Man, every time I've used Discord it has been an aggressively unpleasant experience. How is this platform so popular?

@pganssle I can't really answer that question but what parts do you find unpleasant?

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@cenobyte Pretty much every aspect of it.

1. The client is this monolithic thing with all the servers in the sideboard, and then *every room on the server* is available and possibly generating notifications. Even being default-in every room would be annoying enough, but from what I understand you can't even leave or hide rooms you don't care about!
2. The voice chat doesn't seem to work as well as other options I've used before, which I thought was the whole point of using a Discord?
3. No alternative clients and no support for multiple accounts (at least on Android).
4. If I'm not using the *absolute latest client*, Discord refuses to connect. The Arch linux package for discord updated pretty much immediately, and I still couldn't connect because my specific package server had not refreshed their index in the last *four hours*.
5. It's a walled garden situation controlled by discord. Apparently discord has some questionable content policies (servers can get banned for allowing people to talk about violating the ToS of a service, apparently?)

I essentially only use this platform when I absolutely must (and even then poorly). I am totally the kind of person who drops into an IRC or other chat room for a specific purpose and just never leaves for years and years, but I am *never* tempted to do this in any sort of Discord or Slack.

@pganssle
> The client is this monolithic thing with all the servers in the sideboard, and then *every room on the server* is available and possibly generating notifications.

I think that's a big reason people find Discord friendly: it is discoverable, it's all there to click on and it pushes information at you.

@cenobyte

@pganssle

IRC is in my opinion better for many reasons. But the newcomer experience is that it's hard to find stuff and hard to figure out what *can* be done. Discord massively improves on that with a big focus on discoverability.

@cenobyte

@bignose @cenobyte Having a thousand things shoved in your face is not really "discoverable" in my opinion, because it's too noisy.

I don't know if IRC is the best, but when I used to just show up on a server and look for rooms, it was easy to just browse the directory, same as with Matrix.

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