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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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