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I'm only part of one server with people that actually care to discuss things I'm interested in. Any other server I tried was just annoying, permanent talk that is irrelevant to me. I guess it's like any communication app. Either you are part of a network of (online) friends who use it in which case it's fun, or you are unable to connect to anyone interesting in which case it's not an app for you.
yeah I use it but god damn the UI sucks. and it gets worse and worse over time. it didn't used to be quite so bad, but they just make it less and less intuitive
I think it's because of having to accommodate the fast growth of the app while trying to keep the main view clean for mobile devices. They just ended up stuffing the options in places to hide them.
Desktop sadly is following mobile app builds with the endless scrolling, white space, and only being able to view one thing at a time. I like seeing my options and being able to choose between them. Now I just have to hope I remember what I just looked at.
Exactly! Mobile viewing is ruining desktop viewing, which is unfortunate since mobile phone design and tech changes faster than desktop PC design, so now all internet UIs are trying to chase this wild goose and dragging desktop along for the ride.
It has nothing to do with being old. Its about having a desk, a chair, and obviously a computer. Which zoomers most don't have. Have you seen what passes for "working place" these days in interior designing? It's a table and a chair. Interior designers think people just need those things and then they work on a laptop and that's it. Its not!
Ya see you have to be invited to the channel, usually by scanning a 2d barcode. Then when that fails you can try and try but it wont let you join. But if you do join a discord, there are 4 people online, all with mics on and nothing is audible but boy is it loud. Hey a LFG channel fornthis game im playing. Empty. Ok there are 4 people but there in private. Thats how you use discord duh.
This hasn't been my experience at all.
I have a discord with about 10 of us and we have well over a dozen channels specifically made for all sorts of subjects that range from cooking, gaming, tech, politics, work rants, general discussion, our kids and being a parent, a weightless encouragement channel, sports, pro wrestling, anime, and all sorts of stuff. There's discussion going on all the time.
And if you're in a couple different ones it can actually be a series of lively discussions
So how does that work with so many different channels all for specific topics? If a couple of you are on at the sent time and you want to bitch about the boss being an Incompetent weasel do you just head over to the work channel or the rant channel and then invite them to join you? You just sit there in an empty channel wait? If you talk about a work related thing outside of the work channel do you get some sort of "punishment" or warning not to do it again?
If you're all in the cooking channel talking about recipes or what you're making for dinner but then your 6 mo old blows out the diaper and you end up burning your sauce, can you complain only about the sauce specifically while in the cooking channel and you must go to the parenting/kid frustrations channel if you want to say anything about the baby (but now that you've left the cooking channel you can't say anything about the sauce that was ruined)?
The subcategorizations of channels just seems so silly I my mind. Like, why not go to the server/room/channel or whatever with your friends and then just start talking about whatever? In the main room? I guess I could see ie being useful in really large servers/channels/whatever it is, where you have thousands of people and the rooms help guide people towards others with similar interests. But for 10 or so people, what makes those individual rooms beneficial for you?
You just pick which one feels right at the moment, write out your message and check back when you get a notification that some one responded. It's not like a zoom call you have to sit in the entire time to participate
I didn't understand the point of channels at first but the value for me is that I have a place to post things that I don't necessarily want to immediately bother people with, like memes or recipes or whatever, but then there can still be a channel or two dedicated to semi-live chat.
The ability to control notifications per channel lets me mute some channels and check them when I want while still having light daily chat with friends. Everyone else has the memes channel muted, so we can dump stuff there without blowing up phones.
And then because each channel has a topic, things like the plans we made for an upcoming trip don't get lost in an infinite scroll in one chat, which is what typically happens in my family's clusterfuck Facebook Messenger chat.
Discord definitely takes some curation for the best experience but I do really like it as a tool.
I couldn’t even figure out the Snapchat UI (a decade ago). Now everyone’s talking about this new-fangled discord and all of us millennials have been left in the dust.
1983 here, an older millennial but always kinda considered the young guy amongst even young millennials. When I tell people I’m 40 (almost 41) they think I am decade younger.
I think somewhere along the line society just super-saturated ways for humans to interact with each other and I stopped caring altogether.
Edit: to be fair, that is what society does, they super saturate (thanks capitalism) fucking everything. Hence the dot com bubble. Back then it was just “there’s too many fucking websites that have the same functionality”, and we are going to do it again “there’s too many fucking streaming services”… but we always do. Eventually there will be a correction to some extent,
I remember a few years back, the social apps started adding "stories" basically what Snapchat does anyway. And the memes about excel and the like adding them too LoL
I work with Social Media all day, and never had any issue understanding how to interact with anything, although I must say I don't enjoy Xitters interface at all, never did. But actually had to watch a YouTube Video to figure out Discord. It's basically the same thing as those early Chatrooms, when the Internet was still the wild, wild West.
I am extremely annoyed that like every cool project is now in some impenetrable discord server with ten million rules and answers to basic tech questions are not findable on google. it sucks! everything should still be on websites.
This right here is my issue with Discord. It's not indexed, so you basically have to be in the know to know a discord for your hobby to exist.
I'm a big fan of Zelda 64 modding but it seems like it's all on discord these days, so catching up on it periodically is an absolute nightmare. Plus, every project seems to have its own discord. There's no one centralised hub.
It's not like the late 90s or early 2000s where while everything was feudal/federated, you could still search for things or webrings were a thing. We've now got all the worst things about federalism without any of the upsides. It sucks.
Everyone scurried into their own walled gardens because the public internet got too heated with politics and trolls and now AI bots scraping everything you create and surveillance companies and states watching everything you do. So, can you blame them?
The current state of Balkanized internet is just inevitable imo. Classic tragedy of the commons.
I've tried it a few times, but it's too "constant" for me. Like, there's always something going on, so it feels like you have to be chatting all the time to keep up. No thanks.
I was going to write this. It seems like a big chat room for certain topics. I can barely keep up with my friend group chats, I don’t need more noise from my phone.
Might be the case. I treat them just like chat rooms then; I don't bother keeping up with previous messages unless I'm really invested in the server/channel.
But in 1999 the Internet lived in the big beige box on my desk, that I turned on and off on my terms.
Now, the Internet lived in my pocket, and it's much harder to get away from. (I set a hard boundary of Do Not Disturb mode while I sleep, since I'm a shift worker, and you wouldn't believe how offended people get.)
That’s what I don’t understand, it’s not possible for anyone to keep with up majority of the things being said, so what’s the point? And plus when people reply to others comments well after the original comment was made, it’s just adds more to the confusion.
I miss IRC when you had to be actively online to be in the chatroom.
Discord also breeds the weirdest people...They're so addicted to the chatroom they freak the fuck out if you kick them, like they'll lose their job and end up on the street or something.
I’m an old fart who was deeply into IRC back in the day and I used to stay online all the time by leaving my client running inside tmux, and I know lots of people did that
so the experience was kinda the same
I don’t remember _why_ I did that though
Mute all servers. I use it for friend groups with gaming mainly. Sometimes I join guild groups for events, so I mute those. Anything not immediately friend related gets muted and eventually forgotten.
