active developpement as discord.
ICastFist@programming.dev 11 months ago
The point of Tauri and Neutralino is to do what Electron does without needing to bundle a whole, isolated chrome browser to make it pretend it is a native app
Aatube@kbin.social 11 months ago
They used to be native with Kotlin on Android and IDK on iOS. Now they use React Native
just_another_person@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Are they? How? This article doesn’t explain anything.
Resol@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I miss the early days of Discord. Nowadays it’s just a lot of advertising for their Nitro service.
Not even their marketing videos are fun anymore. Why can’t they just bring Zencha back?
TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You usually know a company is slowly going to shit when they start to be serious and stop doing fun in their products and ads. Then you know lawyers and shareholders and people who think you can only do business with a straight face started to take over the company. Which is just sad.
Mek@lemmy.world 11 months ago
As long as they don’t start adding actual third party adverts in their ‘free’ version, I don’t care how much they advertise Nitro.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Is it becoming FOSS or supporting any meaningful level privacy?
Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Discord is spyware and all of my friends are the laziest most boring people for thinking they should spend their entire social lives on one app.
dannym@lemmy.escapebigtech.info 11 months ago
Yeah, there is one way to make it better, but it won’t happen until they’re forced to change: force them to integrate with the matrix protocol
yes, I know that it’s possible to use a bridge, and I do it, but it still requires a discord account, it would be great if discord rooms were just accessible with the matrix protocol
SamsonSeinfelder@feddit.de 11 months ago
I can not find anything in there. I can not favorite messages to find them again. It is a hole where everything your write is virtually there, but practically lost.
FlavoredButtHair@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Take those paywalls down.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The only thing I want is a good Discord update for Linux. Streaming with sound still doesn’t work and Discord hogs more CPU resources than on Windows.
sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Discord is the primary voice chat platform for a lot of my gaming groups, and half the time it can’t even detect the correct mic or output. Also routing my calls to the phone app for no reason when I am clearly ACTIVE AND TYPING on PC.
I don’t need another messaging app, I need an actual seamless voice chat experience.
muzzle@lemm.ee 11 months ago
If I wanted to get there I wouldn’t start from here.
RinseDrizzle@midwest.social 11 months ago
What are people using for gaming/chat other than discord?
nutsack@lemmy.world 11 months ago
one day it will need to become profitable and suddenly it will be a pile of shit
fluckx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I already have too many chat apps. STAHP
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not sure what everyone is complaining about in the comments. I use discord pretty much constantly and at all times.
Nitro ads? It’s 1 very minor ad when you launch the app. Then there’s no more ads.
Not as good as forums? Bull. I get an answer to my question immediately on discord. I may never find the answer to my question by sifting through dozens of pages of forum posts of someone having a similar but not congruent problem to mine.
Can’t find information? Discord has integrated forums in each server.
Bloated? How so? You have an inbox and you have your list of servers on the left hand side. Okay, some of the options are a little obscured, but it’s not like Discord is doing anything except connecting like minded people.
I sincerely don’t know what anyone is talking about.
trackcharlie@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
They could fucking start by going bankrupt so open source alternatives that actually give a shit about privacy can take over. Revolt chat is objectively superior to discord
FuyuhikoDate@silkky.pub 11 months ago
Just read the headline… Will it stop spying on me o und which Servers i am?
verysoft@kbin.social 11 months ago
It's going the complete wrong way if so.
Tosti@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Discord is a disjointed mess that is being abused by many to fill a role it was never designed to fill.
No, I don’t want to join your discord to use a half assed search to be able to dig my way through what you think is an FAQ about your game.
lupec@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Yeah, it really bugs me that it’s basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don’t reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with
TwanHE@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I like discord a lot for support groups for small projects where it’s about 50-100 ish people interested in it. But when a project grows and the server grows with it definitely becomes a struggle for people to look back at whats already been discussed so people keep asking the same questions over and over.
Tosti@feddit.nl 11 months ago
And every gamer and his dog have their own, so communities are adhoc and lackluster. It does the opposite of what forums used to do.
StraightArrow@feddit.de 11 months ago
A lot of people kept trying to tell me Discord was the new Reddit and a new ultimate messenger type software. I tried it a bit and did not find it lacking on both sides.
Perhaps it will swallow the rest of the world, but I’m happy with Lemmy and other messengers.
I’ll give it another go from time to time
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.
but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.
Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.
Tosti@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Jup, it’s terrible. Where information goes to die. I wish devs would not use it as much as they do.
systemglitch@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You nailed it.
Bosa@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ya this is true and that sucks and I don’t see a way to change it. Would be nice to go back to get all this info back on forms
whereBeWaldo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Don’t even get me started on people actively chatting in public discord servers
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It takes seconds to ask a question and receive an answer in discord. It’s entirely likely that my problem was never discussed on a forum post from 10 years ago with 15 pages to sift through.
imperator3733@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can’t imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they’re trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.
I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.
flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
It’s an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers voice chats, kitchen sink …
I just can’t force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.
PrettyLights@lemmy.world 11 months ago
AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.
The tin foil hat side of me says it’s so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They have forums within discord. Searching takes moments.
Tosti@feddit.nl 11 months ago
True-ish. Most discords are setup with chat channels that serve the function of a board. With all threads in a single timeline and several conversations running through one another.
In addition the interface is a cluttered mess with many different icons, buttons and panels all competing for your attention.
And the search then gives you a single post, leaving you to scroll in that messy interface through several mixed conversations to try and make heads or tails from it.
In the mean time the information cannot be found through search engines meaning I have to find the correct community (sometimes there are multiple) and hope the info is there.
It’s not an improvement IMHO.
homicidalrobot@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Discord does not allow you to search will. Discord’s search function is EXTREMELY limited when it comes to symbols, so if you go to search for version numbers of a project, you are shit out of luck. Discord forums are not engine searchable, so discovering the content requires you to join yet another discord server (sometimes multiple servers) to get info you could have just searched (the point of discoverable forums).
Perroboc@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Honest question: is there a centralized alternative? Like “here, install this or use this SaaS, it enables your community to chat, discuss in forums, and allows you to manage a FAQ/KB from the content from the chat and forums”
Tosti@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Good point, and I think there isn’t a one stop shop. But I think chat is overrated in this, it might be an addition. But having information that is not search indexed limits access and thus usability for the broader community. Also discord sucks for KB and FAQ in terms of formatting and setup (usually you see locked chat channels for that containing links to external sources. And the community discussions usually end up with multiple simultaneous discussions that get drowned out by new discussions in the same thread.
I think discord has a role. But it is not a good solution by any means. Lemmy, reddit, even the steam forums seem better.