Comment by cletus

I like the idea of Discord in general. It certainly does have uses like making voice communication more accessible.

But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any discoverability.

One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure.

This is why tagging is so much better.

Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type? You see how quickly it breaks down.

Discord channels are a hierarchy.

So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and someone might only be interested in those posts.

Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on different parts of the screen.

I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example, to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it seems?).

So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or you're going to have a bad time.