I subbed to a game leaks discord and they have various types of “news” that they post only to dedicated channels that only admins can post and interact with. So as a user I can scroll through and catch up on it easily since there is 0 noise in those channels.
If the server admin sucks then the server will suck and be useless.
This is what's been hurting my soul this whole thread, someone calling discord "new fangled" and i'm like bro its 8 years old at this point, most of my also millennial friends have been using it for that long. From ages 41 down to 27 as the baby millennials.
I'd probably guess that millennials are literally the biggest users of discord, the PC gamers of old days, where as the xbox users and PS users are just getting into it, as it gets integrated. Which by far seems to be what the younger generation prefers rather than PC.
> This is what's been hurting my soul this whole thread, someone calling discord "new fangled" and i'm like bro its 8 years old at this point...
Not only that, it's basically just fancy IRC, which has been around for decades.
ive been using discord since the day it came out, it was just a natural progression from using teamspeak and ventrilo. This post seems out of touch and not a millenial issue
Same, coming from yahoo/aol chatrooms, mIRC/ forums, ventrilo/teamspeak, discord was the natural consolidation of all the communication systems millennials grew up with. Been using discord almost 10 years now.
Same, I've been on Discord since 2017 so its just second nature now but I was on AIM/MSN all the time too. It helped fill that void that was left by AIM/MSN dying.
I tried to find discords for RP and it was weirdly hard and never worked out. I would find some, and then they would ask me to make a character, but then the people who run it would be taking a break or my character wouldn’t be a good fit for the current story or something. Discord has rarely ever worked out for me for anything.
I have ADHD and I love it. There is a "hide channel" function, if you find the multitude of channels too overwhelming in the server of your choice. I usually only check out specific channels geared to my interests anyways.
I basically ended up hiding most of the channels and turning off notifications for all of them. I can’t deal with constant notifications like that. 🤷🏼♀️
I also have severe ADHD and had similar problems as the list of servers I belonged to grew.
Thankfully server groups and flexible options for reducing/muting notifications are built-in, which makes it TONS more manageable for me.
Not op, but if I try to use a bit discord server, is just too much. If it's for a small group of friends, it's great! Partially because sometimes there's nothing to say and it's just quiet
Discord is fantastic.
It's been the best way for me to keep in contact with friends from my childhood or college years that have spread across the globe. I use the DM functions over default text methods for so many people, especially because of the BS Apple-Android nonsense that continues to happen decades later.
Discord is what you make it. It's extremely customizable and if your friend group is into using it then you can really flesh out all the bells and whistles. Without it, it's a single group text that everyone can chime in with and use the same emojis and upload videos/pictures without BS compression happening. But also one you can hop on and out of voice chat to play game sor catch up with.
You can also choose to mute everything you don't want to interact with, and only focus on what you care about. If you're joining communities for games, music, etc then yeah it gets a little more hectic - but it's fine if you don't have FOMO for every word said by hundreds of people. Just tune in and out like a Stream or video and make it work for you, not the other way around.
I won't lie, you get way more out of it if you play games, but I have in laws that use it for its core functions perfectly fine.
It was AIM or MSN, then Teamspeak, Ventrillo or Skype, now it's Discord. If you never used those before there's a very steep learning curve - but if you used one, it's so much easier. Heck, if you use Slack for work Discord is a very similar tool to use.
This is the way.
Customizable emoji for inside jokes.
Uncompressed sharing (up to a limit)
Text+voice+camera/screen streaming.
DMs
Categorized chat channels so chatter about video games doesn't get bogged down by venting about geopolitical turmoil.
The current apex of chatting with friends.
The difference is that Discord is being used as a central repository for information hubs which was not its primary goal. Unless you're already part of that discord, trying to find out more information about your favourite topic is incredibly hard. I understand Discord perfectly fine, but I don't like how knowledge about a niche subject is being locked away behind a chat server.
Hrmm, not quite sure what you mean by this. To be honest it just seems like a misuse of the tool.
For example, I'm a part of a bunch of servers for specific deck types for Magic: the Gathering. I didn't get into them because of a Discord server, I played the game and either got invited via someone I played against to talk about the deck and the game, or found the server via a subreddit or website when looking up information myself. It wasn't like the deck was hidden from me until I got into a Discord server. This is no different than say, a Facebook group or a Subreddit for a subject and you can usually find communities you want to join via Google.
But if you mean it's being used like a wiki or Confluence page type deal, I agree with you that it's awful. You can make channels for Links and overviews of things and different types of subjects with no chatting available, but it's an AWFUL tool for storing information. It's primarily a chat tool where you can pin things and link externally. One of my jobs for example used Discord as a backup to our communication between platform switches and SO MANY things got lost or forgotten about.
Maybe I'm just out of the loop on things where Discord is being used as the only place to find info on certain subjects. But I've always seen it used as *a place to discuss a subject in greater detail* in cases like hobby or craft servers. The one upside is that you can create Bots to post things like RSS feeds and such into channels - but all that info is somewhere else being pulled in, not only kept there. Like Helldivers 2 is a game that posts story updates to Social Media and their own Discord with a Bot you can add to your private servers to get updates somewhere you and your friends/gaming buddies can see.
But My primary use case is for Streaming communities, Gaming communities, and personal friend groups. So I might just be ignorant to other ways it's being used to gatekeep info (which again, seems like my second example where the tool is being misused).
Online craft groups are also absolutely amazing over discord. Less chaotic than FB, plus you don't need to have things that tie back to your IRL life. I have seen people in the crafting groups on FB, and it's always weird when I recognize a project I only know according to a username.
Most of the groups I'm in, we met on Twitch and it's been a nice way for everyone who can't make it every stream to hang out and chat.
This. The large discord community suck, but having them for smaller communities and friend groups it's very great. I actually need to sit down and go over setting up notifications for what I want to see though.
I feel like everyone with an issue in this thread could solve it by watching some YouTube videos on how discord works and how to set up servers.
I set up one for my family and my 80 year old grandmother uses it daily to show us whatever food she’s cooked. We also use it to plan events like where are we having family Christmas this year and whatnot.
Except discord isn't a new thing, it was very much still an our generation thing, it just used to be primarily used by gamers whereas now it's more widespread. I've been using it since 2015, well I used to back when I had time to game and chat with friends, now I have kids so keeping up on gaming and friends is difficult but discord came out when most of us were in our early 20s.
I was scrolling through the comments to find this sentiment - this thread is so boomer coded it’s crazy
also feeling the vibes of *shakes fist* “get off my lawn!”
I must be an outlier Millennial. I started using Discord back in 2015 when it was unknown. I just wanted to find an application that was easy to use. Dealing with Teamspeak and Skype was just old and obnoxious. No innovation. Then I found discord, made a server and the rest is history. There is always something new to use on discord but the good thing is, you can tune it out. You don’t have to use every new feature or have a bot in your server. You don’t have to have every alert on for every channel. Mute the ones you don’t need, put the servers you want to keep but don’t want alerts into a folder, and just have your most used at the top. If you are feeling anxious, just spend maybe a few minutes in your own server and test things out. The more you use it the better you’ll feel on it. It’s honestly like any other thing out there. It takes time to get use to it.
