I do not understand what people like about Discord.

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@aphyr It has been fascinating watching it _get worse_ as the company has found more ways to insert their monetization goals into their users' social goals.

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@aphyr What people like: they already have it (mostly from when it was less bad), voice chat works and is relatively pleasant to use, infinite scrollback

when it was aiming to replace roger wilco and teamspeak I think it was a clever and well-designed product, but then they won that fight and still had to Grow.

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@aphyr case in point on getting worse: voice chat now has its own attached streaming and chat service, _within discord_, that is disruptive if you're trying to just join a voice call. Whatever you were doing, you now need to click back to, whereas the UI used to stay where it was when you joined a call.

[owen@mastodon.transneptune.net]

@aphyr I don't think Discord has any real chance of becoming a Streaming Platform for Gaming the way twitch did, that market is pretty saturated and being accessible outside of the platform-app is a huge selling point for literally anyone but Discord, but they're trying anyways and making their product worse to use in the process

[vulgalour@birdbutt.com]

@aphyr It felt actively hostile to use which is why I stopped. Just too much information too much of the time and everything is hard to find. What's making that noise? Why can't I find what made that noise?

[oggie@woof.group]

@owen @aphyr

It used to be significantly better on every single axis. Now it's primarily the best of a lot of bad options, and pretty much everyone is still using it.

Not excited to use it, or happy to use it, but -still using it-.

It works fairly well as a group chat system that's less intrusive than signal ( I like signal but it's more of a point to point, discord lets you trivially do tons of segregated channels).

Primarily they just won the lowest barrier to get people to install it.

[robdaemon@woof.group]

@motoridersd @aphyr I have a few communities on there but I hate the app so much I never look at them

[motoridersd@pug.ninja]

@robdaemon @aphyr yeah and I hate when projects use it as their only way of getting any kind of support

[robdaemon@woof.group]

@motoridersd @aphyr yep the Vampire accelerator for the Amiga did that. It's how you can download the latest FPGA update bits for it too. Hate it.

[ccshan@woof.group]

@aphyr I use Discord to field student questions. I haven't done a survey of options, so I would welcome alternative suggestions. I wrote a bot that allows each student to create a channel that only that student and the entire course staff can see. My priority is to get students (who can be shy, afraid, anxious, distant, intimidated, hubristic, disorganized, confused, overwhelmed, socially awkward, technically incompetent, etc.) to talk. to. us.

[erai@furry.engineer]

@aphyr It’s very painful when it won’t let me size the window down further than my whole screen

[anderson_jon@hachyderm.io]

@aphyr custom emoji and gifs, I can mute all the servers I don’t care about and pretend they don’t exist except when I need to be there, I like the reply feature as well as threads being different (vs slack for example), infinite scroll back as someone else mentioned, voice chat built in…

But I only like it for friend group chats with channels for different topics (usually different games). I do not like big servers or “documentation” servers. Those suck ass and it’s Too Much.

[klauser@mstdn.io]

@aphyr I'll take Discord over MS Teams any day. Low bar, I know.

[negahyphen@infosec.exchange]

@aphyr I think they mostly like that it isn't Slack.
There's a new one coming up, runs off Tor, looks really awesome but not quite ready for prime time. It's called Quiet.