Discord was never 'user-friendly'. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).

[–] crossdl@leminal.space 1 points 8 months ago

It definitely let people create insulated pockets. Is there a chat app that doesn't do that? Telegram?

[–] Ilandar@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Discord is far worse in this context, though. Much of reddit is still publicly visible and is still indexed by some search engines, even if it could be better. Discussions from years ago are still visible and provide useful information to many (this is part of the reason "search term + reddit" became such a popular query template). When communities move to Discord, many of their conversations become completely private to anyone who isn't a member. The conversations move quickly and there is no easy way for people to reference past information. I get that people on Lemmy hate reddit and it's popular to circlejerk about it, but forums being replaced by things like Discord and Telegram that aren't equivalents at all has been much more damaging.

[–] crossdl@leminal.space 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You make a really good point here. However, is that same anti-indexed nature a boon in the era of Ai site scraping.

[–] Ilandar@lemm.ee 1 points 8 months ago

Possibly, although it hasn't stopped people from doing it in the past.

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a "community tool".

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think it's because it's great for group messages too. SMS/MMS is kinda shit, especially when somebody has an iPhone and their iMessage interferes (seriously, enough of the 'loved an image' spam). IRC gets blocked on a lot of public networks because of its association with piracy, so that makes it less than reliable.

Discord is pretty full featured too, like IRC doesn't do group calls, and getting a group phone call going is a pain. Being able to have different channels is also super nice, because you can have a channel for, idk, birthday party planning to keep it from vanishing in the general daily chitchat. I've used it with roommates to get everybody on board with a grocery list before, because we all had Discord accounts anyways.

It's just useful enough as a community tool.

[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago

This is the answer.

For whatever complaints one might have about Discord (and they are legion), it does a really good job of packing a bunch of different functionality in one place and with a UI that's super easy to grasp and understand what does what and how that requires very little foreknowledge of what the thing is or its underlying mechanisms.

If I am completely new and pretty blank of what it is, Discord's pretty good at me being able to catch up quickly; it's got a good UI and, following that, functionality for a bunch of things related to communication. And, if I need a quick solution that just gets me going…that's gonna be pretty painless.