They won their market share with their early demographics by being a better product flat out. Whether the visual design is to your taste or not, you’re fooling yourself about the reason for their success.

I feel like a boomer when it comes to discord because lots of niche information, utilities, mods, and discussions that I used to google search for and find on forums and subreddits have moved to discord servers and as a non social gamer I find it chaotic and cluttered. I suppose it's different for people who grew up using it to play games with their friends as it became their go-to community tool.

For example if I want the latest info on the state of installing a certain linux distro on macbooks with T2 chips I have to open discord and figure out which unlabeled icon on the left out of dozens of servers I'm in that I visit infrequently has the information I'm looking for. I don't use the servers often enough to memorize their "logo" so it would be helpful if I could see names there. If I want to report a bug in a VR app the only way to be sure the developer sees it is to again dig through those dozens of unlabeled server icons then figure out which of the many text channels I have to put my question in. If I want to be notified when Nvidia cards are in stock at Best Buy I have to find the drop server, find the channel with the pinned message and click on the right "reaction" emoji. I'm not sure why the new generation prefers this format but it is what it is, no harder than digging through IRC channels and usenet but not much of a better experience, personally.

I quite prefer discord over lots of other solutions (slack or zoom). But their place as a forum is interesting and you make an excellent point for the concern that it pushing lots of good content out of the public web and into private spaces. I wonder if discord could add a feature that publishes chat logs in a way that could be crawled by search engines.

for me its just like irc. irc was used to organize tech and gaming communities for years and years and was not really more user friendly or organized.

Windows is still relevant too. Average people don't care about UX it seems.

And what is the competition there outside Mac? I haven't yet felt at any time that Linux offered superior UX experience. Maybe I'm too used to Windows...

Maybe you are. Modern Linux desktops are nothing like they have been not to long ago. Personally I can't even imagine more productivity win than gnome shell.

That's a complaint I keep hearing. But the reason I switched to discord in the first place was because I loved the interface. Both in terms of usability and aesthetics. Makes me wonder why there is such a gap in how people rate their interface.

I'm pretty happy with the interface, with a couple exceptions:

1) I'd like to be able to collapse, or reposition, the right panel (the one with the users in it).

2) I'd like to be able to have multiple channels open at once. This one is probably my biggest complaint. It's frustrating having to frequently click back and forth between different channels in a server.

I'm sure I could find more things to complain about if those were resolved, but those two changes would make me content with the UI.

Give me some other themes too, I suppose. Maybe a really dark one.

You can collapse the user list. Click the icon to the left of the search box in the header bar.

I initially found discord UI a little confusing, not sure why. I use it all the time for work, and the layout is essentially the same as slacks. Admining servers is much nicer with discord.

Slack learned us to join and leave channels on purpose. This is something I totally miss with discord. There is always EVERYTHING at once hammering at me. For me a definitely not work friendly environment because it builds on distractions.

I guess it depends on your setup, but for me, based on your role, you're automatically part of all the channels that are relevant to you. You can mute channels if they become distracting and aren't relevant. I find this way better, as when we get new people they are instantly part of everything they will care about. When we had slack, I found I had to force join people to channels because they wouldn't know to go particular channels.

I think it is possible to do this with roles and bot managing those. Ofc, that is not standard solution.