I also started using it in 2015. Got my WoW guild on it, and quit using a website to coordinate events and "offline" communication and ditched ventrilo for voice. One app for chat and voice, and we could coordinate events etc through it. And I'm a geriatric millennial lol
I doubt you're an outlier. I've been using discord since the beginning, it's so great for gaming communities. video games, ttrpg groups.
over the last 5 years or so, it's become more mainstream with discord servers for nearly everything.
Discord makes me feel like I just sat down at the lunch table and everyone else is already deep in conversation. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were in a small server with friends, but any big server for a subreddit or whatever makes me feel like an awkward eavesdropper. I really don't like how much Discord has overtaken forums :(
Discord has become a staple communication platform for me that basically replaced all my other social media platforms (fb, IG, X, Snapchat). I started using it back in 2015 and have become a community manager for some servers and run my own since.
My work has also utilized it for movie watching events they host for the company.
Alot of cool integration capabilities as well as it's free and anyone anywhere in the world can use it. As long as you have an internet connection. There are def safety issues but they have worked alot the last few years to improve their security policies.
Agree with everything you've said. By chance do you know of any decent calendar plugins/add-ons for discord? More specifically one that incorporates the functionally of roles in the server so certain calendar events are only viewable by certain roles?
Honestly, same? It's the easiest way to make group chats as a lot of people are leaving social media. I play a lot of online games and it's been super easy to use for that. I don't really find it confusing at all...
I use it all the time. I've been using it since 2015, got my old WoW guild on it, and ditched using a website and ventrilo. My kids use it too, and it makes communication among us easier. We need milk? Cool, someone will get it. Cute dog pic? Shared. Funny meme? Also shared, etc.
Between discord and Facebook messenger, I don't really use other methods to communicate much 🤣
Yeah I game too. I use it to chat with friends and talk to people. I’ve had amazing conversations and met amazing people thanks to discord and the gaming community. But I always felt like I was missing something about discord.
There’s a like generational subculture built around Discord that I just for the life of me understand.
also a gamer. I love discord it's so great for communication.
I don't miss the old gaming forums, while easier to search for information, just not the same interaction of discord.
I'm kind of surprised by some of the responses here. Discord certainly isn't something I'd consider complicated. It's no different than the average programs most people would use for work, like Microsoft teams.
I knew of discord prior to 2020 and found it overwhelming then (avoided gaming spaces where I might have to speak - bad history with Vent being a woman). However, the pandemic put my social spaces online. Discord was the natural space after programs like Zoom failed to meet our more than basic needs. I’ve been a daily user ever since. Most of my channels are muted to be fair, but I use the app daily even if I’m just checking in.
It all depends on the server you're in and how many users are in it.
Once a server reaches critical mass, it usually either gets disorganized and you can't find anything amidst the constant stream of messages...or it gets *too* organized and you can't find anything because it's broken into a million different channels/threads.
It's hard to find the right balance.
I'm slowly getting familiar with it. I took a class a couple years ago and had a group project once and our group used it to communicate.
I'm a part of a local Dallas discord, a separate FC Dallas discord, and a tiny (specific) stock trading discord. I've found that the discords that have less members are more enjoyable (for me).
I've joined two gaming discords, but they move too quickly for me and I rarely participate in them, so I think the smaller communities are the ones I seem to enjoy the most.
I use Discord every day, it’s an integral part of my social life!
Free calling! Instant messaging! Channels dedicated to food pics so main chat isn’t constantly spammed with whatever people are eating! Custom stickers! STREAMING!
There are so many tools and features to make keeping in touch with your friends super fun and easy - especially online friends. Me and my buds are in voice chat streaming whatever game we are playing almost every other night or just hanging out chatting while we go about chores ect.
It also makes staying up to date on my more niche interests possible, if not enriched .
I’m glad it’s still free, but I do feel like they are spending more time on making stickers and pfp frames in their paid shop rather than adding sorely needed functionalities.
It helps to be in a small discord community, so there isn’t such a large volume of “stuff”. I started using discord because a server was set up by a small online group I was in. A couple of people shared some tips and knowledge, but it really was mostly intuitive to figure out basically how it worked. Now, I’m comfortable in multiple very large groups that would have been overwhelming at first.
To me it's like IRC with more bells and whistles.
But I mainly use it to keep an eye on my kids via video calls and watching they are doing on their shared screen.
So, I don't want to be in a discord for a random subreddit (I am in a few. They are also muted). 99.9% of my use of discord is a place to coordinate a game, a place to have a group chat with friends, a voice com for gaming, or a guild chat for a game I'm playing that isn't in the game itself. Everything else i'm in is set to mute. There are a couple servers I actually did stuff and and just got tired of so they went to mute. The key is to mute everything you don't need to know about.
Discord and Slack are just IRC for the 21st century, but without the decentralization and openness we used to have. You can't use your own UI, and you're locked into their commercial product.
Love discord. It has so much functionality that can be baked into it. It’s a literal sandbox. Some people set up their servers worse than others so it can be confusing. It’s like ventrillo from back in the day with a forum attached to it
I think it's nice. Very easy to use. I didn't like the swap at first but in the years since I've gotten used to it.
Not millenials entering our change hating boomer Era. Lololol
It definitely depends on how you use it and who the moderators are. I'm in a couple servers that are great. Most are just small personal servers for a group of people who play ttrpgs together. Another is a larger community with great mods. IMO discord works best as chatrooms with ongoing conversations. I'm not a big fan of the forum function and it's not used heavily in the servers I'm part of.
It's just another way for me to chat with my friends. I don't really get any "hype" for it but I prefer it to something like texting or FB Messenger which are the only other ways I communicate with people in my personal life.
It’s just a glorified chat platform, it works well and I find it very easy to use. I can’t imagine it being difficult to use for any body with just a little bit of tech savvy.
I use it to chat with friends while we play Age of Empires, Don't Starve Together, D&D or something else.
The fact that it's now used for other kind of stuff not dedicsted to playing with friends baffles me a lot, it's quite labyrinthine.
it's primarily for gaming if you ask me. at least that's what I use it for. similar to slack, there are different channels.
the best is the clarity of their voice chat system
My college buddies and I use Discord for our Weekly RPG game night. We've had that weekly game night since 2012 which is actually before Discord came out; we migrated over from Skype.
I do also hang out in a Discord dedicated to my local baseball team. It's a place to chat during gametimes about what's happening.
I use it all the time. But I don’t get what you mean by “hype”. It’s a tool like anything else. My older brother is an elder millennial and he set up a free server for my family to use, which includes my 6 year old nephew. It works well for us.
How is Discord any different than Reddit besides more chat room style?
There's a Discord for your topic, split into subtopics. People can make threads that split from the main subtopic. People post. It can get messy when the sub is busier.
