Ask HN: Do you find Discord completely disorienting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you find Discord completely disorienting?

88 pointstechsin10185 comments

Whenever I end up on discord, I'm completely lost, and I know all the functions, but still lost. If I had to describe it in a word, it'd be ANXIETY. 10 teams, 30 channels, 50 unread messages in each channel, 500 members, 5k gifs...

I have no idea who is talking, what is being talked about, are you and how are you suppose to follow anything, how to find information that took place 1 min ago and let alone few weeks ago, how each message somehow takes so much vertical space.

The UI contrast doesn't help, as there is none. Everything just looks like vomit of UI elements on page, that's what came to be the interface of discord.

But people seem to be using it? who is using it? and how are they managing to 'get' it?

It feels like artistic rendition of millions of people chats combined into one, but meant to be appreciated from distance not to be interacted with.

View on HN

Its more like classic IRC than everything else. I think it's even more ephemeral than Slack. Most servers have two channel types: slow announcement channels that only owners post to, and fast conversation channels for fans, content creators, etc.

Any important announcement like release notes will be in announcements. Announcement channels have no discussion directly inside them.

The conversation channels are like message rooms of old. Usually the conversation channels have important or common questions answered in pinned posts. Unless you want to talk now, they are kind of useless. Also you need to spend some time in them before you know people and how best to use them. You can jump in and ask a question, you might get an answer.

It's a power use interface, and takes some time to learn. Once you learn it, you will miss features in other apps.

It's not like IRC. You had one or two channels per topic. Discord servers have 50 channels for everything under the sun.

You join a programming Discord, there's a general, meme, spam, announcements channels, like on that gaming discord, like on my friends' Discord, etc.

It's incredibly hard to navigate. And they're complete siloes. Previously someone on #programming could join #friends-channel. Now you need to explicitly invite them. So there's no cross-pollination possible.

It's nothing like IRC.

I really liked the ability to automate IRC. I am not very familiar with what the options are for this on discord.

Server admins can write/install bots. End users can get banned for trying anything that's not the unedited default client.

IRC didn't require e-mail AND phone number to use it

And IRC is dead.

Getting one’s account stolen on IRC because of NickServ was common occurrence with new users.

Get back to me after Discord will be 25+ years as IRC and let's compare which how was each "dead" at that stage.

I couldn't care less about my ephemeral IRC account getting used (not sure why you call it stolen, if it's just there for anyone to take) by someone else, it's for sure much less important to me than sharing my email AND phone with some corporation, especially considering email would be more than enough to verify the user.

Discord doesn't need your phone number, although if you try using a VPN or Tor they'll think you're suspicious and require it

oh so it was just my imagination they first required email, them they required phone and I don't use VPN/TOR, maybe avoid black statements if you don't have clue, when did you try to register last time?

yep, exactly. if IRC was on the web, back in the day, I feel it would have been a lot like discord.

IRC is on the web and has been for some time, but it is not like discord. There is a difference in their approach

Discord tries to make chat searchable so they encourage splitting conversations to 1000 channels, and a more asynchronous way of replying. It s a searchable live news feed rathr than a chat transcript.

IRC is simple live stream, if something is not noted immediately, it gets lost and you have to repeat it. It's meant to be ephemeral

IRC is not a web protocol. IRC is on the Internet, but not the web.

IRC frontends can be and are hosted on web pages, but that's not the same thing.

Discord is hosted on port 443, uses HTTPS as a transport protocol, and is entirely a web application.

anyway, I feel that discord is meant to be just as ephemeral as plain IRC is, given that nearly every IRC server I have ever used automatically logged everything that happened to a searchable web interface.

No Matrix users here, huh?

I'm confused why you're confused. A discord is just a chatroom server. Click on the chatroom and type your message in the textbox and read other messages. It has native support for things IRC didn't, like emojis, the ability to upload files, voice chat, etc.

Maybe you joined a discord with too much traffic. But I'm in the most popular discord that covers my entire state and #general can go hours without anyone talking.

If you think its too complicated, maybe you're over thinking things.

I suspect a lot of HN users have some kind of willful ignorance where they mentally block themselves from being able to use the tool because they are upset about it being written in electron or blocking user bots. So as soon as they come up against the first uncertainty, they mentally shut down while a regular user clicks around for a bit, finds what they want and then moves on.

