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Comment by r_hoods_ghost | Hacker News Reader

The output is quite cool, but why on earth have they locked interaction with it away in discord instead of having it available in the web? It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it, won't interact with it, and won't be able to view the results. It's just a deeply weird design decision.

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It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it, won't interact with it, and won't be able to view the results.

That's good for now. It's early days and it's pretty busy already. I don't like Discord much but I'll admit it's a pretty good interface for something like MJ as you can see (and be inspired by) other people's prompts and discuss the process in a live way. The amount of realtime product feedback they are getting is amazing and it's fun watching it from the sidelines. The founder also does live calls on the voice channels where he talks about how things are going - it's a very interesting group experience for a product.

I'd argue Discord is great for attracting creative types. The number of HN comments complaining about how complicated Discord is (not yours so much, but the ones where people refuse to even countenance Discord at all) strikes me as odd given my assumption the typical HN user would be a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things.

> The number of HN comments complaining about how complicated Discord is (not yours so much, but the ones where people refuse to even countenance Discord at all) strikes me as odd given my assumption the typical HN user would be a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things.

I think I could be considered as a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things, and my avoidance of discord isn’t that it’s complicated (hard to use), it’s that it’s complicated (unnecessary busy). From the notifications being a lot of noise by default to threads being so much work to catch up on after the fact, it’s just heavy and dense and complicated.

Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.

> whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.

On larger servers discord has started defaulting to a feed channel summing up all the others and displaying popular messages/subthreads with a facebook/twitter type algorithm.

Discord is a slick chatroom experience, less good for asynchronous communication and really not secure.

I used to think that way too, but putting it on a social platform has a lot of benefits. New users who don’t know how to write prompts can learn from others and discover new artistic styles and concepts. It brought me up to speed much faster than DALL-E’s web based interface.

Fair enough, I guess there's value to the social feedback you get in discord and being able to easily see what others have input.

There isn't really, the majority of people in the channels are newcomers, it scrolls too fast for you to really see much, and once you subscribe you move to private and only see your own messages anyway.

I have no idea why they went to Discord, it hasn't provided any benefit to me personally, at least.

True enough. I totally agree with you. without Discord if it will be normal web portal it will be very nice.

They have show and tell and prompt training channels. If you only hang out in the newbies channel then yes, it will be newbies.

I don't know, that might work for some but I would have prefered a webapp with a nice UI instead. I've subscribed for a month but the first time I discovered some of the parameters was just now when someone on HN linked to their docs. Had no idea they even had those.

The flow was invite -> public discord channel with other people that don't know about what prompts work well with their model -> run out of free GPU time -> subscribe -> move to private discord message where none of the social aspect matters.

This isn’t entirely true - when you move to the chat with the bot you still have access to the show and tell and prompt training channels as well as the newbie channels you started in. But you can create without posting in public as you iterate via the private chat with the bot. I believe the newbie channels even still work for image creation if you really want.

By the way, /help for the bot works. Surely we always try the help flags?

Probably has a split effect. I saw no way to interact without discord, close tab.

Same here. I'm not a gamer and Discord isn't a thing in my world. I simply closed the tab.

I’ve been playing with tech like this in various Discord servers for over a year now and I’m still fascinated every day. Knowing how incredible it is and then hearing people say “Sure. But, Discord. Ew.” is a shaking-my-head moment. The Discord interface is far from ideal. But, it has had a very high ROI for the small, low budget team behind Midjourney.

I don't know why. I use the Discord server and don't like it, my messages get lost in the scrollspam and it's just a bad experience. Surely, a text field on the site would have been equally good.

you don't get to see other's images and talk with them in a shared chat channel with that approach (unless they build out a lot more web app). Which is half the fun of it. (Not that hard to build, but more work than a Discord bot.)

Which is half the fun for /some/ people.

What people are saying (including me) is that it's not fun for them, and Discord feels like a big hindrance instead of a benefit.

I like FPSes but I don't like multiplayer games. So I play single player FPSes, even if they are worse, because multiplayer ones are not fun for me. Craiyon, DALLE 2, and Disco Diffusion all offer a less social and direct interface in the same space as MidJourney and may be better to experiment with until MJ provides some sort of Web interface, as I imagine they will at some point.

You can click to add the bot to your own server and use it privately with ease. It’s quite fun!

I don't care if it's discord or slack or whatsapp or thelatesthypedapp... I even have a discord account, I just don't understand why the author is introducing extra hurdles, stick it on the open web, that's the lowest friction and least platform dependence.

cool

I know how to interact with discord, however I read the FAQ channel and it didn't answer the question "where do I type a prompt" or "how do I make it generate an image", so also closed tab

I know, the discord bot is calling a backend. It's not like their GPU-run model is somehow in discord. It's trivial to cross-post results to discord, and provide a web text prompt calling the same backend.

More likely, they are hiding from bots that will scrape / crosspost?

Probably easier for them to handle all the edge cases of a website via discord. I can imagine a situation where I’m focused on my backend and outsource UX to discord. I also think at this point they don’t need every user on earth, so if you can’t climb a gently sloping learning curve then they’ll catch you later - it appears they’re successful enough as it is. Finally I have to say the prompt training and show and tell discord channels are useful and I find a lot of material to help me innovate in the images I create (mostly in support of things I’m doing with my daughter like a lemonade stand logo and illustrations for its menu, etc)

They’re only just coming out of a restricted beta, so having it available to everyone is the opposite of what they were going for , so far.

I also read an interview with the CEO where he said they noticed that mostly people don’t know what to ask it to create, so they just input boring prompts (“a dog”) and, I’m guessing, walked away soon after. But together, seeing what others do, they went much further with it.

> It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it

They have close to a million users on their Discord, seems to work out not so bad... But I suppose the real reason was simply to save time and money.

To iterate fast and get something in the hands of users. I can guarantee they want their app on every platform under the sun someday, but things take time.

But I'm sure this is restricting the number of users who access it as "people who use discord" is a significantly smaller number than "people who use the web".

This is obviously on purpose for the sake of the beta. Compute power is not free.

Discord solves a big problem for them: they are trying to give a limited number of uses to each user. They dont have to create their own proof of human infrastructure since discord already has some weak forms of that with sms verification.

Easier to rate limit and easier to transition to selling access?

I for one will wait for secondary sources and if this is so great I might end up creating a Discord account. But not just to check out for myself if it's cool or not.

reddit.com/r/deepdream has a lot of Midjourney output.

Not true. Daily Dose of Internet mentioned it. Within a few weeks of that they came close to maxing out total Discord users on one server (1 million).

It is a strange choice, all right. I had some fun with Wombo, and this looks much more interesting - but I'm not going to go figure out Discord, and potentially have to deal with a bunch of crazy gamer kids, just to try it.

Presumably they will make a better interface available as they shift from early testing to productization.

You don’t have to figure out Discord or deal with “gamer kids”. You literally need 1 commands to use Midjourney.

You have to figure out Discord well enough that you have an account and know where to type in the commands, don't you? Is Discord not a chat service for gamers, or am I thinking of something else?

It is, but presumably you have seen a chat application before and thus already know where to type, and can deal with a totally standard website sign-up flow too. I don't like Discord, but it isn't difficult.

Midjourney users are sectioned off into separate rooms. For me, Discord ran into an updating bug and either they didn’t assign me to a room, or the app failed to surface the room. I had to force quit the app and restart it. I’m not familiar with Discord so I can’t comment if bugs like that are endemic or not but it doesn’t make a good first impression.

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