The problem with Discord is that every single thing has their own server with 42 highly nuanced channels, intricate permissions and multiple utility bots.
Then you have like 15 active users, all typing on #general
Multiply this by 20 or so communities and it's an UX clusterfuck of epic proportions.
At the other end of the spectrum, I manage a 20-user private channel in which users coordinate to play together and chat about games in a single channel, voice chat in about 2-3 channels and the quality of life is various degrees of magnitude better than the old skype/teamspeak days.
When you look at what it was supposed to compete with (good old mumble and teamspeak). The UX and UI make a lot of sense. You where supposed to have a lot of channel since you where usually creating one per game / per team. I remember having channel lol-1, lol-2, cs-1, cs-2, etc, so that multiple team could play the same game at the same time without speaking over each other. Then you had a main channel where you where hanging out when not playing anything.
But discord became so popular, it stopped being used just has a "game voip" service and has a general messaging service. A lot of streamer/youtuber use discord to host their community. I even know some company who switched to it when the pandemic started. And the fact and the matter is that discord was never designed for this.
Totally Agree. We have quite a few smaller professional communities switching to our airsend (https://www.airsend.io/) exactly for the same reason. What we hear often from these users is that managing discord (tool) takes more time than the actual communication. It is ideal for large communities but if you want something simple discord is not the way to go.
That's exactly why I prefer Telegram to Discord in most cases. Everything just feels so cluttered. Yeah, it's nice to have the multiple channels in one server (though forums would be nicer, as then things would be easily searchable in the future for everyone and not behind Discord's wall, where who knows what could happen), but Telegram is just so much sleeker in my opinion, and that's why I use it as my primary chat app (and keep trying to get more of my friends and family on it)
More broadly, what does the landscape look like in 5 years? 10 years?
I'm also skeptical that chat is worth as much as I'd once thought. If it's not paired with an enterprise solution (Slack, Teams, Hangouts/Allo/Meet/Whatever), it has to make money on ads or premium features (emotes, stickers, "server boosts").
Google and Facebook are about to get reamed by the DOJ for anti-competitive practices, and I'll wager that privacy is one of the talking points. If you can't use chat to enhance your advertising moat, what then? Sticker sales can't amount to that much, and ads without purchase intent or social graph knowledge are pretty low value.
A lot of things in Telegram are done right, but that does not mean it will win the audience.
Discord is a very good solution too, but I doubt people want to use it on their smartphones as a messenger.