I don't think it's an Electron thing, because you'll see the same kind of HN comments about not "getting" Twitter. In both cases I'm not really sure where the confusion lies.

For any kind of social tool, there's presumably a reason you're using it, so go pursue that reason. For me, Discord is primarily about casual competitive gaming. It helps organize races, tournaments, etc.

It's not electron specifically, its just some arbitrary reason to dislike it. For twitter, they already don't like twitter and then find reasons to justify the dislike which are really far fetched like not understanding the UI.

Sounds like you're trying really hard not to empathise with people that actually and simply, just do not get it.

I'll tell you why I won't touch Discord — I just have an (irrational?) deep-seated distrust for the team/org.

I wouldn't execute their software on my machine for money. They may not deserve this, just my feeling and opinion.

Can you give a bit more perspective, what do you find Discord confusing relative to? Because my comparison goes to IRC and Slack, and I find both of those far harder to use.

As it stands I can't say I see where you're coming from. It's a chat room, or really a series of chat rooms. If you have something to say or ask you find the appropriate channel and post a message there. If someone needs your attention specifically they'll @ you.

I'd say a chat room like this is strictly transient. Think "call", not "e-mail". Don't expect it to serve as an index of information, just treat it as more-or-less real-timely communication.

> just treat it as more-or-less real-timely communication

And there-in lies the rub. It's a medium that asks us to use it synchronously, when it has none of the supporting features that make synchronous communication work.

In what way does it ask you to use it synchronously?

Sound-and-flashing-lights notifications, for starters.

My guess is OP is comparing it to the good ol' days of forums like vBulletin, which I have no idea why you would compare vBulletin to IRC.

I use Discord frequently. It's just IRC or Slack, although the userbase skews younger, so indeed there are more GIFs flying around than usual.

Channel muting (and category muting, and server muting) is very important.

I also recommend visiting the "Appearance" and "Accessibility" sections in the settings: perhaps you prefer "Compact" mode, or would like to disable all animations (including GIFs).

Same. A small subreddit I help moderate asked all the mods join discord.

I’ve zero clue what the hell is going on in that interface.

Long conversations happen in what seem like ephemeral spaces. There’s a bazillion channels… I don’t know where my attention should be.

Apparently the discord channel for the sub involves a lot of drama and BS but hell if I see it / I don’t really care…

I might end up just not being a mod so I don’t have to figure it out.

Think about it like a large office. You're neither able nor expected to know what everyone says the whole day. Different teams will discuss different things that are not relevant to you. Those are the unread messages.

To function well - leave all the channels you're not actively interested in. You'll be pinged if anyone needs you there. Turn off notifications for things you don't have to know about immediately. (basically all non-@ messages)

For conversations, just treat it like walking into a room - of course you don't know what's been going on while you were gone. You can scroll up some arbitrary number of messages and get to catch up though if you want to.

> leave all the channels you're not actively interested in

That works for Slack, but you can’t leave channels in Discord. That to me is what makes it too busy. I’m in servers with tons and tons of channels and I get pinged for every single inappropriately used @here.

Right click on channel -> notification settings -> only @mentions.

You can also change this for channel groups or entire servers.

Seeing them light up is not leaving.

Having people on #your-channel referencing something written on #other-channel that you tried to avoid is not leaving.

The only way to use Discord is to mute all servers, and just browse what and when you want to. You can usually opt into roles to get important notifications about what you want.

The need to mute is annoying, and the search function is garbage, but otherwise Discord is pretty great.

This is the way. I agree that joining a server, everything in it should be muted by default. Or at least, there should be some global option you can set to mute all channels in a newly joined server by default.

The way I manage Discord is: 1) Join as few servers as possible. There are even some servers I will join, chat, and leave. Customer support servers are a common case for that. 2) 99% of servers you join total mute. Only go to them when there is an intentional reason to go to them. 3) There are maybe 1 or 2 servers that are "my home". The close friends Discord. The Discord server that I run. Places like that. Even in those places I mute the channels I don't regularly participate in.

In the end, even though I am in 15ish servers, I only have 15ish unmuted channels that have any significant amount of activity. It's not any different than having irssi open with 15 channels across the bottom. Hardly unmanageable.

