What is strange about Discord is this great discrepancy between the ones that love it and the ones that hate it. If I were to guess on the reason of why that might be it would be that Discord is probably really good for the people that are constantly on it, and don't really miss any communication going in. These people have probably been there for some time so they don't feel the problem of not knowing where the past information is, because they were there when that information was communicated and therefore never need to look back at it. These people will (obviously) recommend using Discord, since it works so well for them!
The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.
I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it.
I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other channels as your interests grow. If a given channel has too much activity and is too "off topic" you'll usually find like-minded people who'll just fork to a smaller, more manageable channel. But on Discord you're invited to what they abusively call a "server" and from there you usually see dozens of groups with various purposes and features and you're bombarded with gifs and notification icons all over the place.
I think I agree with you, if I was an ~18yo right now and was willing to invest time into a community I'd love all this... stimulation. But as a boring old 35yo it's just overwhelming and feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
Discord forces you to be online or nothing. You can hide the "server" within some folder but your presence is still online.
If you truely wish to depart you need to leave the server and to return isn't an easy task; as to be able to get back in to the room you need the invite link which has it's own set of caveats. At the same time people tend to think your gone for good.
Unlike IRC where if you desired to step away, you could close the channel and reappear at your own leisure and still continue where you left off. If you returned regularly you end up being known as a regular. IMO the current pitfall of IRC is that it's plagued with idling.
And the days where I could post my own non-https link to a funny image are gone; it feels that most are now self-conscious of cliking linked-content from none-mainstream sources. How did we end this way?
Might I recommend treating it like irc in that you can idle in the server, walk away and then come back as needed and skipping down to the bottom? It’s not uncommon for people to skip in and say “morning all” in discords I’m in, even though there’s other active conversation going. The backscroll then is just used for context before you go “alright back to work for me” and then you just stop responding. There’s no longer an explicit join/quit process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one anyways just by nature of humanity.
Why would you ever want to turn anything off? What if you need it? Then what if it couldn't hear that you need it? You need it to be able to hear when you need it. Don't turn things off.
I don't think I experienced this when I was younger, but, now, it feels like being "on" (e.g., on Discord, even if it's closed and sitting in the tray and I'm getting no messages) incurs some subconscious stress somehow.
I'm not getting any messages, but I could get some at any moment. And then I'd have to choose whether to respond immediately or not. And, while I'm not responding, some part of me is wondering what the message's level of urgency is.
It sucks. Exiting Discord entirely for some portion of the day when I don't feel up to being "on" literally feels like going on vacation without your phone or something. My brain can finally relax. https://youtu.be/E2-AnDdgIF4?t=17
Matrix is a good middle ground; free and non-proprietary, but it still offers a few convenience features compared to IRC (which is a bit clunky by modern standards).
I think Matrix’s biggest issue at this point is lack of polish in its clients. If there were Matrix clients as smooth as Telegram or Discord is it’d probably take off.
I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.
They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay.
As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service.
Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all?
Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.
In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.
How? I look through my discord search settings and it’s pretty straightforward. I search for something a friend posted some months back and found it pretty easy. The only difficult part is knowing which server it’s on.
Discord uses default elasticsearch settings for search, so almost every word belongs to an equivalence class of synonyms and conjugations that are often not equivalent or mutually relevant in technical usage (for gaming-related use or for work-related use!), multi-word phrase search is impossible, searches including words in the stopword list are impossible, searches including programming language syntax are impossible, etc. "ide" is a fish or an Integrated Development Environment but belongs to the same equivalence class as "i'd" (contraction of "I had" or "I would", mysteriously NOT on the stopword list!) or "id" (part of the mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory). If you go to a server concerned with programming, psychoanalysis, or fishing, and you search for "ide" or "id" you probably weren't looking for every single time anyone ever said "i'd."
So you use something designed for gaming to run a technical community, and when the search wasn’t built to handle highly complex or technical queries you complain?
It doesn't work for gaming either. I mentioned this in my comment.
