Armagetron Discord

[Light]

I still think I had a damn good idea.

I didn't realize this was an old thread, and didn't remember that I disagreed with it. xD It's funny because Discord basically runs my life now. I'm not gonna read through everything in this thread, but I will grant you the W.

[delinquent]

Just gonna say this here rather than making a new thread.

I hate the look&feel of Discord. It's a brilliant platform, but it feels like one of those horribly over-stimulating children's toys from the mid-00's. It's so busy and incredibly distracting. Yet, I'm relegated to it for the majority of my communications. I did try ripcord, but that won't play nice on my desktop machine because, for some reason, prime number calculations have suddenly become a problem. Oh, and it keeps ******* beeping at me, jesus.

There's something in there about errant conversational flow, deeply unpleasant chatrooms, abrasive teens who think they're hot shit behind a keyboard with no parental intervention, and missing forums when one can take an hour or two to consider a post's content, craft and review a response, and be satisfied that you said exactly what you wanted to.

Also, **** electron and the horse it rode in on. Did you know, discord spawns as many as six processes and pretty much vomits userdata to almighty google? Take a look through wireshark and be horrified.

With all that said, I don't think there's another truly accessible communications platform like it at the moment. Kids these days rarely know how to use forums, much less IRC. Shame, really.

[aP|Nelg]

Oh, and it keeps ******* beeping at me, jesus.

That might be something desktop environment dependent; if you're using KDE check your system sounds settings (or whatever it's called), and make sure notifications don't play a sound. Otherwise, I've been using Ripcord here with no issues, though I do have mixed feelings about it being closed source.

I do occasionally still have to open real Discord*, which is just annoying. There's very little in the way of appearance customization, and the options you do have pretty much make it look worse. The light theme? Gray text on a white background. What kind of visibility is that? Also, poor content density: everything is massive and has miles of space between. Particularly annoying for people like me who rarely use touchscreen devices and don't really want to pointlessly waste screen space like that for an application.

I did look for some other alternatives for Discord. At one point in time I was using an IRC bridge, which in some ways was great (I could easily see deleted messages and messages as they were before editing), but it was ultimately just a massive hassle. More recently, I found some GTK-based open source discord thing, though from what I remember it looked like they tried to mimic the real Discord appearance as much as possible. What's the advantage there? Well, being open source, I suppose I could customize the theme myself.

Of course, one thing that is nice about Discord is that I don't necessarily have to have a client connected to get messages. It doesn't make a huge difference to me since I use Quassel, which (provided everything is working properly) will always be sitting in IRC servers/channels. Not everyone does that, though.

Also, **** electron and the horse it rode in on.

I don't hate Electron, but I'm not sure it's well suited for general purpose desktop applications. I don't think I've seen an electron application actually ever use the actual system theme and colors. And of course, Electron, being essentially a web browser with more stuff hammered on, really inflates the size of an application. Though, I should also mention that I think stuff like games might not actually be that bad of an idea under Electron outside of the fact that it's got annoying APIs you have to use if you expect to do anything fancy with the system integration stuff.

Though, to games, I give exceptions to most of the stuff mentioned in this post; you (hopefully) spend more time playing the game than dealing with the clumsy GUI.

* In a browser of course. I'm not installing that heap of garbage natively! Even though certain features still don't work for some reason under Firefox (I think video sharing was one). But hey, I suppose I should be glad it works at all, unlike Skype...

[syllabear]

Is the browser version any better?

[sinewav]

Cool, I love a good opportunity to hate on Discord! I hate it. Mostly because I've noticed it being used as a replacement for BB style forums like this one, which is a terrible idea. Also, the interface looks like it's made for little kids. It's an OK replacement for IRC and the integrated voice/video chat is nice, but as an information resource it's awful.

[delinquent]

The browser version is even worse! Firefox has a bit of a slow memory leak, apparently, so after a while it ends up consuming almost three quarters of my available system memory - which I admit is low at 8Gb. Oh, and voice, video, audio and suchlike are simply unreliable. Same with Chrome, but I don't like to keep Chrome installed. Did you know, Google Software Updater makes a full inventory of your operating system and sends that information to Google? I didn't think that would be at all appropriate - it's blatant spyware, but I observed it in action sending a portfolio of my entire system over, and get this, HTTP. No, that's not a typo. If it wasn't bad enough that it was sending your information in significant complexity to Google, or Alphabet more likely, it's doing it insecurely!

I'm in the process of preparing for an injunction over this, actually. I work with information that is considered protected, and for a while I used Chrome as my testbed since the rendering engine is actually pretty good. I've had to send out notice to all of my clients that information security has been compromised. That's not an overreaction, either - it quite literally has.

Anyway, besides my little rant about google, my real gripe with modern design is what it says about the developer's opinion of the consumer. You can see it quite clearly in the redesigns of social media lately. There's a huge impetus to simplify everything - and that comes at the expense of functionality. The idea seems to be to "dumb the web down", as it were. I feel like I'm being treated like an infant, not a functional adult with a modicum (I hope) of intelligence.

That might be something desktop environment dependent; if you're using KDE check your system sounds settings (or whatever it's called), and make sure notifications don't play a sound. Otherwise, I've been using Ripcord here with no issues, though I do have mixed feelings about it being closed source.

It's not the beeping persay, it's that Discord seems to demand a ridiculous amount of attention. It's actually distracting. I've taken to using a presence widget instead of actually being there, which allows me to post to channels without seeing anything from other users until I open the actual application.

Ripcord will eventually be open source - and it technically is semi-open source, if you ask nicely cancel will give you the entire source to compile yourself. I actually had a fairly long conversation with him, trying to figure out why Ripcord doesn't run on my PC - turns out my processor is reporting that it supports certain operations when it doesn't, and this problem seems to be getting worse. Regardless, it's not a solution at the moment.

I don't think I've seen an electron application actually ever use the actual system theme and colors

It does on Plasma! At least, it respects window control design, and somewhat respects colour preferences. Custom colour themes in individual applications has been a thing for a while now, and when used sparingly it does help somewhat with branding. Ideally, it would be opt-out.

I've noticed it being used as a replacement for BB style forums like this one, which is a terrible idea.

+1. Discord is incredibly ethereal. Strictly speaking, so is IRC, but back then if we had a complex post we took it to slow-message services. Like forums. It's incredibly annoying that things like code review seem to be moving over to it. Posterity is important!