I think the Discord interface is decent, the issue I have with it is the resource usage. My suggestions are to stop caring about the unread indicators, mute any channel you don't read or care about, and put servers in folders organized by how much you care about them. The quick switcher is useful, ctrl+k to find a channel or server. Don't bother reading backlog on public servers. The search is ok. You can turn on compact mode to make messages smaller. Honestly just avoid big servers in general.

Not disorienting, but definitely not as useful as a chat application could be. Especially when concepts like 'server' and 'team' are overloaded so gratuitously.

Ironically, MS Teams suffers from this as well, as do some IRC clients that try to aggregate interfaces on top of the network+channel concept.

Most classic chat clients used to have a user-managed interface for 'people' and 'groups' and while the service decides what a user is, everything else is left to the user, and all the concepts of communication are inside each 'chat' instead of extracted into the main interface. It's almost like the hierarchy is broken down where elements of different detail level are just mixed together. Not even Internet forum software is messy that way.

On Slack you can get the same issue when you use Slack Grid, and in certain scenarios with non-local participants as well (i.e. Slack Connect).

The problem I have with Discord (as well as with IRC and Slack and other "chat" services) is insufficient structure to get a good overview of what's going on. Maybe it's not supposed to be used in a completionist way, but that makes me really uncomfortable. What if I miss something important!?!

It's even worse when a large part of the community is in a different time zone. I just come back every day with too big a pile of discussions and no way for me to make sense of what happened.

I understand the sentiment that I'm not supposed to read everything, but that's just not how I roll.

As a great example of a chat service that works well for me, take a look at Zulip. The UI takes some time of getting used to, but the way how all conversations are grouped into "topics" makes it so much easier to filter.

Discord threads could be used in a similar way, but they just never are. I blame it on the UI.

> As a great example of a chat service that works well for me, take a look at Zulip... but the way how all conversations are grouped into "topics" makes it so much easier to filter.

So, you're looking for a forum. :)

That's s false dichotomy. Why not support different types of users at the same time?

Zulip is more of a hybrid between a forum and a chat service, and I think it does that really well.

I think a lot of the UX paradigms of Discord were built back when users' first experience was most likely a small server of friends or small communities with only single or double-digit active users at a time. Early on you might join a streamer's server with a lot of users but if you are watching Twitch you probably already had experience with Discord anyway. Once you are comfortable with the interface in a simple, low volume server the big servers are less disorienting.

Now with Discord serving as the platform for massive communities and interest groups outside of gaming a lot of people will have their first experience be a clusterfuck server with dozens each of channels, roles, voice channels, rules, emotes, etc.

I'm not sure what the solution is but I think that's how we got here.

I don't feel it's that much of an issue. I hardly have any idea what roles do, channels remind me of IRC except they are grouped by ownership rather than literal servers with independent channel mods.

I just ignore all the power user tools and the stuff I need seems pretty well exposed. When I start a game, a little thing comes up asking if I want to stream it, etc. It all just seems to do what I want while ignoring everything else.

Imo, it's way better than Slack or Teams. Discord I understand, teams and slack took me a while to grok. It's a chat room, a person can't follow every conversation in every channel in every server. I just hop around between servers and see what's going on, I have 2-3 servers that I actively participate in...then the remaining 99+ servers are there for when I get bored and want to see what's going on. It's not unusual for me to not read a server for a week. The key is that I disable notifications on servers that I'm not actively a part of. The right click -> mark as read for the entire server is nice to get rid of the red icon when I don't care about what's going on.

I feel the disorientation part. To me it's a combination of bad ux, bad server organization and featureitis. I dont think it was ever intended to be orientable. I use Discord similarly to FB groups - only when I have to and even that infrequently. Fortunately chat apps gain and loose popularity at light speed so hopefully next-gen makes for a better user experience.

I think Discord has an absolutely atrocious mobile UX, to the point where I have gone back to standard SMS to keep in touch with my friends that insist on using it for group chats. For the majority of my friends I use basic-ass apps like Groupme/Telegram on account of them not feeling like I’m trying to navigate some eldritch Laveyan ritual to figure out who said what and where they said it.

As for the idea of using it as a social network or giant chat room, that’s not something I’m interested in to begin with, largely because of this terrible UX.

