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I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've b

by simias 5y ago

I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place. I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.

doublerabbit 5y ago
Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online. If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good. Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling. And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow. I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what the message's level of urgency is. It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally feels like going on vacation without your phone or something. My brain can finally relax. https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17 https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
    - zer0-c00l 5y ago
      you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this judiciously
      - night862 5y ago
        Consider the recent studies that show that people's attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under their bed, even if its turned off. Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.
        ipaddr 5y ago
        I would never bring my phone to the grocery store. It feels good leaving in a place to get recharged where it can't be lost.
    - MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
      This is like idling on IRC.
    - tekknik 5y ago
      You can disable notifications entirely
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.
- bozhark 5y ago
  You can set your online status to invisible and it never shows your icon while online
nootropicat 5y ago
- dijonman2 5y ago
  Very insulting response. Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age. Amen. It seems "user-centred" design is a long-forgotten philosophy, having been steamrollered by "attention engineering".
    - tekknik 5y ago
      I find it even more interesting that people want notifications from arbitrary webapps as well. It’s bad enough the amount of notifications received from installed apps, and we want random websites we go to to have the same ability?
- ailef 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm even younger but completely agree with GP. I now only use Discord for voice with two or three friends in a specific "channel" (or is it room?) but even then I would gladly use Teamspeak instead if possible.
- gjvc 5y ago
  Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero. Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other people physically around the user, by breaking their concentration / getting their attention. Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and having to be that guy who goes around asking people to silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user. Another point for working from home is that one cannot easily distract others.
charcircuit 5y ago
>what they abusively call a "server" It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A server is home to many channels which one can join.
- saurik 5y ago
  In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyone use them except to be weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.
  - thfuran 5y ago
    >The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting. That seems more than a bit ridiculous.
    - saurik 5y ago
      FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.
      - notreallyserio 5y ago
        It sounds like serverless is something you'd really be in to!
zozbot234 5y ago
Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.
  - night862 5y ago
    I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in. They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay. As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service. Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all? Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.
      - 5y ago
xboxnolifes 5y ago
> But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" ... I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.
- albio 5y ago
  Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.
  - rK5Q58 5y ago
    I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.
    - circularfoyers 5y ago
      > Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.[1] This is why it's users refer to them as servers. [1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
  - tekknik 5y ago
    The service is still very gamer centric, Discord Nitro for instance gives you a game subscription. I really hope they’re not trying to become Slack, that will be the death of them.
- bozhark 5y ago
  Guilded is a new discord clone. They separated those terms a long time ago, even before the second-hand app
- tekknik 5y ago
  They’re still referred to as guilds in the APIs, but their friendly name is now servers.
holler 5y ago
I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
- tekknik 5y ago
  > no gifs Just gonna go ahead and call it, it’s dead. Gifs are required. Even in the Slack I manage for work for a large team the primary request is we add giphy.
  - holler 5y ago
    the key thought I had is not having it end up like twitch where there's a firehose of emoji/gifs and actual conversation is diluted...
    - tekknik 5y ago
      this tends to not be an issue for work slacks, as the fear of being fired for what could be considered abusive chat or procrastination would stop most of the spam.
bozhark 5y ago
LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it. We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.
- night862 5y ago
  This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are. "Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."
  - burnished 5y ago
    That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.
    - night862 5y ago
      Yes, you are very correct. Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their platform, especially to something unfamiliar. The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its extremely fast to begin, well known and even works in a browser. If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this exact experience, what would have been egotistical would be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the thing that already works for everyone.
behringer 5y ago
Maybe you're not using it right (tm) With discord, you search for a server that interest you, for example "city xyz gamers" and then you disable all notifications unless they mention you. Then you browse to your hearts content and turn on mass notifications for the rooms you do like to see.
mr_beans 5y ago
100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate with the public. Abysmal!
OOPMan 5y ago
I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers. I'm only really super active on two or three of them though. You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get. I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.
- 7331 5y ago
  Yeah I'm on lots of servers too. It's annoying that it can't show the server names down the left... only their icons. I can't remember what they all are, so I need to slowly hover my mouse over them one-by-one every time I'm trying to find a certain server.
TheBicPen 5y ago
As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.
bradknowles 5y ago
Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with. We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels. For that use case, I think it works pretty well.

by simias 5y ago

doublerabbit 5y ago

Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online. If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good. Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling. And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?

