> Discord is very much disliked, but the software is really good
Discord as a text chat app is appalling. Whether on mobile, chromebook or desktop PC it's slow and janky to transition between channels. It is a measurably worse user experience than using IRC on a computer from twenty years ago with 1,000x less raw MIPS.
Maybe it has some advantages for voice chat, but to me it's a lowest common denominator we use because of the people and despite the software.
Discord is good enough for most users and since it was one of the first to fully leverage WebRTC in-browser for voice chat (without requiring an account), the network effect is almost impossible to overcome at this point. This is incredibly unfortunate as closed chat ecosystems are an information black hole (except possibly when user generated content is licensed to the highest bidder for LLM training, what a gold mine!)
PS. It's worth mentioning in any Discord discussion with the (though the usual "could get banned" caveat applies): it is possible to export from Discord using https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
Unfortunately, personal account automation like this is also in the reasons for "could get banned". Sigh.
I thought about building a scraper using something simplistic like Puppeteer to login to my account since the Discord browser experience is basically the same as the Discord app (which makes sense since its Electron). It would just issue a command to scroll arbitrarily up on a given channel/etc. until a certain earliest date was reached, and scrape all the data.
But.... again I'm sure that they have all sorts of mechanisms to detect unusual user behavior, so this might be JUST as vulnerable to detection as the aforementioned DiscordChatExporter.
Even leviathan walled gardens like Google let you export your data in a reasonable fashion (Google Takeout) - this is probably my biggest issue. On the other hand even if I could find an equivalent user-friendly platform, I'd never be able to convince all my contacts to migrate off Discord.
It's interesting to see how requesting your data[0] could take up to 30 days! I haven't yet clicked the button, but it would be interesting to see what's in the data dump.
Yes on very fast modern hardware, the textbox sometimes takes dozens of frames to display the character I typed, and it is inconsistent. The tech sucks.
The disparate experiences people have on the same piece of software is interesting. I'm on a Mac M1 (so definitely a higher end laptop) and have had zero issues with the Discord app. It sits comfortably on my second monitor and I use the Cmd-K shortcut to quickly snap to the correct channel/user when I want to chat. While I wouldn't call the app "blazingly fast", I don't really notice any meaningful latency.
I mean it's not like it's a low-level ASIO driver for pete's sake.
Memory usage is also reasonable. Continuous uptime is over 4 days now, and combined real mem shows it's using about ~400mb which honestly is about what I would have expected from an Electron app.
I think some of it comes down to user expectations. When I'm playing a game, we're primed to look/notice choppiness and dropped frames particularly since the graphics are constantly animated. When I'm using my DAW, I'm primed to hear latency between my interacting with a midi controller and the audio output. I don't have any such expectations when I'm using a glorified text messaging platform, so while there might indeed be some latency, it would have to be significant for me to notice.
That being said, I'm not a fan of the Android app - the UI/UX experience is rather rough.
I wonder if this is just everyone else using it on massive gamer PCs and me using it on mobile/chromebook, but .. no. It it is not snappy. The process of fetching all the new messages and rendering them takes up to a second.
I don't understand why people who insist on 60fps games are happy with a 1fps chat app, but I guess they don't have that experience.
And yet the one thing I can't do is automatically jump to the top of a question. One of my Discord servers loves doing FAQs as separate conversations, and once they get too many replies, I have to scroll endlessly (PgUp, etc) to see the first few comments. It's maddening.
Discord as a text chat app is appalling. Whether on mobile, chromebook or desktop PC it's slow and janky to transition between channels. It is a measurably worse user experience than using IRC on a computer from twenty years ago with 1,000x less raw MIPS.
Maybe it has some advantages for voice chat, but to me it's a lowest common denominator we use because of the people and despite the software.