I'm not a Discord power user, just occasionally use it to play games with friends and sometimes view a community. And I find it pretty simple to use. I did have some confusion on how to switch between seeing direct messages with friends and seeing the "servers" but I worked it out and have no issues now. I'm not sure how I'd rather it be done either.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the program. I prefer the UI of Telegram for basic chat and media but Discord does communities better.

Discord "clicked" for me when I realized it's arranged hiearchally from left to right. Select the server you want on the left, the chanel you want to the right of that, and view the individual messages to the right of that.

Also for OP: you can right click on any server or channel you don't need all the time and mute it so you don't get notification spam.

I accidentally left it in a voice channel one time and my friends heard a two hour long conversation between me and my partner. Barely used it since then. I have no idea what's happening in that app and I'm the generation that grew up with the internet.

Is that really Discord’s fault though? I’m not familiar with other chat apps, so maybe Discord is not doing something to prevent such accidents from happening.

Yes, it is Discord's fault.

Clicking on a channel name normally shows you the content of that channel. But clicking on some channel names automatically start an audio connection, and if you're on several Discord servers with many dozens of channels each, it's easy to miss which are which. Once the audio connection is started, assuming you realize what happened, the method for dropping the connection is a single unintuitive (for me, and apparently others) icon. If you instead switch away from the channel, thinking that just as the text for a channel disappears when you switch away from it, perhaps so does the audio, then you'll remain connected.

If you're focused on what you're doing, it's relatively easy to see what's happening and undo it. The icon is a monochromatic old-school phone handset with a tiny X in the corner, and recent versions of the Discord desktop client now include a reasonably large message on the lower-left telling you that you're part of an audio call. But if you're treating Discord like another chat app, then it is easy to accidentally end up broadcasting audio without realizing it, and I think Discord's design is to blame.

Thank you for the clarification.

My comment about Discord’s inculpability was quite unfair anyway because even though I use Discord, I’ve never used the voice channel. It’s foolish of me to make that comment.

On another note, I wonder how many times those kinds of accidents had happened? And if it’s relatively high, is Discord aware of them?

I think they're aware enough that they've definitely made the notice that one is voice-connected more prominent since I started using the client. No idea how often it happens, but it seems an issue for new users specifically. Once you spend some time focusing on the UI, it eventually makes sense.

I feel like every layer of the stack (poor UX design, discord, chrome, electron, windows/android, drivers, my actual microphone) is not to be trusted now more than ever. I'm not even talking about conspiracies or the NSA, I'm only talking about glitchy buggy behaviors that cause things like "I didn't know I was unmuted". Things are so unreliable and untrustworthy these days I can only falt OP for not being overly paranoid and double checking constantly.

Yes and no. It's fully possible to name your channels meaningfully, but too many people who create Discord servers decide to be cute and ultimately make them unnavigable. Additionally, too many discord server owners get too granular with their channels and end up making their servers into conversation wastelands because you end up having to be in 3 different channels just to share content in the way that you would normally share it in a conversation.

I don't share the confusion, but I generally don't like the real time format.

In an office setting (whether remote or not) , I think something like Discord or Slack is useful. I'm on the clock, and I know others are, too. I'm there for several hours of my day and I always have the chat window up.

Outside of that type of environment, chat room style discussion don't fit well with my life. I'm busy and I value asynchronous discussion, so I want to spend 15 minutes catching up on whatever happened, say whatever I need to say, and then not be present until the next day. Trying to make that work in Discord is fatiguing if the community is active. If I'm feeling overwhelmed by life, I start trimming things that send me notifications on my phone, and Discord is always the first to be culled. Currently my Discord app sends me 0 notifications, which is the way I need it, but it's not what people tend to expect. It's hard for me to participate.

I get that Discord/Slack are not at all analogous to forums, I just wish more communities gravitated to forums instead Discord. Discord obviously has its place.

Yes. It feels like a clusterf*ck to me.

If people use threads more, messages in a channel should be less of a mess. From what I’ve seen, only a few use threads and they’re either a moderator or a prominent member.

Threads are pretty new and also just... not well put in. Slack's threading is much better in that regard. The use of threads in almost every case I've seen seems to be more of a subchannel thing. Example, if your server has a tech channel, but five or so people want to separate out say... keyboard talk, that becomes a semi permanent thread.

