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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

Discord is a much more usable version of IRC. And most IRC channels didn't log, they have always been a black hole. For the moment (and I don't expect this to last forever) Discord is far less of a black hole than IRC used to be.

Increasingly I don't really think decentralized open source is what we need, we could really use a centralized nonprofit mission-driven org that is committed to operating something like Github along with a chat service and a social network. Every project trying to operate their own, we get a bunch of poorly secured, poorly backed up projects, all of which are doing a ton of duplicative work where if all of those distributed teams were working on one project they could scale to orders of magnitude what they're scaled to independently.

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>Discord is a much more usable version of IRC

Requires a phone number to even sign up. How is that more usable than say opening up https://web.libera.chat and typing `/join #channel`

>most IRC channels didn't log

That is a good thing. And those who log, presented it as a searchable js-less plain text so I can easily search for a string in chat messages from 2011. Unlike Discord that I don't recall the last time I did a successful query in that weird search UI at the right side of screen.

Actually awful search ergonomics alone, makes Discord more of a "blackhole" than IRC.

>Increasingly I don't really think decentralized open source is what we need, we could really use a centralized nonprofit mission-driven org that is committed to operating something like Github

Well, let's see how long the status quo remains.

> Requires a phone number to even sign up. How is that more usable than say opening up https://web.libera.chat and typing `/join #channel`

This is the level of hardheadedness you have to get through to interface with the FOSS community. People who actually think these things.

If you actually bother to engage with features in IRC and Discord, it is 1000% apparent how Discord is vastly more usable for the average user. Discord matches expectations for how an app or service will behave, and has a powerful set of features that are easy to grasp and require minimal or no setup. That's why it wins.

If you want to insist that IRC is actually more usable go ahead, but in realityland Discord has won for a reason.

Honestly I’m not going to complain too much about Discord. It’s the closest thing we have to a healthy form of social media. Lots of little islands. Limited performative bullshit. Mostly just friends of friends playing games together.

Yeah, the fact that each server is basically an island is the key. Toxicity seems to increase with total user count.

It's not the total user count, but the flattening of different groups that didn't need and frankly didn't ask to be constantly smushed together:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

In real life interaction happens in short term and long term physical and social bubbles where the way you act and present information naturally takes into consideration the people you're interacting with. How you talk to a customer is different from how you talk to to your friend, is different from how you talk to your partner, is different from how you talk to your boss, and is different from how you talk when all four relationships are in one conversation together.

On the Internet— and basically only on the Internet— you'll say something meant for your knitting discussion group, and then Rocky, Steve, Gwen, and Stacy from the guitar, farming, volcanology, and motorcycle communities will butt in and take offence— because the geniuses in charge of the platform have decided that human progress is best measured in terms of how many people they can blindly jam into the same room at once.

So please explain to us why Discord should have my phone number.

> Requires a phone number to even sign up. How is that more usable than say opening up https://web.libera.chat and typing `/join #channel`

As much as I love the chaos of the old Internet where you could kick someone and they could immediately rejoin the channel, that's simply not practical on the modern Internet. If web.libera.chat were as popular as Discord they would probably end up requiring phone numbers too. (This wasn't always a requirement.)

> Actually awful search ergonomics alone, makes Discord more of a "blackhole" than IRC.

I don't really use Discord for technical stuff, but whenever I have tried to search for something in my social channels I have been able to find it easily. It's not for searching the world like Google is - it's for searching personal history and it does that really well.

Yet every time I try to force myself to try Discord, I turn back in disgust as the UX is the worst I have seen in a chat application.

Weird how it can be so divisive. I can understand people tolerating the horror because everyone else is there, but thinking it's usable is beyond my capability to understand.

Matrix/element might not be superb either, but at least there is the clear potential of alternative clients.

I love Discord's interface overall. It's really nice, and makes it easy to do all kinds of things. The feature set is excellent for a monolithic application like this.

> but thinking it's usable is beyond my capability to understand.

This is part of why UX is so often trash in FOSS projects: a lot of FOSS enthusiasts cannot even perceive the usability issues that exist in them. They're on a completely different wavelength compared to the average user. They are, in other words, UX-blind.

This is not false. I wish Discord just allowed alternative clients, it would nicely fix the problem without affecting the boring part of their users.

Since they fight against it so much, I guess they're doing their data mining in the client.

I think it's more likely that they just make money off of their client via Nitro and other random features. Having other clients would let people get around that while still using Discord's servers/bandwidth.

And there's definitely technical issues with supporting other clients. Can make it hard to change things without breaking those other clients.

Discord does have client mods (Vencord, BetterDiscord) which do help. They technically are against Discord TOS, but I've been using Vencord and BD for several years with many friends, none of us have gotten punished yet.

Is it not personal preference? For example I like to see messages in chronological order with no extra stuff like who is answering who or emotes on the side of message.

If I care about the conversation, I like to read it fully to understand whats going on, those extra bits are just distractions to me.

It depends on the conversation. In a fast-moving conversation with a dozen people the emotes make it possible to "read the room" and avoid 10 people saying the same thing and drowning the channel in noise. The "who is answering who" makes it possible to have sidebar conversations without anyone losing the main thread. Some conversations are too big to read every message, but those features also make it possible to reduce the size of the conversation without any loss in information.

I think it's just different people having different preferences. For me, Discord is the best group chat app I have ever used. The UI is fantastic.

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