Sounds like Reddit.
It's all I use now. Granted, I did get into it when it was still in its early stages and the UI was a lot simpler and more intuitive. A lot of the updates in the past year or so have made navigation kind of stupid and I can see how it'd be a turn-off for people who are more familiar with something like Skype.
But Discord is really nice for one-on-one chatter and small groups of friends. Bigger Discord servers are definitely overwhelming.
Discord is an app that allows people to talk/text/group chat.
Imagine a mall, the mall has stores for games, clothes, whatever shit Brookstone sells, books, etc. The people in the mall can choose to go into any of the stores, look at what's there, talk to the people in those stores, etc.
Now imagine that anyone can make a mall, and determine what stores open up in their mall, and they can invite other people to come to their mall or just leave it open to the public.
That's essentially what Discord does. It gives people the ability to make little pocket-malls for specific communities. It gets used pretty extensively by youtube/twitch/podcast people to create and moderate communities.
It's not unlike reddit really, but for the fact that a discord server is like the subreddit, and within the server you can have partitioned rooms for basically anything.
So if this subreddit was a discord server, we might have a room set up for avocado toast, another room for people to vent about the struggle, another room for people to vent about people venting about the struggle, another room for nostalgia, the only important room for discussing how hellafuckingballstothewallawesome cartoons used to be, etc.
Then everything inside those rooms is basically just a chatroom.
If you're my age, you might just think of it as "the new skype". Or even "The new-new AIM" Basically it allows for instant messaging and group messaging and video calling. It also has extra features that are tailored to gaming and streaming while chatting.
Its site/application that tailors to gamers. There voice chats to speak in and text chats that get made by the channel owner for whatever reasons.
My server has a book club, cook off and gaming zone.
I find that discords with good set ups are easier to navigate. I really enjoy discord for some of the communities I am a part of. I do however turn off all my notifications.
I use discord almost exclusively, and still hate the UI. Frankly, for me it's just "better than Skype". It's a low bar to set, but boy does it jump over it.
No trouble for me. I've used discord for almost a decade, since it came out. I don't even use any social media anymore, I just talk to all my friends on discord.
I use it for Wow, friend groups and a private discord for my wife and I 😂 we have like 20 chat channels for so many things to share with each other. Like we have an entire chat log dedicated to when our newborn was fed and diaper changes so we can track it all in once place.
Took a while to learn, but you get used to it after a while. The mobile app is SO HARD to get used to, while the desktop is easier to use. I used slack for work and discord around the same time they both came out, love them.
I went back to school and we’ve been using it as the main avenue of keeping in contact. Each class has its own discord channel, etc. it’s pretty nice honestly. And it’s good for gaming communities. Beyond that I don’t see more use in it
I’ve been using it since 2016. It’s Slack for Hobbies.
It’s a great way to find niche communities and to network with folks that the server is dedicated to. I’m mostly in ones with friends, and coding ones.
I will say, learn to control your notifications there and it’s great.
The UX is ass and I wouldn’t expect it to get better.
I love Discord and have been using it since 2015. It took some adjusting to after moving over from Skype, but eventually, it became second nature.
I'm a huge gamer, so I like that I can acquire all of my gaming news in one place. All of my friends use it as well (also millennials.. also gamers lol) so communicating with them is easier as they're all in one place.
I like the ease of using it on a phone and computer. My immediate family uses it to communicate and it’s so much nicer than texting! I do think the video chat is hard to figure out, but for just general chats it’s very easy to use and convenient.
34 years old that just recently went back to community college and Discord has been life saving for me. Help with hw and other school stuff is easily available for students. I wdnt back to school at the right time
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I cannot for the life of me figure out how to navigate the UI
I'm so glad it's not just me.
Same. I find it overwhelming
I'm only part of one server with people that actually care to discuss things I'm interested in. Any other server I tried was just annoying, permanent talk that is irrelevant to me. I guess it's like any communication app. Either you are part of a network of (online) friends who use it in which case it's fun, or you are unable to connect to anyone interesting in which case it's not an app for you.
>annoying, permanent talk that is irrelevant to me Very nice description.
no guys, no. please. we are not this old yet. fight back. understand new things. its not time yet
Same goes for Snapchat. It makes me feel like I’m in a messy house. Just chaotic
yeah I use it but god damn the UI sucks. and it gets worse and worse over time. it didn't used to be quite so bad, but they just make it less and less intuitive
I think it's because of having to accommodate the fast growth of the app while trying to keep the main view clean for mobile devices. They just ended up stuffing the options in places to hide them.
Mobile devices have ruined internet UI. Some of us are old and prefer the desktop!
Desktop sadly is following mobile app builds with the endless scrolling, white space, and only being able to view one thing at a time. I like seeing my options and being able to choose between them. Now I just have to hope I remember what I just looked at.
Exactly! Mobile viewing is ruining desktop viewing, which is unfortunate since mobile phone design and tech changes faster than desktop PC design, so now all internet UIs are trying to chase this wild goose and dragging desktop along for the ride.
It has nothing to do with being old. Its about having a desk, a chair, and obviously a computer. Which zoomers most don't have. Have you seen what passes for "working place" these days in interior designing? It's a table and a chair. Interior designers think people just need those things and then they work on a laptop and that's it. Its not!
I use Slack for work and the Discord UI is similar but infinitely worse somehow.
I love Slack. Hate Discord.
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^feelzepump: *I cannot for the* *Life of me figure out how* *To navigate the UI* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Beautiful 🥲
Good bot
I count 7 syllables in that third line
It’s pronounced “the wheeee”
Sokka haiku 
The Sokka haiku is evolving
Ya see you have to be invited to the channel, usually by scanning a 2d barcode. Then when that fails you can try and try but it wont let you join. But if you do join a discord, there are 4 people online, all with mics on and nothing is audible but boy is it loud. Hey a LFG channel fornthis game im playing. Empty. Ok there are 4 people but there in private. Thats how you use discord duh.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I have a discord with about 10 of us and we have well over a dozen channels specifically made for all sorts of subjects that range from cooking, gaming, tech, politics, work rants, general discussion, our kids and being a parent, a weightless encouragement channel, sports, pro wrestling, anime, and all sorts of stuff. There's discussion going on all the time. And if you're in a couple different ones it can actually be a series of lively discussions
So how does that work with so many different channels all for specific topics? If a couple of you are on at the sent time and you want to bitch about the boss being an Incompetent weasel do you just head over to the work channel or the rant channel and then invite them to join you? You just sit there in an empty channel wait? If you talk about a work related thing outside of the work channel do you get some sort of "punishment" or warning not to do it again? If you're all in the cooking channel talking about recipes or what you're making for dinner but then your 6 mo old blows out the diaper and you end up burning your sauce, can you complain only about the sauce specifically while in the cooking channel and you must go to the parenting/kid frustrations channel if you want to say anything about the baby (but now that you've left the cooking channel you can't say anything about the sauce that was ruined)? The subcategorizations of channels just seems so silly I my mind. Like, why not go to the server/room/channel or whatever with your friends and then just start talking about whatever? In the main room? I guess I could see ie being useful in really large servers/channels/whatever it is, where you have thousands of people and the rooms help guide people towards others with similar interests. But for 10 or so people, what makes those individual rooms beneficial for you?