I think the key thing that makes Discord less usable than IRC or Slack for me is how unreads are handled. In both my chosen IRC client and Slack, I can set things so that I am only notified when my name (or chose alias or string) is referenced. In Discord, it's more like a blacklist than a whitelist, and I have to end up muting every channel to avoid the unread counts piling up.

Once you mute very nearly every channel and just pop in manually to see what you want, Discord works very well!

Completely agree. I think zoomers get a high out of all the "engagement" they're manufacturing for themselves and their server, what with all the different channels and notifications to click-through and explore. The red notification bubble is a tantalizing treat. They were raised on that kind of hyper engagement-optimized corporate walled-garden internet, so it's what they're comfortable using.

This makes me realize something: between the 50+ channel discord servers and the twitter X/20 chain posts, people are slowly rediscovering the superior usability of the "old internet", i.e. traditional forums and blogs. Each discord channel is one long poorly-indexed thread, and each twitter chain post is a blog. People are naturally gravitating back toward these traditional patterns because they work very well for the kind of communicating we do on the internet.

Add a voice chat channel to a traditional forum and you have discord with better usability (and index-ability). Put your twitter chain post on your Substack or regular blog and now it's infinitely more readable.

I guess the problem with going from twitter to blog though is that you lose discoverability and the momentum and network effect that twitter has.

And with discord, it's just visually more appealing than both traditional forums and IRC, especially with all the vector cartoon animals and soft edges. I suppose if a traditional forum started rounding its corners, adding anime kitsune vector art, and using several shades of purple, maybe they'd become popular again. That and add some voice channels.

I absolutely hated it but I had to use it to participate in a Tetris Effect competition. Hated it for weeks and then it just suddenly clicked. Now I use it for more varied things.

Yep, nonsense as far as UX and actual information organization. It's not a forum. And it wasn't designed or used for that from the get-go due to being primarily for gaming situations. But a symptom of certain generations lack of attention and obsession with memes and stuff means they've gravitated to it and somewhere a bunch of similarly minded coders and stuff started using it for open source projects etc and of course the plague of crypto, so now we're here. That generation's/gamer-warped minds are so only focused on now that everything flying by and losing anything that was talked about 2 hours ago isn't important. Their whole lives are ephemeral - from how they consume information, to how they consume culture. No history. No future. I avoid it at all costs as there's usually other avenues like twitter, github discussions, HN too of course.

This complaint or descriptions of this experience and Discord and other platforms use comes up around here anytime someone asks 'what happened to forums' or why are we using reddit and stuff to answer questions etc.

I gave up on Discord, this week I wanted to report bug at Kiwi Browser discord, I remember in past I didn't need anything, now I was asked to provide e-mail, didn't like it but OK, then in next step I was asked also for phone number because appartently e-mail was not enough, at which point I just closed this data harvesting website (and obviously didn't report the issue). F Discord.

It's just a chat app. You've probably used IRC, or Slack, or Teams. It's really not different from Slack in most ways in the context of your complaints. The main difference, IMO, is that slack servers are generally pretty small, with well defined groups of people, especially if you only use it within a company. Join servers that your friends or interests are in, mute channels you don't care about, join conversations that seem interesting.

> I have no idea who is talking, what is being talked about, are you and how are you suppose to follow anything, how to find information that took place 1 min ago and let alone few weeks ago

You tell what is being talked about by reading the conversation. And information that is old is not relevant. Chats are basically ephemeral. You can search for info if you know relevant keywords.

> how each message somehow takes so much vertical space.

User Settings -> Appearance: * Message display: Compact * Adjust chat font scaling * Adjust space between message groups

1. Mute channels that are not carrying urgent calls 2. Mute at the server level by preference 3. Learn the difference between @everyone (all people subscribed to channel) versus @here (only subscribers marked as online) 4. Limit the servers you subscribe to on each account 5. Where possible, champion the cause of a separate channel for automated notifications (“bots”) versus channels for discussion on the same topic 6. In the same vein separate channels for technical discussion from channels for breeze shooting and fat chewing (these “social” channels are useful for the neurotypical humans in the team, distracting or traumatising for everyone else)

Discord also has a “inbox” summarising new posts since you last checked, along with “mentions” which lists posts mentioning you or any role you have eg @here, @everyone, @sunos_admins, @team_orange_rocket)

There are many tools to help cope with information overload. What I have mentioned here are just the low hanging fruit

YES. I use Slack all day long for work, and mostly love it. When I have to use Discord for some group, I feel like I'm missing everything. The UI baffles me. I'm kinda worried that people might be direct-messaging me and I'd never know. (CAN you DM in Discord? You must be able to, right?)