Slack is a worse product in almost every way, but it does have better search than Discord if you pay 850 yen per person per month. Do you think that e.g. the Sorbet slack or the Zig community discord should pay 850 yen per person per month for any random person who wants to discuss their open source project?
Seems like they're called "servers" now. I imagine "guilds" felt a bit too gamer centric for them after they saw how popular their service was becoming.
I've been working on a simple bot for one of the servers/guilds I'm on, and the API endpoints as well as documentation still heavily uses the term guild.
The service is still very gamer centric, Discord Nitro for instance gives you a game subscription. I really hope they’re not trying to become Slack, that will be the death of them.
As a Discord user, I don't really understand this issue. In what way is having a single channel with content on every topic less overwhelming than having specific channels for individual topics? If I want to read about a specific topic on Discord, I simply go to the channel for that topic. But if there's only a single channel a la IRC, then I would have to search through a whole bunch of conversations about topics irrelevant to me to find what I'm looking for.
In IRC terminology that was a "network", not a "server"; multiple servers worked together as part of a network (which might have only had a single server in the degenerate case) to create a unified channel namespace and it didn't matter which server you used (and yes, I know that at some point server-local channels were added as a thing using ##, but despite using IRC for a quarter of a century I never once saw anyone use them except to be weird). The term "server" used in the way Discord decided to use it is awkward and even off-putting.
In TS/Mumble/Vent terminology, there was no federation (unlike IRC), so a server was generally literally a single server hosted somewhere. All the channels, all the users, etc, went to a single machine.
Discord's selling point isn't really being a "better IRC", it's the voice chat. It's a better TS/Mumble/Ventrillo. Low-latency, decent audio quality, push-to-talk or an actually functioning level detection, with an easy to use interface. It's "Chat for Gamers" for a reason, not "IRC with history".
True, but you had to pay for a server for TS/Vent/Mumble as well, so the $5/month Discord charges for the higher voice quality is comparable (or cheaper).
Discord is voice chat, with text as a nice extra, and with image/file sharing and screen sharing and emoji/stickers/profiles (these are attractive to some people). IRC is text only. TS/Mumble/Vent were all voice chat, with really awful text chat interfaces (TS was sort of OK, Vent may as well not have had text chat).
I don't think Discord is good as an information archive, and I'm not terribly fond of seeing FOSS projects using it as a primary means of communication, but it's great for gaming compared to what we had before.
FWIW a bunch of people do seem to agree (though that isn't to say a bunch of people disagree). Maybe it is because I'm "old and set in my ways". Maybe it is because I'm just too familiar with IRC (while having never used TS nor even heard of the other two). Or maybe it is because I actually run servers for things (including IRC). But every time I hear "my Discord server" a very large part of my brain gets confused: it is a word which is so incorrectly-to-me being used--being neither a literal nor a metaphorical (via IRC) description of what is going on--that it causes me momentary confusion and then even a twinge of anger that this is what "server" means to people in 2022: a mere account on a service that isn't even themselves running a server for the user :(.
This is the real answer. casual users just want to Press button->Receive bacon. If anything looks lame or hard, their limbic systems will direct them right back where their freidns are.
"Matrix? Dude just get on Discord we're forming a party right now."
That's a weird and kind of egotistical way of saying that it's a platform that doesn't ask you to invoke the Olde Magycks in order to make it do the thing you want to use it for. IRC asks you to invest before you use it, IRC needs you to care first. Discord does not need you to care about it in order to use it. It works even if you actively despise it.
Discord definitely wants it that way, they are for sure thinking about the moment when you are trying to get in game fast and easy, and nobody cares to switch their platform, especially to something unfamiliar.
The thing about the limbic system is that you're gonna feel the pull to just come along. If your casual game group is just doing that, its a pretty hard sell when everyone already is using Discord and if they arent its extremely fast to begin, well known and even works in a browser.
If by egotistical you mean believing oneself to be better and more important than others, I disagree: I've had this exact experience, what would have been egotistical would be demanding they use mumble or matrix instead of the thing that already works for everyone.
