Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!

I get frustrated with these platforms trying to turn into these ‘do it all’ applications. discord was fine before they started adding all the bullshit in everywhere. it was a great chat place with ‘rooms’ for different groups of people or friends. kinda like how spotify seems to be trying to morph into some social music sharing crap. i don’t use spotify to be social, i use it to listen to fucking music.

You ditch discord because it’s bad for organizing projects

I ditched discord because it’s proprietary

We are not the same

I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we’ve always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.

1. USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
2. Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
3. Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
4. Tencent Ownership
5. General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.

So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I’d say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won’t play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you’re welcome on my server.

Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.

Suddenly, I don’t feel so alone anymore.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

My biggest issue with discord is that I’ll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.

Even if I get to the notification, often I don’t get it right away, and often I don’t open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I’m left with no earthly idea why I’m in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.

When I’m actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I’m almost never actively in discord.

I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens… Then I don’t mind it so much. However, if I don’t use discord all the time, then it’s less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there’s no chance I’ll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.

DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.

To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are: Pros:

• convenient (when in active use)
• good voice chat
• a lot of people use it Cons:
• slow notifications
• bad notification handling

I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don’t have problems with it, since they’re pretty much always on it. For someone who isn’t always plugged into discord, it’s a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don’t really have any issues with it.

Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn’t do voice, so there’s some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you’re taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.

discord is totally the best thing. Anyone on the internet want to explain why I’m wrong?

Worst example I’ve ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.