It's worth noting that I don't feel this way about Slack (mostly). It has a clear visual hierarchy of Servers > Channels/DMs > Messages [> Threads]. Discord has things linked every-which-way; someone will start a group call and it's somehow separate from the shared server you're on, living in a whole separate subtree of the interface.

Maybe the difference is that Discord accounts are cross-server? So you have conversations that live in a server, and conversations that live outside of any particular server?

I still cannot seem to hold a mental map in my head of where to get to DMs. (It’s under Home.)

For what it's worth you can also Ctrl/Cmd-T and search for someone to begin DMing them.

(I had no idea. Thank you. That’s a nice shortcut.)

I’ve found slack super confusing and counter-intuitive in how Cumbersome it is to log in to my workspaces on, for example, my phone. This is because I don’t have a slack account but multiple accounts - one for each workspace and all of them connected to the same email (so for me as a user they’re the same account. come on - Why do I have to sign up every time?)

The UI around this has improved tremendously over the last 6 months, but it is still not great.

I want different handles for them, I want DMs to be grouped by discord - not into a single giant bucket, I want notification emails to go to different emails.

The biggest blocker to me enjoying discord is that it assumes I'm the same person across all the groups.

The only thing though I found out not possible to customize per server is the avatar picture, for some reason. But I already use the same for personal and professional communications so it didn't bother me too much.

Nope. The different handle on a server is there for other people's benefit, not for yours. Anyone who sends you a direct message will see your actual Discord handle.

I can't fathom why it's implemented this way, but it is.

I would hazard a guess that it's because the vast majority of people want a single login for a single app.

I know I certainly prefer the discord one account many servers approach over the slack one server one logon.

Obviously the 1:1 relationship makes sense for slack as it's targeted at businesses, a lot of whom use a centralised user directory of some kind (SSO/LDAP etc...) but having to create a new user/pass to join every discord server would get old very fast.

There isn't one.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

That gave me a chuckle

Like how Reddit spares you from registering for 100 forums.

Still, the voice quality is way way ahead of anything else like Zoom or WhatsApp. I think that's probably more important than anything else.

Now that Discord has a far more diverse population beyond your more hardcore gamers, I think softening the jargon would be positive. They've already started to move the tone of some of the more playful messages[2] to improve UX for a broader audience, so it may well move away from the current terminology before too long.

[1]: https://blog.discord.com/discord-is-for-your-communities-3d1...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/inuc6u/they_rem...

Though the medieval history is its own baggage as well that would likely keep Discord from wanting to use the term publicly in sales marketing: medieval guilds were predecessors to modern unions and there's at least a few potential enterprise companies that would balk at using a union term for chat groups.

Isn't it just a single left click on the voice channel name?

I think the discomfort in this case comes from the semantics of clicking an item in a list. Every desktop interface for the last 25 years has taught us that clicking a list-item means "select". This works for text-channels, and I can kind of see how you might stretch that definition to joining a voice channel - though that's more of a "significant action", which traditionally warrants an actual button - but it makes absolutely no sense for leaving a voice channel.

You took what I couldn't articulate and perfectly described it.. thank you!

After not being able to "get" the layout of Discord after multple uses, it made me wonder if I was the wrong age group of the platform for not "getting it."

When lockdown started the huge company I am contracting for decided to try Discord. It was a hilarious clash between corporate culture and gaming culture for a month. I think they've toned down some of it now? (We ended up with teams)

https://i.imgur.com/eVwStvT.png

Being the public sector, we’ve gone through a lot of different things, even a few specifically build for business-to-client video chats with encryption, and I can’t recall anything that has been as easy to implement as teams. We have a lot of people, like a thousand employees, who never learned how to use Skype for Business, most of them now use teams seamlessly.

The fact that Microsoft are building things into it at a fairly rapid pace, and even by suggestion from users like us (the ability to hide team emails from outlook). Makes it fairly valuable. I mean, I’m in development and not operations, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a presentation platform that could be used by the political layer with so little support before those team meetings where you present to a muted audience.

I personally prefer discords IRC-like bits, and use discord at home like everyone else, but it’s getting really hard to compete with teams in an enterprise setting.

https://blog.discord.com/your-place-to-talk-a7ffa19b901b

https://discord.com

One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.

Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.

You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.

That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.

“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.

Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.

Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.

"Hey hop on my mumble server"

"Hey hop on my vent server"

"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"

"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"

These are the UI complaints I have that I can list from memory. There's a bunch more regarding to how the service is operated (especially support), but it's overall not really a good experience for me. Definitely better than Skype, though that's a very low bar.

Edit: Oh, and no threads. That's Slack's best feature by far.

I never had these problems with IRC in pidgen.

No idea why they made Discord audibly ping whenever someone say anything in any channel on new servers you join.

I think sensible defaults are valuable, and I don't think Discord's approach here is sensible.

This might be why Discord themselves have said not to use it for serious business in companies (I can't find the quote and don't know if they say that anymore, but they definitely used to).

I think it's an amazing piece of software. Every single day that I have to use Lync or MS Teams at work I miss the easy copy/paste interface and all the rest. My only gripe is that notifications are unreliable and spotty on my phone. I tried making a chatroom with a couple of friends but they had similar issues so we all moved back to Whatsapp. Maybe they've fixed those in the last year or so.

I used Slack before I used Discord, so I compare the two a lot. I think Slack is more polished and playful while remaining mildly professional.

Discord I think has a more nerdy and less polished interface, which I think is a part of it's appeal.

This right here was one of the biggest reasons for the popularity of the Mac and Apple’s other early stuff.

They’re not so playful right now, but the aesthetics are still a big part of why so many people love to “be there”, while other people can’t understand that and deride it as “form over function” and blahblah