- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Discord users are cancelling their Nitro after new mobile layout update::undefined
Source: like 7 people on
twitterXYe, but it’s significant since that’s 80% of the Nitro subscribers
Make it 70. I am a Nitro sub actually make it 40 I have 3 other friends that are as well. Well now technically 30 because I have an additional friend in Sweden who pays for it. I have fiber my friends and I stream games the higher streaming quality is worth it. I also use Vencord to add some additional features.
More people pay for things that I think are given credit for. I don’t mind spending money on a product I enjoy with my friends.
While I agree that you should buy the things you enjoy to keep them around, throwing money at every service and application on your computer just because you use them often is exactly why everything turns to shit. Subscriptions for everything. You will own nothing, and you will like it.
I would say of the services to give money to, Discord is on the lesser evil side.
Sure, they lock a bunch of stuff behind Nitro, but they’re at least only giving people ads for their own stuff and not scams or dong pills. Because if nobody paid for anything, that money would have to come from somewhere.
Discord is also extremely data intrusive and retains the right to commercially process anything you write, post or say on there. By using it we already pay with our data, nitro is just extra skimming. I will cede that they have avoided ads for non discord related stuff, which is at least something.
Running all of the web services at scale takes a chunk of money. Even Matrix has a paid tier to cover the costs of running the servers for the paying customers. The free tier performs as expected for being free and not ad supported. It’s not extra skimming if I end up with fewer annoying things in my face and some neat tricks to use when communicating with my friends.
Giving up those rights for anything your input into a commercial Internet service is fairly standard. All that AI data came from somewhere. Not saying it’s a good thing, just that it’s not atypical.
Personally, I think the update is a genuine improvement. Everything is more intuitive, and labels for the UI was very much needed.
Yeah, same. I didn’t even touch the friends tab at all, so having it as DMs works better for my purposes. But Discord is trying to be the app for so many purposes I’m not surprised people are upset by a major UI change and having it be different to the desktop layout.
works better for my purposes
For yours, not others. That’s kind of the crux of the issue with most UI changes nowadays. They’re made for the “average user” and the average user has the most basic needs, utilizes few advanced options, and takes advantage of the least functions. They don’t even glance at the settings menu.
And when your primary goal developing software is to serve that audience, you will end up inevitably prioritizing aesthetic over functionality over time, until you’ve got…well, until you’ve got the reddit mobile app.
“Look pretty, do less”
And every time you do that, you’re pissing off your power users a little more.
As with most issues with UI changes, they could be solved by giving the user options to customize their experience to their needs, but the idea of customizable UI is verboten nowadays for consumer apps.
I dislike a couple things – swipe to reply in general, hiding the server member list within search, and the way they laid out the new tab that combined DMs and friends list. Making the friends list horizontal profile pictures to scroll through is just annoying. Other than that it’s fine.
Yeah, it finally feels like a mobile app that you can use without having to know the layout of the desktop version first. A friend of mine that never used the desktop app really struggled with basic tasks on the old mobile app.
Yes, it finally makes some goddamn sense. It’s still awful, but I find it genuinely easier to find the things I want.
Every time I open discord it just generates popups about features.
Its fucking annoying.
Making a separate button for patch notes like everyone else would take too long.
Odd, I was pretty happy when I got the update. I always thought it was odd that servers and PMs were mixed somewhat in the UI, and hard to distinguish between.
People just don’t like things being different than they were ig.
Or is there another change I didn’t notice that had people bothered?
I don’t dislike all the changes but the removal of the left swipe gesture to access current channel information and pinned message is a huge negative change to me.
I agree, this throws me off more than anything else with the changes.
Oh OK, I guess this seals it, I don’t have whatever new version people are complaining about, left swipe still works for me. I was reading through the posts trying to figured out what changed, and none of it sounded familiar. I got a discord patch yesterday, but maybe the fold phones don’t have the same version as bar phones do.
Edit: Ah, if I close discord fully and open it on the little outside screen instead, I get the new version. That is definitely too many changes to make at once. Weird that I just have both versions.
Before it was better because all of the messages were in one place.
I mostly use discord for dms and now for some reason I have to switch to a different tab to access them, it’s annoying and unnecessary.
App is also slower now.
The two big problems for me are (1) increased slowness and lag, and (2) phantom notifications (a red 10 dot in the bottom notifications but I click in and see that it’s empty)
Having used it a bit more, I can definitely agree on the lag. Crazy bad.
Been a while since I used the new thing, immediately hated it. All on mobile.
First of a, the bottom scroll thing on my phone to select a server or whatever it was just ain’t it. I didn’t use it much, but it seemed extremely annoying to move between dm and servers, especially if they weren’t the top ones. You can get lists and such by swiping.
