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Comment by raxxorraxor | Hacker News Reader

The UI is optmized for the usual ADHD kid on cocaine that really needs every stimuli maximized. The text density is attrocious. I guess they want to copy the Twitch model with microtransactions.

Of course that would conflict again with making content actually discoverable.

It is nice for chat, but not really for information exchange. I do think that many communities are making a mistake if they solely rely on it.

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You're getting downvoted, but I think low text density contributes to the low quality of conversation. I've commonly witnessed conversations that were going around in circles, with people just tuning in and re-asking questions that were already asked and answered in the same conversation two or three page scrolls up.

If it's not on the bottom screenful of text in a channel it might as well not exist on Discord. Which is funny, because one thing that people really like to bring up when comparing IRC to Discord is its lack of persistent history. It turns it doesn't make much practical difference.

It might not make a difference when looking at a noisy straw man #general channel with strangers, but it certainly matters when you look at everything else like PM convos, PMs you received while offline, notifications while offline, and slower or more critical channels like #staff or a group of irl friends or announcement channels or almost every other channel type I can think of outside of noisy #offtopic channels.

To be super fair too, if you compare Discord to forums, (the thing lots of communities were using before Reddit) in terms of whether it’s good at managing a large discussion, remember when there would be a thread with 19 pages? People would be challenged to find the actually useful post on page 5 when there were dozens of pages on an active thread.

So it’s a slight reassurance, although I feel like still the difference is Google would index those, so you could be landed right on the interesting page. With discord, an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost for everyone but whoever was looking at the chat when it happened :( so I guess my point is… it’s not so bad, but actually it’s pretty bad.

Discord could fix this with some kind of suggestion as you type... But why would they? Its resource intense and reduces engagement.

> an hour after the brilliant point was made, it’s essentially lost.

This is what pins are for.

Not exactly scalable though, would you eventually have 10000 pins after 5 years and let people search (using a good search engine) across those only to avoid the noise of 1000 matching chat messages of idle speculation and uninformed wrongness? In Reddit the useful posts would have been upvoted, and then the post would have been indexed by google. I don’t see a compelling comparison here for a case like “how do I get (Device name) working in Home Assistant”

The downvotes are for shitting on a debilitating disorder and making fun of its surrounding stereotypes.

To be fair, the text density can be changed to be more compact.

You can adjust the density of text as a setting. Most people I know use the maximum density option, just like most people use Discord's dark mode. At that level, I don't think you'd want the text much more dense.

If you switch to the compact appearance and potentially change the font scaling down a tick the text density massively increases.

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