pessimizer 5y ago
Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow. I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what the message's level of urgency is. It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally feels like going on vacation without your phone or something. My brain can finally relax. https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17 https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
  - zer0-c00l 5y ago
    you can mute specific servers and channels. I use this judiciously
    - night862 5y ago
      Consider the recent studies that show that people's attention is reduced by their phone, even if its under their bed, even if its turned off. Try it, purposefully leave your phone at home the next time you go to the grocery store and see if you feel anything weird.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        I would never bring my phone to the grocery store. It feels good leaving in a place to get recharged where it can't be lost.
  - MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
    This is like idling on IRC.
  - tekknik 5y ago
    You can disable notifications entirely
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.
bozhark 5y ago
You can set your online status to invisible and it never shows your icon while online

nootropicat 5y ago

dijonman2 5y ago
Very insulting response. Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age.
- gjvc 5y ago
  Notification fatigue is real, and it’s heavily abused by all apps. Regardless of your age. Amen. It seems "user-centred" design is a long-forgotten philosophy, having been steamrollered by "attention engineering".
  - tekknik 5y ago
    I find it even more interesting that people want notifications from arbitrary webapps as well. It’s bad enough the amount of notifications received from installed apps, and we want random websites we go to to have the same ability?
ailef 5y ago
For what it's worth, I'm even younger but completely agree with GP. I now only use Discord for voice with two or three friends in a specific "channel" (or is it room?) but even then I would gladly use Teamspeak instead if possible.
gjvc 5y ago
Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero. Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other people physically around the user, by breaking their concentration / getting their attention. Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and having to be that guy who goes around asking people to silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user. Another point for working from home is that one cannot easily distract others.

charcircuit 5y ago

>what they abusively call a "server" It's modeled off of IRC / Mumble / TS / Vent terminology. A server is home to many channels which one can join.

saurik 5y ago
In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyone use them except to be weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.
- thfuran 5y ago
  >The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting. That seems more than a bit ridiculous.
  - saurik 5y ago
    FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      It sounds like serverless is something you'd really be in to!

zozbot234 5y ago

Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).

kitsunesoba 5y ago
I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.
- night862 5y ago
  I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in. They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay. As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service. Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all? Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.
    - 5y ago

xboxnolifes 5y ago

> But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" ... I don't know if this has changed, but they were originally called guilds.

albio 5y ago
Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.
- rK5Q58 5y ago
  I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.
  - circularfoyers 5y ago
    > Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.[1] This is why it's users refer to them as servers. [1]: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
- tekknik 5y ago
  The service is still very gamer centric, Discord Nitro for instance gives you a game subscription. I really hope they’re not trying to become Slack, that will be the death of them.
bozhark 5y ago
Guilded is a new discord clone. They separated those terms a long time ago, even before the second-hand app
tekknik 5y ago
They’re still referred to as guilds in the APIs, but their friendly name is now servers.

holler 5y ago

I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im

tekknik 5y ago
> no gifs Just gonna go ahead and call it, it’s dead. Gifs are required. Even in the Slack I manage for work for a large team the primary request is we add giphy.
- holler 5y ago
  the key thought I had is not having it end up like twitch where there's a firehose of emoji/gifs and actual conversation is diluted...
  - tekknik 5y ago
    this tends to not be an issue for work slacks, as the fear of being fired for what could be considered abusive chat or procrastination would stop most of the spam.

bozhark 5y ago

LMAO our discord has people from 18 to over 65. It’s really whatever you make it. We just bullshit and game. But not that well. So it fits a lot of people’s style.

night862 5y ago
This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are. "Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."
- burnished 5y ago
  That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.
  - night862 5y ago
    Yes, you are very correct. Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their platform, especially to something unfamiliar. The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its extremely fast to begin, well known and even works in a browser. If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this exact experience, what would have been egotistical would be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the thing that already works for everyone.

behringer 5y ago

Maybe you're not using it right (tm) With discord, you search for a server that interest you, for example "city xyz gamers" and then you disable all notifications unless they mention you. Then you browse to your hearts content and turn on mass notifications for the rooms you do like to see.

mr_beans 5y ago

100% agree down to the boring old 35 year old part. And now I work for a startup and discord is the main way we communicate with the public. Abysmal!

OOPMan 5y ago

I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers. I'm only really super active on two or three of them though. You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get. I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.

7331 5y ago
Yeah I'm on lots of servers too. It's annoying that it can't show the server names down the left... only their icons. I can't remember what they all are, so I need to slowly hover my mouse over them one-by-one every time I'm trying to find a certain server.

TheBicPen 5y ago

As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.

bradknowles 5y ago

Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with. We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels. For that use case, I think it works pretty well.