Hacker News Reader

Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

The playfulness is endearing, but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me, even after having used it for years now. It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.

It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.

Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?

View on HN

but there's something about the way the UI is structured that always feels a bit disorienting to me

I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)

Agreed.

For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.

Did you ever know that you’re my hero?

(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)

My favorite is shift + alt + up/down arrow to move to the next unread channel. Works between servers too. Super easy way to knock out hundreds of unread messages at once.

Works in Slack too.

Is there a way to swap between two channels/DMs in the same server? Similar to how alt+tab or ctrl+tab would work in Windows?

Looking for CTRL+K?

Ctrl+K just searches for channel. I was looking more for something where I could switch between 2 different channels quickly. Like I'm messaging someone but then have to quickly switch to a different channel to address some issue and then quickly switch back without having to click on or search for the previous channel.

Ctrl-k initially highlights the last channel you were in, so Crtl-k RET will bounce you back and forth.

Except for threads, which bugs me daily.

Calling workspaces for servers is actually a bit of an “aha”-moment for me.

I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)

The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.

Oh man, I HATE that discord ties everything to the same email. I have personal discords, work discords, side project-based discords, and community discords.

I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.

The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.

While a perfectly good point, it's also why it caught on. You log in once. Now you just click "Join" on servers you want.

Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.

I use Ripcord[0] on my desktop/laptop, a Discord client which provides easy switching between accounts. It's lightweight and supports slack, too.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

>Not made from a web browser

That gave me a chuckle

FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.

The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.

> FWIW you can have different handles in each Discord Server, it's under right click on the server icon > Change Nickname. Seems to affect mentions also (something that didn't until recently IIRC), so your original usertag should be completely invisible.

Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.

I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.

> I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.

I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.

I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.

Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.

What is the connection between having a single login and disclosing a username to someone you've gone out of your way to hide it from?

There isn't one.

It's a nickname, not a feature to hide your account name.

You can use PTB(public test branch) as an alt, or Franz or Web for more than 3 accounts, though it’s a workaround than a solution, and neural noise suppression also don’t work for non-official clients.

And I hate how Slack doesn't group everything.

I agree. Discord has one of the most confusing UIs I've used for a while. My first exposure to Discord was when somebody told me to join their Discord server - I was like "where do I put in the address?". Slack calls them "workspaces" which is less confusing. The channel interface is also quite confusing, as you say - joining a voice channel is really weird.

Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.

Yeah that's another thing: in "direct" (non-server) group conversations, the text chat and any voice/video chat for that same group of people belong to a single "conversation" entity. But when it comes to channels on a server, "text channels" and "voice channels" are disjoint categories. There are just lots of little inconsistencies like this that muddy one's mental model.

> joining a voice channel is really weird

Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?

yes it is. must be something else about it that confuses them. I guess having joining a voice channel be one click could be considered odd if you are not used to initiating a "call" that allows people to hear you immediately like that.

You get used to it quickly, but it is odd. Putting an explicit "Join" button with some relevant icon next to the channel name would be much more intuitive. It would also clarify, for example, how you leave the channel. Once you're in one, a separate "Leave" button appears at a totally different location in the footer of the UI, but I can't honestly be sure whether or not clicking the channel name would also do the job of backing you out.

I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.

Maybe they have experience with Skype but not used to multiparty walkie talkie radios or TeamSpeak?

It's completely natural now but I remember not realizing it and forgetting how to join the first few times. Also accidentally joining voice channels etc.

I do wonder if they'll rename servers to 'communities' at some point. A recent blogpost[1] referenced Discord as being made up of communities. As someone with a tech background who game to discord through gaming, servers did make sense (in the sense of old multiplayer servers (pre-matchmaking) rather than IRC server hosts).

Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.

[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...

Discord's "server" language is a throwback to non-centralized voice chats like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, where each group of users really would run their own chat server. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop that language eventually, especially since most of the users who would have recognized it have probably already migrated.

Interestingly, Discord's developer documentation and API still consistently calls them "Guilds", which I find a much better name, personally, but of course is even more of a term with gaming baggage, and "Server" was the eventually official neutral choice after that.

I don't think "guild" has gaming baggage except to gamers? I think of medieval history.

That's part of what I mean by gaming baggage, it's generally not a common word in contemporary English parlance unless you are a gamer or a history buff (and obviously there's an overlap in that Venn Diagram; part of why games use the term so often is how much medieval-inspired fantasy infuses the history of videogaming).

Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.

Couldn't you argue that being in the state of constant learning but never the feeling of being utterly lost keeps you on discord. Like it keeps making things feel fresh and when you want to change mappings or what ever you can move your servers around and what not. I don't know maybe not but I get where you are coming from. I find DM especially can get really mixed but than again I don't hate that. I think the threading idea that something like slack or teams(worst) is to much. I'm just trying to talk to people I don't need a thread the channel already classified what's going on there if need to look something up I can search the channel.

> It's generally easy to find what you're looking for, but you're always "figuring it out"; it's hard to pin things down as having a concrete, spatial location. You never quite have a stable notion of "where you are". I don't know how else to describe it.

You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!

After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."

The channel UI is still confusing to me. When I'm watching a stream, I haven't been able to figure out how to stop watching without leaving the voice channel entirely

You press the stop watching button instead of the big red button. I probably do it 50/50 still.

yeah I feel similar... there's a weird bloat factor to discord that never left.

I agree with this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com