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Why is discord mentioned?
I don't know man. I still don't understand how Discord became so popular in the first place and I will never ever understand how some people are fine with Discord being their only online presence or way of interaction (I'm looking at you, midjourney!) It's a walled garden with a fucking horrible UI and UX. Just look at the screenshot in the article:
What a steaming pile of dog poop, lol
I take it you don't remember the old internets chatrooms, that's why Discord is popular. It scratches a very specific itch, Live Chat. Social Media scratches a very similar itch, but with a platform that is forum based, not chat based.
Throw in the old Social Media, like ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, etc. and you begin to see that live chat is absolutely a feature that people want. Sometimes they want a "room" where a bunch of like minded people are, sometimes they want to talk to specific people.
Social Media as a concept has gone through a lot of iterations.
As much as I'd like to argue otherwise, it's easily one of the most accessible versions of live chat around currently. I'm still on IRC and also on Matrix, but neither is as user-friendly as the centralized single-account, single-app, single-server setup of Discord. That's absolutely not to say that it's the best option, but it's the simplest to explain by far.
My fellow Matrix nerds can tell us all day about how they got their whole family using Matrix and it's great and everybody understood it, but I strongly suspect there's a level of one dedicated user doing things like app and instance selection (or self-hosting) for the entire group, while everyone else is pretty much along for the ride.
Matrix does solve some of the issues of IRC, like using a single account to interact with basically any server, but room discovery is still not great, the mobile apps lag heavily behind desktop, there's persistent basic usability bugs like unread notifications getting permanently stuck, and privacy is an afterthought with most Matrix apps broadcasting your presence to all other users at all times without any option to stop that behavior. Plus, the heavy reliance on bridging with IRC for many communities also kind of loses you the benefit of the single-account approach since you end up having to register an account for your bridge user anyway (and I can hear the eyes glazing over at this point).
Then there's the network effect, of course. Most of the stuff you can reach via Matrix is super nerdy: Linux distros, fediverse support rooms, Wii U homebrew development channels. This part isn't Matrix's "fault" per se, but it's definitely a reason why people would choose to use Discord or maintain a presence in both. At this point, unless there's just nothing that interests you on Discord, switching to Matrix really has to be an ideological choice.
Not only do I not have the "live chat itch", I actively get very stressed on live chat platforms and do my best to avoid it. Afaik I never had communication difficulties my entire life, but being on discord makes me feel like I do. I just have zero idea how to approach any topic, which I assume is because I cannot read facial expressions. I'll much rather approach strangers on the street than chat on discord.
I'd like to know if anyone shares this experience it too. Live chat seems like a better option for most people.
That picture is incredibly bias...
So I do think this is a really unfair take on Discord, but also I think Discord is a terrible replacement for reddit. It was made for conversations, not for discussion.
I feel like it's an issue of bloat more than anything. Discord was much easier to use back when I first joined, but now it's gotten to the point where where you have the ability to make twitter/reddit-style posts inside what is supposed to be a chat room.
I tried to make Discord work for a couple niche interests I had. Holy shit is it awful. I genuinely don't understand why people think it's okay. Maybe it's kids who have never experienced forums?
It's okay for very small groups of people in my experience. I use two servers with like ~10 active users in total. We use the server as a way to keep group text-like conversations more organized in different channels based on topic and the added benefit of voice calls and chat bots.
Large communities for it are awful, it becomes an even harder to read Twitch chat in active channels.
Maybe it’s kids who have never experienced forums?
That's a good point, maybe.
Discord is basically the modern equivalent of the old school IRC chat rooms. Though I think it's biggest draw is the ease of doing voice chat for people who want that.
I get that. It's a voice chat platform. Awesome. You can do text chats. Great. But when customer support is like "please reference the documentation on our Discord", I'm like "fuck all the way off."
I don't use Discord, so this screenshot is amazing. It somehow manages to combine the clutter of bad '90s UI design with the wastage, eye candy glut, and oversimplification of the last 10 years. A towering achievement in the worst of both worlds.
Honestly the only saving grace is they don't show ads. But that only works while the users keep a stream of money flowing their way. It's a lot like the paid Reddit award scheme, except Reddit still shows loads of ads lol
They show ads for their products. Those ads are intrusive as fuck.
They're really not
The sad thing is that they used to be better than this, but enshitification came for them too and they felt the need to cram features into the client that nobody uses to appease shareholders.
Look, look, we're creating value, look!
I do use Discord, but have never seen it look like that. I didn't know it supported posts/threads and stuff... does it really?
I absolutely can't grasp how people use that shit
I don't know any other applications that allow people to instantly join up in voice chat with each other (either through dms or servers) and instantly share their screen/game to their friends. It's primarily a platform for people who are playing games, it's just expanded a lot since then.
I forgot about this feature and how Discord started out. While it might be great as a platform for discussing while streaming, I still don't get how it's being used for so much more by now.
A lot of subreddits have discord servers associated with them. Personally I think discord doesn't fill the role of Reddit well, but it does have its place.
Discord is great for tracking specific projects being run by small groups. For example, I use it to track the status of a Radical Heights fan remake, and also to get updates when a specific user creates 4-bit quantization of LLMs and to read chats of ways they are being implemented.
I use it for that too, and I find it far from ideal. Notifications are wonky, and posts arent very discoverable. Questions are lost in a sea of comments.
Id much prefer a mesage board ala Reddit or Lemmy for that.