In both IRC and Slack, DMs are per-server, so if you are focused on Server A, you can see DMs from Server A, and to see DMs from Server B, you have to focus on Server B.

In Discord, DMs are outside of servers, or rather they're on your server, which has the appearance of being outside any server. So all DMs are together, unrelated to any of the servers you may know someone from.

The kids are using it.

I dislike the discord UI as well FWIW. But it might be a feature and not a big. I think it’s designed for chaotic ephemeral informal impermanent communication.

Someone else here mentioned it’s a power use interface. This makes sense too - you’re not supposed to feel at home immediately…

Young kids are using discord all the time for their co-playing of games (Roblox, etc.)

It's a gamer-focused UI, if anything.

Old UIs from the days of text-based Internet were also 'flat'- the main difference is that Discord supports voice/video, no?

I have to use discord for some specific cases (one side project and a couple of social things) and it's been super comfortable once I did the following:

1. Turned off all notifications

2. Left / muted all the channels I didn't care about

3. Use the web app only

I did this and it still tries to wake up my soundcard for some inexplicable reason. Even with the tab muted I hear a 'click' as soundcard comes out of low power state every few seconds.

Why not use the mobile app as well? Your 1 and 2 already cut a significant amount of noise.

It's IRC with voice chat and images inline. It's not meant to store information, just like IRC isn't or other voice chat isn't. It's a chat service, not a forum.

bingo.

you aren't meant to read it all, I think people miss that as well.

Discord is a quagmire. It is where knowledge goes, not to die, but to be turned into unsearchable memes and random snippets of text.

I walk away from most OSS projects that use it for discussions.

I belong to about eight servers. Most of them are support channels for various projects. I added those for one specific issue, resolved it, and now basically never look at those servers, but never bothered to remove them

I also belong to two small (10-20 people) servers that are just friend groups. The message volume is low enough that I can follow all conversations 100% when I want to. It's just like a replacement for group chats/email threads.

"how each message somehow takes so much vertical space"

Discord has a compact mode https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/217047657-How-...

Yes! Nothing is where I'd expect it to be. A notification? Ok, let me see where I'm mentioned. Oh, you won't? Cool.

"Servers" are supposed to be identifiable just by their image. Great idea when you're in a lot of them and visit them rarely.

Adding someone or joining a server has become less hellish recently as they combined some things in a general search, but it's still not exactly nice.

The whole @everyone thing is a mess. No, I don't want to be notified for this funny cat picture.

I don't open it anymore so I don't know about now, but I used to regularly disable all notifications just for it to keep turning them on and bombarding me with them.

You're calling a means of interacting with users Clyde? Well that's weird since it makes it hard to tell it's Discord talking.

Discord is a piece of software that gives me empathy for (generally old) people who dread using computers because they just don't get how the hell they work. I generally don't have problems with anything else, only Discord.

For context: I'm a part of generation Z, but not a gamer.

Normally when I stumble across people talking like this I try to speak soothingly, make sure they have a safe place to be, and are hydrated.

It'll be ok. Just ride it out. Everyone's just riding theirs, too . . .

I find it annoyingly non-intuitive but with enough use I get over it. the prevalence of animated gifs in chat is fine if its casual but really REALLY irritating for technical and business focused chats.

I use it to reach a team of ~20 gaming and chatting together. It works great, and even if we don't use all the features, on larger servers Ido not feel disoriented at all.

I find all the modern chat apps to be this way.

What do you find better? I've used IRC and various forums and they're definitely harder to use than discord.

Yes. Too much noise.

Never used it which I take pride in.

How were you able to avoid using it?

It seems like everyone is promoting their discord servers these days, and some to the point of only Discord (or maybe Reddit) and nothing else.

I use M$ Teams at work so I have enough trouble without it already.

That seems like a step down in UX, actually. Lobby to replace with Discord.

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