Second was that server channels turned into a huge mess. Showing the last message makes absolutely no sense on any server I use. Especially on bigger game server like destiny group finding one’s already long lists turned into miles long lists. Absolutely unusable. I need things compact and clean personally, having the channels big and wide wastes so much space, and again long lists.
Being in a server hides any notifications and dms too.
Everything that was close at hand before is now far away. And that sucks for me.
“PMs and servers were hard to distinguish with”
Uh, no they weren’t.
I’m not sure anyone is complaining specifically about the DM button, that’s the one change that’s probably good? Like it doesn’t do much for me, and I wouldn’t care if they didn’t also change how the DM window works. Or how the swiping works in the server.
Wait, the new UI I got yesterday? With the servers and messages finally finally separated? I like it personally. I struggle to find my DMs on the desktop app vs servers and never found the overall UI intuitive. I am usually the first to get upset over UI changes (looking at you Google Messages!), but for once I am happy.
One problem I have with it is that it’s harder than ever to get to the members list. You have to click a thing at the top of the screen rather than just swiping from the right.
Otherwise I’m mostly happy.
I have no idea how we got to it before at I mostly use smaller channels and friends, but I just tapped on the # channel-banner-name at the top, without having to think about it too hard. I have never seen this screen until now, but having separate tabs for all the shared links, media, pins, and members is something I wish more apps did.
I hope they can find a happy middle ground for users, or give users enough customization options where they can configure what works for them. I hate that only 3rd party apps for things like Reddit and Lemmy actually give you control over your interface. Is it too much to ask to have customization options like the old days? 😥
Wait, really? It’s not even that big a change! That’s a hell of a thing to cut and run for
It’s quite a massive change and significantly impacts usability in a lot of cases and it also makes Discord no different from any other app.
If they had just kept the server list in the direct messages view this would’ve been way less worse.
I’m so confused. When I got this unexpected change I was so excited. This is exactly what’s been wrong with the UX in that app. It’s so much clearer now
It messes with a ton of my common actions and doesn’t make them better. Things being hidden behind weird actions now. Some of it will just require me to get used to it, but some of it seems genuinely more cumbersome to perform.
The fundamental disconnect here seems to be some people think apps being “clearer” makes them better, regardless of how much functionality is hidden or straight up lost.
And that’s not just about Discord, that’s the theme across the board, it seems. Some people want aesthetics, some people want usability, and UX designers nowadays seems hellbent on pissing off the latter.
But the only thing I see changed is that “dm” was moved to the bottom bar instead of the server list (which made no sense)
Data density in UX has been downhill since Microsoft Office added the ribbon in 2007.
Why do you enjoy having them separate? I much prefer the old layout, it makes a lot more sense to keep everything in the same place and require less swiping to get between them. Having two different sections is annoying and having it one way in the mobile UI and another way in the desktop UI is beyond stupid. I really wish they would just give us the option to pick our preferred layout.
DMs are separate things. They aren’t a server. They’re outside of servers.
Better question is, why would you put a button for DMs in a list of servers?
I’m curious about your usage. Are you heavily into DMs? What % of activity is DM vs servers? Do you switch between them a lot? Are you a desktop user too? What % is desktop vs mobile?
For me I’m mainly in a single server (but have 50 others I drop in seldomly), and I rarely DM. I’m primarily desktop (my fulltime job uses discord for collab), but do mobile a lot off hours.
it also makes Discord no different from any other app.
Seems to be the consistent theme now. Legitimately, no app seems to want to have its own visual identity anymore, it’s all the same shit, in white or black, with the same floating squircles, wasted screen space, laid out in a manner that provides less information. It’s depressingly lifeless and Corporate Memphis levels of inauthentic. The result of a CEO saying “do an Apple” to the UX team, because they gotta hook that young demo, rather than do anything original, identifiable, or interesting.
And they certainly aren’t about to spend any amount of time appealing to tech literate power users, or (god forbid) people who like to customize their own UIs.
puttin buttons at the top is a terrible ux for mobile apps
You should read the last line of my comment.
Discord was never usable for almost all handicaps
Source I work with blind developers
I just looked at the change, fully-prepared to feel outraged and claim they’re changing things just to change them.
Nah. It’s a fantastic, logical change imo. Same as when Firefox decided to move the address bar to the bottom.
If they had kept the server menu on the messages tab it would’ve been better, they also removed a bunch of normal menu actions and hid them and completely obstructed other things.
It would’ve been a logical change if they cared even a little bit more.
Wait what change are we talking about? I don’t see any huge changes on iOS.
They roll out slowly, you’ll get it eventually
The update just came out pretty much, you’ll know when you get it
Outside of a minor appearance change, they moved direct messages out of the server list and into their own space (never understood why they did it that way before), and added a way to quickly reply to a message at the expense of having to tap the channel name to see the member list instead of swiping… I’m missing how this is a massive change here and how it significantly impacts usability…
They hid a bunch of things behind menus, multiple button taps and separated two parts of Discord while they shouldn’t be. Even ignoring all those useless changes, if they had just kept the server bar on the messages tab it would’ve been fine.