Everything depends on the Discord community you’re connecting with.
We use it extensively for hosting chat related to role-playing games that I’m involved in, along with the voice channels for when we’re having an actual game. Character sheets are hosted on RPGSessions.com, with bot links to our Discord channels.
I too grew up on irc and now working on an alternative that has no gaming association, totally open so you can view w/o being logged in, topical, no gifs, and low friction, and planning to keep it clean and simple. https://sqwok.im
Just gonna go ahead and call it, it’s dead. Gifs are required. Even in the Slack I manage for work for a large team the primary request is we add giphy.
this tends to not be an issue for work slacks, as the fear of being fired for what could be considered abusive chat or procrastination would stop most of the spam.
Around a certain age one's tolerance for such bullshit goes to zero.
Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user. Such notifications are designed to break your concentration / get your attention, but they have the toxic side-effect of polluting the environment of other people physically around the user, by breaking their concentration / getting their attention.
Being in the same open-plan hellscape as people using Slack means having to wonder who the hell thinks it's ok to be using a tool which makes 'knock-knock-knock' noises, and having to be that guy who goes around asking people to silence their shit. Yes, this is a human problem, but don't tell me the product designers didn't consider this. Either they did, and chose to leave it on by default or they didn't. Both betray a certain contempt for the user.
Another point for working from home is that one cannot easily distract others.
> Discord, slack, et al would be doing the world a great service if their tools had notifications etc SWITCHED OFF BY DEFAULT so that they don't disturb other people in the same room as the user.
This is a fun one. What if the new hire doesn’t know Slack? They’ll miss all the messages until figure out how to configure their notifications. Or we leave them on by default and then still tell them how to configure their notifications. There’s no magical way to determine the users preferred setting. You also can’t do something like leave it on for mentions only, as sometimes you need to be in a conversation you were tagged in.
A better solution is to use a hammer on their volume buttons. Or buy a nice pair of noise canceling headphones.
Many of us have tried for many years to complain our way out of open plan offices, with no luck.
> What if the new hire doesn’t know Slack? They’ll miss all the messages until figure out how to configure their notifications
In my experience, the "new hires" are overwhelmed by Slack notifications, turn them off, and I have to remind them later, after they failed to respond to semi-urgent public @ and direct messages, that they can configure Slack to be notify only on @ and direct messages, and they won't be bothered by regular chit-chatter on public channels. It's happened to me with at least 4 people it can't be a coincidence.
For what it's worth, I'm even younger but completely agree with GP.
I now only use Discord for voice with two or three friends in a specific "channel" (or is it room?) but even then I would gladly use Teamspeak instead if possible.
I find it even more interesting that people want notifications from arbitrary webapps as well. It’s bad enough the amount of notifications received from installed apps, and we want random websites we go to to have the same ability?
The issue comes frome people shoehorning Discord as a replacement for forums. Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free. Discord is a chat app, not a forum app. It's about real time communication. In popular discords you can often just be ignored and they have to deal with the same stuff asked every single day.
If I want to share something cool then I'd rather post it on a forum because you don't need to be only at that exact moment to see it. If I want to report a bug then I'd rather use a forum. If I want to ask questions then I'd rather use a forum.
I love Discord, I think it really disrupted the industry. But a real-time chat app is not a replacement for a community forum.
> Like a subreddit is a nice place for discussion and it's free.
Reddit is cancer. Their karma system is ripe for abuse, and a great majority of their mods have power issues and ban for frivolous reasons. Reddit is just a joke for any real conversation.
After years and years of making bad changes to the site, they recently did one thing right: they removed or greatly extended the period that you can reply to and upvote posts. It used to be that after 6 months everything was "archived", but now I see an open comment field on posts that are ten years old.
I've already gotten one or two comment replies to some years-old comments of mine, and I was able to help answer their questions.
Mostly, yes, but it comes down to moderation and subreddit culture. Reddit - as a company - doesn't take moderation seriously, as evidenced by it being left to unpaid volunteers.
