I think Discord, especially when it was new, had amazing UX and UI. Nowadays it definitely became bloated and new features don't integrate that well into the existing UI, but it is still on a perfectly useable level, currently.

Discord's UX is a testament to the fact that people will learn complex systems if they believe all parts of the system are valuable. This is the same truth as, for example, spreadsheet software.

The only thing "bad UX" means anymore is that you have parts of your app that people don't find valuable, and you're showing it to them anyway.

Spreadsheet software don't have bad UX? I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

I prefer IRC over Discord any day but it's very hard to convince other people not familiar with it to make a move away from Discord to it.

When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.

> When people get used to certain features they generally don't want to give them up.

Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history and drag 'n drop file upload.

Having to host your own bot for pagetitle preview and user management was also not fun.

You can selfhost your IRC client, which eliminates som of the drawbacks but that also only works for a small portion of people.

> Yeah, I would find it hard going back to not having a offline history

It's funny but I personally prefer that the IRC server isn't required to store every chat log indefinitely. You're right though, these are solvable problems, BNC for example but we're getting a little off topic.

> So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with design that appeals to normal humans rather than turbonerds? Interesting.

I saw 100+ community force migrate from Telegram to Discord. Most of the people complained about UI/UX, me included. And Telegram is not even very good in that area. Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.

And do you think a Discord community force-migrated to Telegram wouldn't have their own UX complaints? This is gonna happen almost no matter what platforms you're talking about, people are used to their thing and don't like seeing it forcibly changed.

> Normal people are not fond of Discord UI specifically, they just get used to it.

Disagree. I think most people are pretty okay with it, maybe not in love with it, but they don't see it as particularly bad in most respects either. I use Google's corp chat for work and my god, Discord is SO much better than that it blows me away.

I came over to Discord in January 2016, from a combination of TS3, Forums & Skype for the purposes of both online and personal gaming groups. It decimated all the competition in gaming spaces for voice chat, async text chat and sync text chat within 6 months. Every single guild or group moved over almost overnight. That should go to show how absolutely revolutionary Discord was, and that it was an actual, huge software innovation. People _loved_ the UX & UI. Users loved the chat and channel interfaces, admins loved the fairly easy to understand moderation tools. Its gotten a little less loved as the app has gotten less and less reliable, the VoIP quality has been reduced (especially for non-nitro boosted servers) and new, unwanted features are added. However, I don't understand how the core UI is bad. Its not puke or emoji ridden beyond what users make of it -- avatars, server icons & banners, role colours, emojis in channel names etc are all user defined. Everything else (beyond the shitty new features they rollout for 6 months then kill) is pretty standard contemporary electron app design, and honestly minimalist in some ways. It is certainly minimalist and easier to navigate compared to something like Element.

I think that HN users seem to not fundamentally understand the needs of online groups beyond what is necessary to carry out an asynchronous open source engineering project. Much of the "bells-and-whistles" that discord offers are _essential_ to both the day-to-day communication of these groups as well as to moderators. Element does not come fully replicate some core features offering an outright less stable experience. Slack/Teams are not accessible to private users. Telegram has even less features than Element/Matrix.

I mean, if you are looking for a Discord alternative, isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for? If you want something that is the opposite of what you describe, IRC still exists and works well, but not sure many end-users would call it an alternative to Discord.

That and I assume if its open-source you can make clients that look like whatever you'd want.

> isn't the design/UX part of what you're looking for?

I think this applies to the original target audience, namely gamers, but as a general purpose chat application, e.g. as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

Of course, this begs the question why these projects adopted Discord in the first place. I guess the lack of a better alternative (that is not self-hosted)?

They use it because Discord works well and simply, with a rich feature set, that's largely free. And yeah, there aren't FOSS alternatives that actually match up.

> as a support channel for software projects, the UI design of Discord is indeed atrocious.

Why is that?

I don't have an issue with the UX, but the design of the user interface seems to have been copied almost pixel-for-pixel.

I wish this project a lot of success but also that it ends up devloping its own identity.

Honestly I much prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Edit: Bonus, it comes with its own font!