You should have seen how mad people were over the time Discord slightly changed the shade of the icon
They’ve just seen this as an excuse to stop paying Nitro.
They could just stop anytime, they don’t have to justify it
discord users are snowflakes
Sure thing grandpa, let’s get you to bed. Joe Biden can’t hurt you there.
Imagine paying for Discord in the first place
I don’t pay for Nitro but I don’t have a problem for people that do. Servers aren’t free so it’s that or ads.
I swear Lemmy is against paying for anything. So many freeloaders in this world.
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How dare a mid-sized outfit have a voluntary paid tier!
That’s not what they said. They said it wasn’t worth the price, not that there’s anything wrong with it existing.
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Lemmy and Reddit users are always simultaneously saying ‘pay people a living wage!’ while also saying ‘no ads, and make it free forever’.
MSN had animated emotes for free like two whole decades ago. MSN had unlimited size file transfers two decades ago, I’ve sent entire games to my friends on MSN. IRC networks haven’t really starved for cash either.
I pay for YouTube Premium since it came out, Netflix, indirectly I’m paying for my emails, matrix, even lemmy.
With Discord, all your money gives you is… emotes and further vendor lock yourself into a proprietary Chinese company and looking good to toxic gamers by flexing those emotes and server boosters.
MSN had animated emotes for free like two whole decades ago
And got discontinued one decade ago because it didn’t have a viable business model. Discord is hoping to make a profit by charging for mostly frivolous premium features, which is one of the least evil business models I’ve seen in a while.
Yep. Don’t pay? You aren’t really giving up any actual functionality, just some fun things that don’t have much of any impact on the functionality
Give it time. We all know why we’re here on Lemmy.
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Yeah exactly. I don’t pay for it because I don’t think what they offer is worth paying for. But I do use the free tier because it’s a pretty good service and it’s where people are. They haven’t done anything near as bad as Twitter or Reddit have this year.
If other people are willing to pay for the cosmetics, I say let them. If the service is able to be profitable that way, all the better.
I mostly pay to support them, and I get a few fun but completely unnecessary perks for it…
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proprietary Chinese company
Gonna need a citation for this. Pretty sure they’re a privately-held US company.
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The unlimited file size I can understand not allowing now. Userbase and file size is much bigger although storage prices are probably on par still.
Yea it makes sense in some cases
Most people can still use Discord for day to day stuff without ads. The extra features are mostly cosmetic, or things like better quality video/audio, which comes with increased load
Data tracking is probably still happening though
Ohh yes absolutely. Disco is a privacy nightmare.
🕺🪩📸
So many freeloaders in this world.
Poor people crushed by insane cost of living and stagnant wage growth who can’t afford spending hundreds of dollars in subscriptions for bullshit, you mean.
I pay when it’s half off, mostly for streaming quality. Their full price is kind of insane.
Wrong. They sell user data.
If you really believe that you should sue them and become a millionaire because their Privacy Policy explicitly states it doesn’t
I don’t really get this take. If you don’t like Discord Nitro, simply don’t buy it. If you enjoy the features Nitro adds and don’t mind paying the monthly fee, then buy it. I don’t really understand what shaming people who pay for Nitro accomplishes.
I always initially hate UI changes, will make my decision in a few days if I like it
Look at you with your emotional maturity and introspection. Not sure you fit this place! :)
Oh look, we’ve finally hit the “this place is full of morons except me and the people who think like me” point. I guess we’re on our way to being a reddit alternative after all.
Exactly! Kneejerk emotional reactions about UI changes are completely mature!
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I mean, they have to make some money some way…
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Or the board of rich assholes who do nothing for the company but hold up their hands every quarter.
You’re not obligated to pay them if you don’t want to.
These people are acting like every company that exists is somehow extracting money from them, even if they aren’t actually paying for it. For someone to ask for money in return for a service is a straight insult to them lol.
Don’t worry, I don’t.
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They’ll take as much as they can get while providing the bare-minimum in return.
It’s called “maximizing profit”, and a lot of people in this thread don’t seem to understand that.
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Jesus christ, relax. Discord isnt some billion dollar revenue stream for people like Elon Musk. Last year it generated $130 million in revenue. The only money they make are from nitro subscribers, otherwise their entire platform is free for you to use. I dont know why you think Discord is a soulless company, especially considering it’s not even publicly traded so doesn’t have to bend to the will of shareholders.
I like nitro for the audio and stream quality benefits. It’s not much money and makes the experience with friends better.
Doesn’t seem much different than streaming services asking for more for 4k streaming.
