Yeah, it really bugs me that it's basically absorbed what used to be public forums and whatnot into its own proprietary bubble where search engines don't reach while not even being a good fit for that kind of thing to begin with

Seriously. I hate discord. Its fine for you and friends fucking about and gaming on a saturday night.

but its been turned into an alternative to webforums. Where you have to go to get support and answers. Outside of where a websearch can index and archive.

Discord will eventually lead to a massive, catastrophic loss of information that will be unindexed, unarchived, and unrecoverable.

I'm always frustrated when a game or service says to check out their Discord for information. Discord is a confusing mess of chat channels, and while it can certainly be useful in (near-)realtime interactions, I can't imagine trying to look up longer-lived information, like what they're trying to use it for. Make a forum, or a blog, or use a subreddit, but not Discord.

I think the most recent case of this was the game Terra Invicta, where I saw a tangential reference somewhere to some coming updates to the game, and a game rep said to check their Discord for more details. No thanks.

It's an overwhelming mess of everything. So many things going on at once - notifications, badges, mentions, boosts, stickers, voice chats, kitchen sink ....

I just can't force myself to use it. My brain is accustomed to a minimalist UX, not whatever that is.

AGS took their working forums for Lost Ark and other games, deprecated them and turned them to read only and switched entirely to Discord.

The tin foil hat side of me says it's so all the complaints stopped showing up in Search Engine results. Also no pesky archives or waybackmachine to properly inform customers.

Yeah the app is bloated as shit

And somehow making the UI worse every single update. HOW?

As long as they allow for free streaming and file sharing, they will need to monetize. That stuff gets real expensive real fast.

Once it scrolls past the top of the screen it's gone.

Once one person gets a bit too giddy and posts 2 memes, your chat is now all garbage. Half of the people involved will have muted it already.

Also it used to be fast, but got bloated and lost its greatest advantage. They abandoned every design choice that made them popular in the first place.

Bandwidth isn't free, they gotta make money somehow

You usually know a company is slowly going to shit when they start to be serious and stop doing fun in their products and ads. Then you know lawyers and shareholders and people who think you can only do business with a straight face started to take over the company. Which is just sad.

plus doesn't it just feel awful to use as software? the way lemmy looks and responds to clicks is night and day versus the le epic gamer kid dark mode awful buggy weird PC web view thing discord does where like, if you want to copy and paste you have to use their little tooltip menu which sucks instead of the system one. every time you launch it it forces you to wait 10 minutes for it to download every piddly little update which probably sucks and doesn't matter....

lemmy is buggy and has its flaws as well of course but it's just like...this is a good solid website. good bones. like the old days.

I see a few claims of spyware in here. Not that I doubt you, but where can I find out more?