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Comment by starkparker | Hacker News Reader

I get his beef with Slack, but this is just Discord for people who don't want to talk to Android users. What's his problem with Discord, other than uselessly calling it ugly?

EDIT: I thought his "it's AI in a group chat" pitch sounded familiar, then I realized it's because it's a Discord blog post from a couple weeks ago: https://discord.com/blog/ai-on-discord-your-place-for-ai-wit...

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I don't have a "beef" with Discord, but I have the feeling I really don't get it when I use it.

I joined a couple of servers related to games I play and some sports. But I feel like there's conversations going on that I can't see. Do I need to message some special bot? Do I need an invite or be admitted before I can see some hidden channels? There are voice chats, there are so many settings.

I definitely feel like I need someone to handhold and clue me in to a few more things about it before I feel "comfortable" using it. Discord is a lot to deal with.

FWIW, that's more a matter of customizations for those servers than Discord in general. Vanilla discord is... still kind of annoying, but not terribly confusing. Mostly just Slack with voice/video chat and bad threading.

Slack has voice / video chat no?

True, ish. The voice is much newer, not part of their DNA like it is for discord, and I don't think they have video.

Can confirm that Slack has video, following their acquisition of Screenhero

I think the sales pitch is

a) better threading UX

b) E2E encryption

admittedly I'm a very casual Discord user, and haven't used this app at all yet, so I may be missing something.

Also, sounds like the Android app is coming, so I don't think "don't want to talk to Android users" is an intended sales point?

I don't really like Discord's threads. They're basically a channel nested inside of a channel, but they don't really interact with or get exposed in the outer channel. And by default, they disappear after a while. And the threads are kind of hard to find if you haven't joined them yet.

Something that has a UX more like traditional forums as a chat app sounds neat to me.

Keep in mind that the messaging ecosystem is big enough for multiple winners. Over the past few decades, there seems to be a continual churn where a handful of messaging apps dominate at any given time without a single one taking over completely.

It specifically says an Android app is on the roadmap.

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