I have shit internet so the audio and stream quality does matter to me - its the universal emojis and sound board that keeps me paying. I’m not ashamed
Haha the extra sound board slots are a nice perk too. Nothing as satisfying as the John Cena intro when something goes your way in a game.
…stream quality is fully controlled by client side.
you don’t need nitro for streaming at any quality you want to, just any client moddeleted by creator
Considering how much is free and how much of a better experience it is compared to competitors, yeah, it really is not so bad. The MTX boil down to a few cosmetics and ability to use more bandwidth (ability to upload bigger files, stream in 4K)
“oh, at least there are no ads”
except they’re shoving microtransaction ads literally everywhere.
Various practices that make you feel like you’re missing out by not buying nitro.
Profile decoration shop ads almost in every single place.
There’s even a dedicated nitro gift button on the message bar.deleted by creator
Lol, remember when Discord had a birthday for 30 days?
Reminded me of that Jimmy Neutron episode.
Imagine getting peer pressured because of emojis. Seriously if you dont want to shitpost with emojis, you’re not missing anything.
This is honestly just people hating it because its different? There is no feature removal, its just built differently. Also i find it disgusting that THIS is why people are boycotting nitro. Imagine being comfortable supporting probably the largest service hosting CSAM (and not doing much about it) but drawing the line at it taking an extra tap to view server members.
I mean they’ve broken the app for me. After about 15 minutes the message window won’t refresh regardless if I change channels or servers. Notifications take me nowhere so I need to go find the event myself. I’m only a light user so I’m sure there is more. It’s not just because it’s different, I actually like the new UI better.
CSAM?
“Child Sexual Assault Material”. An alternate name for “Child Porn” (CP).
One Google search on Dextero and I will pass one using it as a source of information.
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although i use a different mobile client that’s built on older code (aliucord for those curious!), i still tried out the new update and it isn’t terrible imo. what i mainly don’t like is the server list and dms being completely seperate now, how spaced out things are, the swipe to reply feature, the members + pinned messages list being moved, how messages don’t have a smooth little transition/animation when you send them. there are some things i like, like how in the members/pinned messages list theres a media and links tab now… and other things i don’t remember right now lol, but the cons outweigh the pros for me… back to aliucord i go :p
Have they stopped banning accounts that use 3rd party clients ?
i haven’t noticed any activity on my end, but i think it might be cus im only active on like a handful of servers. im thinking the more active you are in more places, or the more active you are in the community, the more likely they’ll notice you and stuff, yk? im thinking that’s why even though i use 3rd party clients on both pc and mobile, they haven’t done anything to my account
I actually hadn’t noticed the tabs, I really like that
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Yeah I like being able to shitpost with meme emojis from other servers and keep the one platform me and my freeloading friends use, alive. I ain’t going back to Skype and god bless the souls on Teamspeak.
Mumble, mumble.
You could always switch to Matrix.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you paying for nitro is adding to discord’s longevity.
You’re just lining the pockets of people richer than you.
Good luck convincing entire communities to use a different service that is less supported.
This. Matrix is great
Definitely won’t have the features I need to shitpost and convince everyone I know to switch. Again.
And my brother in Christ that is called capitalism and in capitalism if they aren’t profiting they shut it down.
So yes, ever since I joined Discord three months after public release, I have been contributing to its longevity. I was the weird friend going on campaigns to get the boys to leave Skype. Part of Hypesquad before they shrugged and let everyone in.
I won’t need Matrix unless Discord implodes or loses touch like Skype.
huh, I opted into the new layout months ago. I got use to it quickly.
Edit: I went back to discord to find the server tray/drawer the beta had disappeared. If this is the final version, I’m surprised people are upset. The drawer was the most radical change.
Reading this, I just switched to see as well. That drawer was atrocious UX, and the new design without it is actually pretty good.
I don’t find myself getting frustrated with having to tap repeatedly to do anything, and the separation of DMs and servers is cleaner and more intuitive than the old layout where they were mixed together.
well the drawer sounds nice in theory, but the implementation wasatrocious.
I’m actually not against just putting the server list at the bottom, as discord is basically unusable with single hand atm
Yeah I’m confused too. I like this new layout
The only issue I have is not seeing the server channel listings. I’ll get over it but I’m not a fan of that when selecting a channel now. Also in the experimental features they have a thing called like launchpad? I think. I fucking love that guy.
After I choose a channel, the sidebar disappears but I can swipe it back into view. I thought it was always like that
The UI changes are horrible. They make it so it takes more taps to get to places. Idk who is in charge of that but they need to reevaluate things. Also paying for discord is hilarious. But people unsubscribing is the only way they might roll back.
It’s always been a mess. This is imo at least a bit better. Crazy that a company of this size does UI so horribly.