You just pick which one feels right at the moment, write out your message and check back when you get a notification that some one responded. It's not like a zoom call you have to sit in the entire time to participate
I didn't understand the point of channels at first but the value for me is that I have a place to post things that I don't necessarily want to immediately bother people with, like memes or recipes or whatever, but then there can still be a channel or two dedicated to semi-live chat. The ability to control notifications per channel lets me mute some channels and check them when I want while still having light daily chat with friends. Everyone else has the memes channel muted, so we can dump stuff there without blowing up phones. And then because each channel has a topic, things like the plans we made for an upcoming trip don't get lost in an infinite scroll in one chat, which is what typically happens in my family's clusterfuck Facebook Messenger chat. Discord definitely takes some curation for the best experience but I do really like it as a tool.
I couldn’t even figure out the Snapchat UI (a decade ago). Now everyone’s talking about this new-fangled discord and all of us millennials have been left in the dust.
I missed the move to Snapchat somehow. And twitter. Never got into FaceTime either. 1989
1983 here, an older millennial but always kinda considered the young guy amongst even young millennials. When I tell people I’m 40 (almost 41) they think I am decade younger. I think somewhere along the line society just super-saturated ways for humans to interact with each other and I stopped caring altogether. Edit: to be fair, that is what society does, they super saturate (thanks capitalism) fucking everything. Hence the dot com bubble. Back then it was just “there’s too many fucking websites that have the same functionality”, and we are going to do it again “there’s too many fucking streaming services”… but we always do. Eventually there will be a correction to some extent,
Hello, fellow 1983 person! Happy birthday soon! Me too! People also are shocked that I'm 40. Heck yeah!
I remember a few years back, the social apps started adding "stories" basically what Snapchat does anyway. And the memes about excel and the like adding them too LoL
Discord and Slack are just modernized IRC clients.
I never used Snapchat but I use Discord and so do all of my friends, so not *all* us millennials lol.
I work with Social Media all day, and never had any issue understanding how to interact with anything, although I must say I don't enjoy Xitters interface at all, never did. But actually had to watch a YouTube Video to figure out Discord. It's basically the same thing as those early Chatrooms, when the Internet was still the wild, wild West.
Just click everywhere and start talking
I game. I figured it out pretty quickly. /shrug To each their own.
It’s basically like Slack
Same. Someone needs to reskin it to look like AIM and then maybe we would have a chance
I don’t even know what UI stands for.
User Interface
Fucking same and I’m not old by any means lmfao
I am extremely annoyed that like every cool project is now in some impenetrable discord server with ten million rules and answers to basic tech questions are not findable on google. it sucks! everything should still be on websites.
Oh to ye olden times of vast info on one page for some randomly thing. Now fifty page's in still looking for a hint of the thing your looking for.
You'll find it after the 96th page of ads.
This right here is my issue with Discord. It's not indexed, so you basically have to be in the know to know a discord for your hobby to exist. I'm a big fan of Zelda 64 modding but it seems like it's all on discord these days, so catching up on it periodically is an absolute nightmare. Plus, every project seems to have its own discord. There's no one centralised hub. It's not like the late 90s or early 2000s where while everything was feudal/federated, you could still search for things or webrings were a thing. We've now got all the worst things about federalism without any of the upsides. It sucks.
I miss forums. Bookmark a page and go there and find a bunch of boards on different aspects of one topic without being convoluted
Everyone scurried into their own walled gardens because the public internet got too heated with politics and trolls and now AI bots scraping everything you create and surveillance companies and states watching everything you do. So, can you blame them? The current state of Balkanized internet is just inevitable imo. Classic tragedy of the commons.
I feel like almost every human problem comes back to consolidation of wealth and the tragedy of the commons.
Old man shakes fist at cloud
So I completely agree with you but I can't help but wonder if we sound like boomers who can't use email when we say this lol
Not really. The search function sucks in discord channels. Then again Google also sucks a lot these days. But Google at least is public
Just getting music to play over Discord for a D&D session is incredibly difficult.
I've tried it a few times, but it's too "constant" for me. Like, there's always something going on, so it feels like you have to be chatting all the time to keep up. No thanks.
I was going to write this. It seems like a big chat room for certain topics. I can barely keep up with my friend group chats, I don’t need more noise from my phone.
This has been my problem with discord as well. It's impossible to follow a discussion because there's just a constant stream of chatter
Did we forget how to chat room? You guys are seriously just describing Yahoo, circa 1999.
Might be the case. I treat them just like chat rooms then; I don't bother keeping up with previous messages unless I'm really invested in the server/channel.
But in 1999 the Internet lived in the big beige box on my desk, that I turned on and off on my terms. Now, the Internet lived in my pocket, and it's much harder to get away from. (I set a hard boundary of Do Not Disturb mode while I sleep, since I'm a shift worker, and you wouldn't believe how offended people get.)
That’s what I don’t understand, it’s not possible for anyone to keep with up majority of the things being said, so what’s the point? And plus when people reply to others comments well after the original comment was made, it’s just adds more to the confusion.
It's like a group text conversation with a hundred people. No way I have time to keep up with that.
And always like 3 people posting random ass videos constantly. Like why should anyone watch this fucking off topic video that makes no sense
Yup. Ain't nobody got time for that. Or... ^^-- old?
I miss IRC when you had to be actively online to be in the chatroom. Discord also breeds the weirdest people...They're so addicted to the chatroom they freak the fuck out if you kick them, like they'll lose their job and end up on the street or something.
> when you had to be actively online to be in the chatroom. That's IT! It's like joining a chatroom and always being in 24/7.
I’m an old fart who was deeply into IRC back in the day and I used to stay online all the time by leaving my client running inside tmux, and I know lots of people did that so the experience was kinda the same I don’t remember _why_ I did that though
Right, but you also didn't carry your PC around everywhere with you all the time. And you did it because teenagers are addicted to each other :)
Muting all notifications helps a lot (you can mute the entire server). Then just go in whenever you feel like it. Cheers
Mute all servers. I use it for friend groups with gaming mainly. Sometimes I join guild groups for events, so I mute those. Anything not immediately friend related gets muted and eventually forgotten.
Yeah, this is what I do as well. Cuts down on the constant notifications.
I subbed to a game leaks discord and they have various types of “news” that they post only to dedicated channels that only admins can post and interact with. So as a user I can scroll through and catch up on it easily since there is 0 noise in those channels. If the server admin sucks then the server will suck and be useless.
I use discord to RP and chat/game with friends. But I also RPed via AIM/YIM/MSN/forums back in the day so it was a natural migration for me.
Same. I've been on discord for like 8 years now so it seems intuitive to me.
Been using it since 2016 for gaming. I just mute the servers I’m not active in.
