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Comment by darthrupert | Hacker News Reader

Discord has the worst ux of any chat software I have ever used, fwiw. There's a fascinating race to the bottom in this area.

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I'm surprised to not see more comments like this. I think chat clients are a product which is used so frequently that after adapting, users become blind to defficiencies. I consider myself pretty technically literate and have used probably a dozen chat clients over years. Discord is the only one where I couldn't understand how to do the basics straight after installing it. I don't use it much, and when I come back to it there's always an element of guesswork. (fwiw I'm not a fan of Slack's UX either)

Because on the flipside, there are users like me who found Discord far more intuitive than anything else. I don't think your 'technical literacy' overcomes a difference in expectations and culture when many others feel it works just fine. It's not the best UI, but it is acceptable given the status quo.

Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples. Start there and we can have a proper discussion, otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-said'.

What chat software do you use? I find Discord to be among the best when it comes to UX. Not perfect (and it is still an Electron app) but when you have atrocities like MS Teams, it passes off as good.

In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.

> IRC ... but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.

Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off

That’s surprising. In what way? I find it to be the most consistent and the most correct out of any chat software I’ve used, including IRC, Slack, Mattermost, and Microsoft Teams. They seem to just get a lot of stuff right.

The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I can mute channels and categories I’m uninterested in, but how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor discoverability?

We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it’s worth.

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.

Discord's UI is seemly optimized for dopamine release, just like a game.

Some people like this kind of constant distraction, though.

Nope, it's possible to control the notifications to a much better degree than any of the other options allows.

I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.

MS Teams? Skype 4 Business? IRC?

Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.

Okay, for the first two. I didn't think of those as actual non-joke options.

About IRC you're obviously wrong :)

Discord seems like the best UX to me. Only things I can think of is some weird UX around new call features and search could be better compared to say gmail (although I generally have no problem finding things I want to find).

Thats crazy, ive used various voips, skype, teams ans discord is #1

I’ve been “chatting” on the web since the mid 90s when I used IRC.

Discord is the best thing I’ve found. My group and I love it.

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