this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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For me personally the shitty UI of discord causes so much friction that I'll never interact with discord ever again, unless I can reach it via some gateway from some of the messaging systems I use - which so far doesn't happen as I'd need to log in to discord to configure the gateway. I tried that once, never again.
what don't you like about the Discord UI?
It is a web designers masturbation phantasy - fancy looking, but convoluted and impractical.
Maybe I'm just missing something here but I can't think of what part of discord's UI could be considered convoluted. It's a list of servers with a list of channels in them. You also have a list of DMs. End of story. Everything you need is right there in front of you.
It's miles better than any IRC client I ever used, which is the most direct comparison between Discord and "the good old days" of the internet. And I liked IRC a lot.
I understand having issues with Discord's corporate backing or having issues with how it's difficult to find files or specific posts. Because it isn't a forum, it was never really intended for that. But I think it's a bit disingenuous to say the UI is complex, convoluted and impractical, because it's actually none of those things. Discord has done its best to keep up with people misusing their platform as a forum, as they should, because that's what the userbase wants (even if they're using the product "wrong"). But the core functionality of what it's supposed to do is wide open right in front of you and is highly intuitive.
Do correct me if I'm wrong though, I'm curious to hear what people have to say about this. There's always a possibility that I'm some savant who is the only person in the world to intuitively grok Discord. But I very much doubt that.
It's been a few years since I gave it a try - so I don't remember specifics, just the impression I described above, and that it put me off from using it.
Your opinion here is valid, but I'm really at a loss for how you formed it. It's no big deal. Everyone has different tastes. I was just hoping to learn a bit. Have a great day.
It could have been that the discord server you interacted with choose to lay it’s self out poorly. Discord does have some questionable UI choices, particularly around settings. But as a chat/call system it works pretty damn well.
It does definitely depend on good management, especially now with "community features" that you really need a good admin team to make best use of.
I remember coming to Discord from Skype and it was definitely an adjustment. Discord wants everything in a server, so direct messages/call between users is a bit offuscated. Once you get used to that it makes some sense, but if you were a primary Slack/Skype/Teams users you might have some initial friction. I know I did
This is my experience as well.
The only issue I have is how DMs are tucked away. I’d rather 2 vertical columns, or a column splitter allowing me to at least show last half dozen DMs and the rest servers.
Modded discord is the only way I can tolerate it anymore, custom UI and plugins take a lot of the friction away on both mobile and desktop, Discord still needs a viable competitor though so stuff doesn't get trapped only on Discord, and so they have an incentive to improve stuff instead of enshittification
The issue with modded Discord is the ban risk, despite how uncommon it is, the risk is still there