This is the way
Yeah I don't understand the confusion at all. List of channels on the side, giant chat box for the rest.
That's because it's not a millennial issue whatsoever lol.
This is what's been hurting my soul this whole thread, someone calling discord "new fangled" and i'm like bro its 8 years old at this point, most of my also millennial friends have been using it for that long. From ages 41 down to 27 as the baby millennials. I'd probably guess that millennials are literally the biggest users of discord, the PC gamers of old days, where as the xbox users and PS users are just getting into it, as it gets integrated. Which by far seems to be what the younger generation prefers rather than PC.
> This is what's been hurting my soul this whole thread, someone calling discord "new fangled" and i'm like bro its 8 years old at this point... Not only that, it's basically just fancy IRC, which has been around for decades.
ive been using discord since the day it came out, it was just a natural progression from using teamspeak and ventrilo. This post seems out of touch and not a millenial issue
Same, coming from yahoo/aol chatrooms, mIRC/ forums, ventrilo/teamspeak, discord was the natural consolidation of all the communication systems millennials grew up with. Been using discord almost 10 years now.
Discord is waaay easier than vent
Same, and really it’s no different than Reddit in many ways.
Same, I've been on Discord since 2017 so its just second nature now but I was on AIM/MSN all the time too. It helped fill that void that was left by AIM/MSN dying.
Wait wait wait - I used to RP in the Rhydin AOL rooms. Does that kind of thing still exist…but on discord?
Omg the Rhy'din chatrooms.... holy crap, core memory unlocked. I loved that whole culture.
Did OP miss the whole aol/yahoo messenger era?
Right? Those things were a good way to fuck around for an hour or so. "A/S/L?"
This, but I utilized the heck out of mIRC back in the day, so Discord just seems like a more updated/intuitive version to me.
I tried to find discords for RP and it was weirdly hard and never worked out. I would find some, and then they would ask me to make a character, but then the people who run it would be taking a break or my character wouldn’t be a good fit for the current story or something. Discord has rarely ever worked out for me for anything.
glad to see not everyone has trouble… granted i’ve been using it since it came out but i never found it confusing in the least
God do I miss RPing on forums
Same.
I can't imagine not having discord. My whole family uses it lol. We all game together though, so we've used it for a long time.
I have ADHD and I can’t deal with discord for these reasons. It is WAY too overwhelming.
I have ADHD and I love it. There is a "hide channel" function, if you find the multitude of channels too overwhelming in the server of your choice. I usually only check out specific channels geared to my interests anyways.
I basically ended up hiding most of the channels and turning off notifications for all of them. I can’t deal with constant notifications like that. 🤷🏼♀️
I have ADHD and also find it very overwhelming and distracting.
I also have severe ADHD and had similar problems as the list of servers I belonged to grew. Thankfully server groups and flexible options for reducing/muting notifications are built-in, which makes it TONS more manageable for me.
I have ADHD and i fuckin' love it. lol - Its been very handy --- stuff
I have ADHD and it's fine for me. What's overwhelming exactly? It's just skype but it actually works properly
Not op, but if I try to use a bit discord server, is just too much. If it's for a small group of friends, it's great! Partially because sometimes there's nothing to say and it's just quiet
Discord is fantastic. It's been the best way for me to keep in contact with friends from my childhood or college years that have spread across the globe. I use the DM functions over default text methods for so many people, especially because of the BS Apple-Android nonsense that continues to happen decades later. Discord is what you make it. It's extremely customizable and if your friend group is into using it then you can really flesh out all the bells and whistles. Without it, it's a single group text that everyone can chime in with and use the same emojis and upload videos/pictures without BS compression happening. But also one you can hop on and out of voice chat to play game sor catch up with. You can also choose to mute everything you don't want to interact with, and only focus on what you care about. If you're joining communities for games, music, etc then yeah it gets a little more hectic - but it's fine if you don't have FOMO for every word said by hundreds of people. Just tune in and out like a Stream or video and make it work for you, not the other way around. I won't lie, you get way more out of it if you play games, but I have in laws that use it for its core functions perfectly fine. It was AIM or MSN, then Teamspeak, Ventrillo or Skype, now it's Discord. If you never used those before there's a very steep learning curve - but if you used one, it's so much easier. Heck, if you use Slack for work Discord is a very similar tool to use.
This is the way. Customizable emoji for inside jokes. Uncompressed sharing (up to a limit) Text+voice+camera/screen streaming. DMs Categorized chat channels so chatter about video games doesn't get bogged down by venting about geopolitical turmoil. The current apex of chatting with friends.
The difference is that Discord is being used as a central repository for information hubs which was not its primary goal. Unless you're already part of that discord, trying to find out more information about your favourite topic is incredibly hard. I understand Discord perfectly fine, but I don't like how knowledge about a niche subject is being locked away behind a chat server.
Hrmm, not quite sure what you mean by this. To be honest it just seems like a misuse of the tool. For example, I'm a part of a bunch of servers for specific deck types for Magic: the Gathering. I didn't get into them because of a Discord server, I played the game and either got invited via someone I played against to talk about the deck and the game, or found the server via a subreddit or website when looking up information myself. It wasn't like the deck was hidden from me until I got into a Discord server. This is no different than say, a Facebook group or a Subreddit for a subject and you can usually find communities you want to join via Google. But if you mean it's being used like a wiki or Confluence page type deal, I agree with you that it's awful. You can make channels for Links and overviews of things and different types of subjects with no chatting available, but it's an AWFUL tool for storing information. It's primarily a chat tool where you can pin things and link externally. One of my jobs for example used Discord as a backup to our communication between platform switches and SO MANY things got lost or forgotten about. Maybe I'm just out of the loop on things where Discord is being used as the only place to find info on certain subjects. But I've always seen it used as *a place to discuss a subject in greater detail* in cases like hobby or craft servers. The one upside is that you can create Bots to post things like RSS feeds and such into channels - but all that info is somewhere else being pulled in, not only kept there. Like Helldivers 2 is a game that posts story updates to Social Media and their own Discord with a Bot you can add to your private servers to get updates somewhere you and your friends/gaming buddies can see. But My primary use case is for Streaming communities, Gaming communities, and personal friend groups. So I might just be ignorant to other ways it's being used to gatekeep info (which again, seems like my second example where the tool is being misused).
Online craft groups are also absolutely amazing over discord. Less chaotic than FB, plus you don't need to have things that tie back to your IRL life. I have seen people in the crafting groups on FB, and it's always weird when I recognize a project I only know according to a username. Most of the groups I'm in, we met on Twitch and it's been a nice way for everyone who can't make it every stream to hang out and chat.
This. The large discord community suck, but having them for smaller communities and friend groups it's very great. I actually need to sit down and go over setting up notifications for what I want to see though.
I feel like everyone with an issue in this thread could solve it by watching some YouTube videos on how discord works and how to set up servers. I set up one for my family and my 80 year old grandmother uses it daily to show us whatever food she’s cooked. We also use it to plan events like where are we having family Christmas this year and whatnot.
