Hacker News Reader

The founder gave an interesting interview about this.

In short when they did user testing with a Web UI, people would write a basic prompt "dog", "cat" and then get stuck.

Discord makes it social by default, you can see what people are prompting and get inspiration.

I also found it a bit weird, but now that ive onboarded its great having a multi platform native experience (ie even chatgpt still has no mobile apps).

View on HN

I don't know anyone who's used Midjourney more than a day and stuck around in one of the newbies channels; pretty much everyone slides into the bot's DMs.

The social angle is not what's fueling Midjourney's success. The quality of its output certainly is.

Some friends invites the Midjourney bot into our own discord server. And sometimes we mess around with it. It's kinda fun this way.

I dunno, even if it only matters for a couple of hours starting out, those hours might easily be critical. There are many technically strong products that fail because they didn't know how to get users to take those first timid steps.

I agree that the social learning component is very useful. Initially, I was taken aback that they force you to use discord but it is great for learning from others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com