this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2026
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Yet the entire software community depends on it for everything
I really don't understand how a chat app for gamers became so big in the software development community. It's such a poor choice, especially for support. Nothing is indexed in search engines, and people can't see messages unless they join. I've even seen some projects use Discord for bug tracking. It's woefully inadequate for that.
before Discord there was Teamspeak 3, Ventrilo and mIRC. Discord at the time brought file sharing, video calls and more polished UI at the time when all of it was not found on TS, but Skype and facebook messenger was around. Me and my friends used TS, but jumped to Discord because it was better almost in every way (apart from sound codecs). If TS devs had not been so oblivious and inovated fast enough, we would have stayed
My impression—I don't use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.
You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn't require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.
And it didn't cost anything to set up.
If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I'd probably use, oh, Mumble. I'd get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I'd only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I'd have to go cobble something together from other components.
Take a look at this absurdly long list of apps. How many have been created at this point and half of them have overlap with a quarter of the list. And yet, from my experience, every single one finds a unique way to fall short of the basic functionality I expect from Discord. And I’m definitely not counting anything available through Nitro.
All of the ones that claim to be full Discord replacements have had incredibly difficult and multi-layered setups that don’t follow any regard for the ability to easily remove if it doesn’t work for you. Their instructions will start with ordering a VPS or will assume that you want to host on the public internet first or do wacky stuff like setup their own reverse proxy without me asking.
Mattermost was almost there. It even has voice and video sharing. But they don’t have voice lobbies. (Not counting the janky plugin) They all just find something that makes my friends not want to use it. Many of these projects are like 2-3 features away from being able to convince my friends to use them but until that day comes, the Dicksword will win.
It's way better than slack lol that's how, i mean slack is straight garbage so it's not saying much
At work we're migrating from Google Chat to Slack, and there's a bunch of things I already miss. There's a lot of strange UI issues in Slack that aren't an issue in any other competing products.
It annoys me that a lot of Actual Budget stuff is on their Discord. Thankfully they have documentation on github and their website.
Because it has a lot of good tools for finding what you need on an intuitive platform focused around communities similar to Reddit.
Let's be real Discord is popular because it does a lot of things really well.
As a moderator and the primary troubleshooter for a 12k member discord server, no the fuck it does not.
new user joins
It's in pins.
new user joins
It's in pins.
new user joins
It's in pins.
Kill me. Or bring back old-school forums. One of the two.
A common thing you could read in old-school forums was "have you tried the search", so I guess that leaves us with one option.
What your talking about has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with stupid users never reading or using resources available.
Same way 1% users actually read server rules.
I would posit that if the tools don't make the resources readily available and obvious (like a pinned forum thread that you literally have to scroll past to make a new thread), then the tools aren't good.
The users found the Discord because they searched for their problem and the result was a recommendation to join the Discord.
If the answer had been indexable by search engines, the search engine would have found the answer and given it to the user. No need to even log in.
you search and go through the results. read a long one 3 screen lengths down the scroll and it was useless. go back to the search and it's back at the top again. scroll more and question if they are even in the same order.
go to the pins and even though you saw it there yesterday its gone. look again later and it turns out sometimes it just takes loger to load them.
go to read the rules but then find out that sometimes they cant be viewed on android and you have to go to desktop to do it. epecially when the server has a bunch of things to click in acknowledgment before the channels show up.
Intuitive?
Are you mad?