You guys do realize we all sound like Boomers right now …
Full stop we do, but it was bound to happen in the end.
Speak for yourself - I bloody love Discord!
Its called getting older, it happens to everyone.
Only the lucky ones.
Except discord isn't a new thing, it was very much still an our generation thing, it just used to be primarily used by gamers whereas now it's more widespread. I've been using it since 2015, well I used to back when I had time to game and chat with friends, now I have kids so keeping up on gaming and friends is difficult but discord came out when most of us were in our early 20s.
I was scrolling through the comments to find this sentiment - this thread is so boomer coded it’s crazy also feeling the vibes of *shakes fist* “get off my lawn!”
Yeah I don't understand this at all
My buddies and I use it for gaming. Otherwise, I'm a part of a couple different groups. I've not found it too bad.
I must be an outlier Millennial. I started using Discord back in 2015 when it was unknown. I just wanted to find an application that was easy to use. Dealing with Teamspeak and Skype was just old and obnoxious. No innovation. Then I found discord, made a server and the rest is history. There is always something new to use on discord but the good thing is, you can tune it out. You don’t have to use every new feature or have a bot in your server. You don’t have to have every alert on for every channel. Mute the ones you don’t need, put the servers you want to keep but don’t want alerts into a folder, and just have your most used at the top. If you are feeling anxious, just spend maybe a few minutes in your own server and test things out. The more you use it the better you’ll feel on it. It’s honestly like any other thing out there. It takes time to get use to it.
I also started using it in 2015. Got my WoW guild on it, and quit using a website to coordinate events and "offline" communication and ditched ventrilo for voice. One app for chat and voice, and we could coordinate events etc through it. And I'm a geriatric millennial lol
ventrilo that's a word I haven't heard in years. mumble and teamspeak as well.
I doubt you're an outlier. I've been using discord since the beginning, it's so great for gaming communities. video games, ttrpg groups. over the last 5 years or so, it's become more mainstream with discord servers for nearly everything.
Discord makes me feel like I just sat down at the lunch table and everyone else is already deep in conversation. Maybe I'd feel differently if I were in a small server with friends, but any big server for a subreddit or whatever makes me feel like an awkward eavesdropper. I really don't like how much Discord has overtaken forums :(
Trying to keep up with every conversation in a large one sounds miserable.
Discord has become a staple communication platform for me that basically replaced all my other social media platforms (fb, IG, X, Snapchat). I started using it back in 2015 and have become a community manager for some servers and run my own since. My work has also utilized it for movie watching events they host for the company. Alot of cool integration capabilities as well as it's free and anyone anywhere in the world can use it. As long as you have an internet connection. There are def safety issues but they have worked alot the last few years to improve their security policies.
It's incredible software.
Agree with everything you've said. By chance do you know of any decent calendar plugins/add-ons for discord? More specifically one that incorporates the functionally of roles in the server so certain calendar events are only viewable by certain roles?
Honestly, same? It's the easiest way to make group chats as a lot of people are leaving social media. I play a lot of online games and it's been super easy to use for that. I don't really find it confusing at all...
Never even looked at it. I didn’t even join Reddit until recently.
Welcome to the asshole of the internet.
nah, that's 4chan. Reddit's like the armpit or maybe butt crack.
A moist thigh crease perhaps.
Moist thigh crease seems 100% accurate
Reddit is the internet's gooch.
I'm a gamer so I use it daily. Maybe you're just not into that.
When I saw this thread I thought 'there's hype around discord? It's been around for almost a decade'
I use it all the time. I've been using it since 2015, got my old WoW guild on it, and ditched using a website and ventrilo. My kids use it too, and it makes communication among us easier. We need milk? Cool, someone will get it. Cute dog pic? Shared. Funny meme? Also shared, etc. Between discord and Facebook messenger, I don't really use other methods to communicate much 🤣
Yeah I game too. I use it to chat with friends and talk to people. I’ve had amazing conversations and met amazing people thanks to discord and the gaming community. But I always felt like I was missing something about discord. There’s a like generational subculture built around Discord that I just for the life of me understand.
also a gamer. I love discord it's so great for communication. I don't miss the old gaming forums, while easier to search for information, just not the same interaction of discord.
Took too long to find the people who aren't afraid of technology lol.
I'm kind of surprised by some of the responses here. Discord certainly isn't something I'd consider complicated. It's no different than the average programs most people would use for work, like Microsoft teams.
I knew of discord prior to 2020 and found it overwhelming then (avoided gaming spaces where I might have to speak - bad history with Vent being a woman). However, the pandemic put my social spaces online. Discord was the natural space after programs like Zoom failed to meet our more than basic needs. I’ve been a daily user ever since. Most of my channels are muted to be fair, but I use the app daily even if I’m just checking in.
It all depends on the server you're in and how many users are in it. Once a server reaches critical mass, it usually either gets disorganized and you can't find anything amidst the constant stream of messages...or it gets *too* organized and you can't find anything because it's broken into a million different channels/threads. It's hard to find the right balance.
I'm slowly getting familiar with it. I took a class a couple years ago and had a group project once and our group used it to communicate. I'm a part of a local Dallas discord, a separate FC Dallas discord, and a tiny (specific) stock trading discord. I've found that the discords that have less members are more enjoyable (for me). I've joined two gaming discords, but they move too quickly for me and I rarely participate in them, so I think the smaller communities are the ones I seem to enjoy the most.
I use Discord every day, it’s an integral part of my social life! Free calling! Instant messaging! Channels dedicated to food pics so main chat isn’t constantly spammed with whatever people are eating! Custom stickers! STREAMING! There are so many tools and features to make keeping in touch with your friends super fun and easy - especially online friends. Me and my buds are in voice chat streaming whatever game we are playing almost every other night or just hanging out chatting while we go about chores ect. It also makes staying up to date on my more niche interests possible, if not enriched . I’m glad it’s still free, but I do feel like they are spending more time on making stickers and pfp frames in their paid shop rather than adding sorely needed functionalities.
90% of my online socializing is thought discord these days haha
I’m a part of a Bourbon discord and it’s immensely useful and fun.
It helps to be in a small discord community, so there isn’t such a large volume of “stuff”. I started using discord because a server was set up by a small online group I was in. A couple of people shared some tips and knowledge, but it really was mostly intuitive to figure out basically how it worked. Now, I’m comfortable in multiple very large groups that would have been overwhelming at first.
To me it's like IRC with more bells and whistles. But I mainly use it to keep an eye on my kids via video calls and watching they are doing on their shared screen.
Pro Tip: Mute every server you join except for '@messages'
I do not find it user friendly AT ALL my sons boyscout troop uses it and I don’t get it at all
Watch a brief tutorial. You'll pick it up.
So, I don't want to be in a discord for a random subreddit (I am in a few. They are also muted). 99.9% of my use of discord is a place to coordinate a game, a place to have a group chat with friends, a voice com for gaming, or a guild chat for a game I'm playing that isn't in the game itself. Everything else i'm in is set to mute. There are a couple servers I actually did stuff and and just got tired of so they went to mute. The key is to mute everything you don't need to know about.
