Discord is where my programming career started. My very first (serious) project was a Discord bot back in 2016, so I attribute pretty much everything I have to the platform. Obviously that made me care a lot for it, which means when it became worse with every update it always stung a bit. Off the top of my head though, here are the things I find baffling about Discord:
1. You can't resize the channel list, and when resizing it's prioritized higher than the main chat window. This means that after a certain threshold of width the application is unusable.
2. The developer experience is very lackluster. On Slack you can integrate your application to the point where it almost feels like it's a platform feature (you can even define slash commands with parameters and tooltips). On Discord the best you get is reactions on messages.
For more on this, recently I had to verify the bot I mentioned in the beginning of this comment, as per October 2020 all bots in more than 70 servers will need to be verified. I went against my better judgement and sent them a picture of my documents, and after the lengthy process I tried to use the application transfer feature and was denied specifically because it was verified. Support basically flipped me off and directed me to their feedback forum no one reads.
3. No threads.
4. Pretty much no control for voice comms. In video game contexts it's useful for the leader to be able to speak uninterrupted (muting everyone else in the call) at the press of a button. TeamSpeak has had this for 18 years.
5. The permissions system is bonkers. Some actions are either nonexistant or hidden under items that make no sense. For example, what do you think the "Embed Links" permissions does? It allows/forbids you to send links, right? Wrong. You can send links, but it supresses the embed. If you need to supress links you need to use a bot.
6. Keyboard navigation is broken. If you're on #channel2 of server 1 and want to go to #general, it makes sense to press Ctrl+K, type #general and press enter. You can do that, but it will throw you to a channel named #general in a random server you're in.
7. Lazy loading of members sometimes means it's literally impossible to ping someone, even when they show on the autocompletion.
8. Sometimes you click a channel and it'll be scrolled way far up. You then respond to a message, it gets scrolled down and you realize you're responding to what someone said 3 days ago.
I've no idea if fixing these is enough to bring users in, but this project is important because it'll either succeed or I'll get some appreciation for Discord again. I can't justify using it anymore after 4 years of broken update after broken update.
1. You can't resize the channel list, and when resizing it's prioritized higher than the main chat window. This means that after a certain threshold of width the application is unusable.
2. The developer experience is very lackluster. On Slack you can integrate your application to the point where it almost feels like it's a platform feature (you can even define slash commands with parameters and tooltips). On Discord the best you get is reactions on messages.
For more on this, recently I had to verify the bot I mentioned in the beginning of this comment, as per October 2020 all bots in more than 70 servers will need to be verified. I went against my better judgement and sent them a picture of my documents, and after the lengthy process I tried to use the application transfer feature and was denied specifically because it was verified. Support basically flipped me off and directed me to their feedback forum no one reads.
3. No threads.
4. Pretty much no control for voice comms. In video game contexts it's useful for the leader to be able to speak uninterrupted (muting everyone else in the call) at the press of a button. TeamSpeak has had this for 18 years.
5. The permissions system is bonkers. Some actions are either nonexistant or hidden under items that make no sense. For example, what do you think the "Embed Links" permissions does? It allows/forbids you to send links, right? Wrong. You can send links, but it supresses the embed. If you need to supress links you need to use a bot.
6. Keyboard navigation is broken. If you're on #channel2 of server 1 and want to go to #general, it makes sense to press Ctrl+K, type #general and press enter. You can do that, but it will throw you to a channel named #general in a random server you're in.
7. Lazy loading of members sometimes means it's literally impossible to ping someone, even when they show on the autocompletion.
8. Sometimes you click a channel and it'll be scrolled way far up. You then respond to a message, it gets scrolled down and you realize you're responding to what someone said 3 days ago.
I've no idea if fixing these is enough to bring users in, but this project is important because it'll either succeed or I'll get some appreciation for Discord again. I can't justify using it anymore after 4 years of broken update after broken update.