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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

Is the user interface still Discord?

Indeed. It sort of blows my mind that they cannot put a simple web UI up given all the resources they have at their disposal. To get midjourney, I need a midjourney account *and* a Discord account (I'm not a gamer).

There's no such thing as a simple web UI - discord is on all platforms desktop and mobile, they would have to duplicate a lot of work. It's a neat hack they recognize that generative AI is essentially conversational (or to go the other way, a conversation is essentially an iterative walk through possibility space).

EDIT: I don't know what you mean by having a discord account and a midjourney account, you log into billing by granting it access to your discord account - only one username/password is necessary.

Why would they have to recreate the wheel? A lot of very large companies use Gmail or Outlook for their emails, or Slack for their communications...

Getting real time communication at scale is real tough, especially when Midjourney is from far the largest Discord server https://www.statista.com/statistics/1327141/discord-top-serv...

> Getting real time communication at scale is real tough

Fair enough, but maybe I don't want a community. Maybe I want an application that works like Photoshop, Gimp, Inkscape, Figma, etc. Or maybe I just want a query response website, like a classic search engine, or how OpenAI works.

I think the refusal to put up a web app just seems lazy.

> It sort of blows my mind that they cannot put a simple web UI up given all the resources they have at their disposal

Of course they could if they wanted to.

They think it's good to have the whole community on their discord channel, so people can see what other people are doing to inspire new users.

I'm not on it myself, so I can't comment on whether it works.

Discord dropped the “for gamers” thing a while ago, and for example many open source projects use it to host their community and provide support

I don’t think that means they should only be available via Discord but not being “a gamer” isn’t a good reason to not use Discord on its own

can you elaborate on why creating 2 accounts is such a turn off? Don't get me wrong though, I agree that discord is a horrible UI for such a powerful tool.

How many accounts would be too many? Is 4 accounts too many? 6 accounts?

Some of us consider more than 1 too many.

Creating even one new account is usually more of a hassle than I am willing to deal with.

this is absurd. i have no idea why teens like discord so much, it's like irc with all the bad sides (messy, not stored on the open web, ephemeral, corporate censorship) and without the good sides (privacy, decentralization, etc)

> (privacy, decentralization, etc)

These are not universal values.

> (messy, not stored on the open web, ephemeral, corporate censorship)

Being stored on the open web to be indexed and archived is really the opposite of private. Obviously discord has access to everything but as far as the user is concerned its more private than anything else short of e2ee group chats (but what's the point of an e2ee chat with hundreds of strangers, any one of which can be a fed?)

And I don't know if you noticed but a lot of the youth prefers the censorship, or as they call it, taking out the trash.

Hosting a chatroom yourself is too much work. The same reason why nobody wants to run their own email server.

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