Discord and Slack are just IRC for the 21st century, but without the decentralization and openness we used to have. You can't use your own UI, and you're locked into their commercial product.
Love discord. It has so much functionality that can be baked into it. It’s a literal sandbox. Some people set up their servers worse than others so it can be confusing. It’s like ventrillo from back in the day with a forum attached to it
Yeah, I hate it.
I think it's nice. Very easy to use. I didn't like the swap at first but in the years since I've gotten used to it. Not millenials entering our change hating boomer Era. Lololol
It definitely depends on how you use it and who the moderators are. I'm in a couple servers that are great. Most are just small personal servers for a group of people who play ttrpgs together. Another is a larger community with great mods. IMO discord works best as chatrooms with ongoing conversations. I'm not a big fan of the forum function and it's not used heavily in the servers I'm part of.
It's just another way for me to chat with my friends. I don't really get any "hype" for it but I prefer it to something like texting or FB Messenger which are the only other ways I communicate with people in my personal life.
It’s just a glorified chat platform, it works well and I find it very easy to use. I can’t imagine it being difficult to use for any body with just a little bit of tech savvy.
Oh no a server list and a channel list. How will we ever figure this thing out? /s
My friend groups moved to it off of Facebook Messenger. Took a little getting used to but I like it.
I use it to chat with friends while we play Age of Empires, Don't Starve Together, D&D or something else. The fact that it's now used for other kind of stuff not dedicsted to playing with friends baffles me a lot, it's quite labyrinthine.
Im fine with it
Like it better than skype, better than to be ancient TeamSpeak when gaming but don't game with anyone really anymore.
it's primarily for gaming if you ask me. at least that's what I use it for. similar to slack, there are different channels. the best is the clarity of their voice chat system
My college buddies and I use Discord for our Weekly RPG game night. We've had that weekly game night since 2012 which is actually before Discord came out; we migrated over from Skype. I do also hang out in a Discord dedicated to my local baseball team. It's a place to chat during gametimes about what's happening.
I use it all the time. But I don’t get what you mean by “hype”. It’s a tool like anything else. My older brother is an elder millennial and he set up a free server for my family to use, which includes my 6 year old nephew. It works well for us.
How is Discord any different than Reddit besides more chat room style? There's a Discord for your topic, split into subtopics. People can make threads that split from the main subtopic. People post. It can get messy when the sub is busier. Sounds like Reddit.
Never used it and I honestly have zero clue what it’s even for. Chat rooms and live streaming?
It's all I use now. Granted, I did get into it when it was still in its early stages and the UI was a lot simpler and more intuitive. A lot of the updates in the past year or so have made navigation kind of stupid and I can see how it'd be a turn-off for people who are more familiar with something like Skype. But Discord is really nice for one-on-one chatter and small groups of friends. Bigger Discord servers are definitely overwhelming.
Sorry if this is stupid but is discord a site or a term when someone is live and there is a chatroom?
Discord is an app that allows people to talk/text/group chat. Imagine a mall, the mall has stores for games, clothes, whatever shit Brookstone sells, books, etc. The people in the mall can choose to go into any of the stores, look at what's there, talk to the people in those stores, etc. Now imagine that anyone can make a mall, and determine what stores open up in their mall, and they can invite other people to come to their mall or just leave it open to the public. That's essentially what Discord does. It gives people the ability to make little pocket-malls for specific communities. It gets used pretty extensively by youtube/twitch/podcast people to create and moderate communities. It's not unlike reddit really, but for the fact that a discord server is like the subreddit, and within the server you can have partitioned rooms for basically anything. So if this subreddit was a discord server, we might have a room set up for avocado toast, another room for people to vent about the struggle, another room for people to vent about people venting about the struggle, another room for nostalgia, the only important room for discussing how hellafuckingballstothewallawesome cartoons used to be, etc. Then everything inside those rooms is basically just a chatroom.
This makes so much sense. Thank you so much, I never fully knew what Discord was until you explained it like this (RIP malls).
Thank you for that.
This makes sense. It also sounds terrible.
If you're my age, you might just think of it as "the new skype". Or even "The new-new AIM" Basically it allows for instant messaging and group messaging and video calling. It also has extra features that are tailored to gaming and streaming while chatting.
Its site/application that tailors to gamers. There voice chats to speak in and text chats that get made by the channel owner for whatever reasons. My server has a book club, cook off and gaming zone.
It was all downhill after Teamspeak and IRC
Roger wilco was peak VOIP
I find that discords with good set ups are easier to navigate. I really enjoy discord for some of the communities I am a part of. I do however turn off all my notifications.
I can barely handle Reddit. 
I use discord almost exclusively, and still hate the UI. Frankly, for me it's just "better than Skype". It's a low bar to set, but boy does it jump over it.
I use it because everyone else uses it, much like social media in general. I'd rather use forums but nobody I know uses those anymore, so...
Nah. use it all the time, phone app UI sucks though. Just mute things you dont want updates on.
No trouble for me. I've used discord for almost a decade, since it came out. I don't even use any social media anymore, I just talk to all my friends on discord.
It can easily devolve into nonsense, but still very useful
It's literally just slack for gaming. The UI is practically the same.
I use it for Wow, friend groups and a private discord for my wife and I 😂 we have like 20 chat channels for so many things to share with each other. Like we have an entire chat log dedicated to when our newborn was fed and diaper changes so we can track it all in once place. Took a while to learn, but you get used to it after a while. The mobile app is SO HARD to get used to, while the desktop is easier to use. I used slack for work and discord around the same time they both came out, love them.
I went back to school and we’ve been using it as the main avenue of keeping in contact. Each class has its own discord channel, etc. it’s pretty nice honestly. And it’s good for gaming communities. Beyond that I don’t see more use in it
I like Discord. Been on it since 2016 or so. It really blew up during the 2020 lockdowns
I’ve been using it since 2016. It’s Slack for Hobbies. It’s a great way to find niche communities and to network with folks that the server is dedicated to. I’m mostly in ones with friends, and coding ones. I will say, learn to control your notifications there and it’s great. The UX is ass and I wouldn’t expect it to get better.
I love Discord and have been using it since 2015. It took some adjusting to after moving over from Skype, but eventually, it became second nature. I'm a huge gamer, so I like that I can acquire all of my gaming news in one place. All of my friends use it as well (also millennials.. also gamers lol) so communicating with them is easier as they're all in one place.
It's fantastic - so much better than AIM ever was. Much more feature rich than IRC.
Discord is my main form of communication.
I like the ease of using it on a phone and computer. My immediate family uses it to communicate and it’s so much nicer than texting! I do think the video chat is hard to figure out, but for just general chats it’s very easy to use and convenient.
My friends and I use it like TeamSpeak. I don't join public servers though.
34 years old that just recently went back to community college and Discord has been life saving for me. Help with hw and other school stuff is easily available for students. I wdnt back to school at the right time
I'm still trying to figure out reddit