Just use Google. Reddit's built in search is useless in comparison. Yesterday I found a great thread about suit tailors in my city. The posts were all 3 years old but fortunately the tailor was still active. Digging up this info would be impossible on Discord, because at best I'd be locating individual comments asking about the topic, then scroll down to see if anybody bothered to post a response instead of changing the topic to something else.
I would disagree, searching for a topic or question on any search engine and appending 'reddit' gets me reddit discussions that are frequently relevant to my question (game tips, bugs encountered in some software, often real user reviews for products, etc).
Reddit's redesign is annoying and their own search isn't great but the alternative sources for a lot of communal information is completely inaccessible. I cannot search Google for Discord conversations and get information about my Lenovo laptop's rear thunderbolt port misbehaving, even though I witnessed that conversation take place multiple times on the unofficial Legion Discord community. If you're not on Discord and sort of active in a community it might as well not exist.
I'm not sure if "click" is intentional wordplay or not, but if it isn't, the word is "clique" FYI.
I'm also strongly of the opinion that tying core business functionality and information transfer to a third-party chat application is a massive footgun, and other than the fact that I use it out of business needs and not just for voice, I think s/Discord/Slack/g applies. I've both heard Discord described as "Slack for hobbies" and Slack as "Discord for the employed" (although obviously it's not a perfect distinction and I've seen e.g. Netrunner groups on Slack and e.g. some startups communicating through Discord).
That said, the number of teams and departments I have either encountered or heard about from engineering friends elsewhere whose primary - and sometimes only maintained - deployment interface is a Slack command clearly means that I'm the dumb one for trying to work the UNIX philosophy into most of my life's tools and nobody else is blinking twice about vendor lockin and memoizing solutions in a chat application. I just try and take any question/answer that was sufficiently obscure or anything asked more than once and shove it in an "OAQs" ("occasionally asked questions") on Confluence or whatever the knowledgebase application du jour is, but it still feels like teardrops against the ocean sometimes.
I use Discord a lot and I agree that it's bad to use it for anything that you can't afford to suddenly lose (though people still use Google and Paypal too).
I do think a modern chat app is a value-add for fast moving (tech) companies. It is a nice hybrid between sending an email or knocking on someones door for a chat.
And as for the 'chat commands', they're usually just thin wrappers around the UNIX style tool. It's maybe not the most reliable way, but it does have a low barrier and there's not much lock-in. I used to have my server email myself whenever something needed my attention, but now it'd probably use a Discord bot for that.
However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
> However, I still wouldn't use it professionaly. the lack of self-hosting (privacy) and archival(bots can solve this pretty easilly) and restricting DMs (see slacks previous issues) makes Discord unsuitable.
Slack doesn’t have a self hosted option either. This doesn’t stop literally every company on it from using it. This argument is a purist mentality. At some point you have to use someone else’s servers, or invent everything yourself.
Self hosting doesn’t even give you control, the app owner can easily put command and control software in the server image and still do whatever they want. Don’t pay your license fee? Good luck getting the keys to your encrypted data store.
In my experience discord servers will scale up to about about 20 people at most. I don't think that's the use case model discord is trying to push, but I think there's a large long tail of small friends-only discord servers in the order of 3-20 people.
Within those parameters discord does work well. Nothing else has the necessary creature comforts (by default). I think most of my friends have misgivings about discord, but I don't think there's anything else that fills this niche well at the moment.
Big discord servers are a completely different world, I don't understand how people put up with that.
About half of the Discord servers I have joined completely stalled and became ghost towns; when they did I deleted them. The bigger ones, while thriving, have huge numbers of users but are terrible for finding information that the org they represent needs to retain.
The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker. So I'm left skimming an entire channel that includes 50 other things that I don't care about at the moment.
The sheer volume can be overwhelming too. I went on the Zenith (VR MMO) Discord the day after release to ask a question and I found it to be useless. The channel was moving so fast that 2 min after I asked my question I couldn't even find it and had to search for it. There's no way to follow something going that fast (at least for me) and a lot of the chatter is tangential, so in addition to being poorly organized the signal to noise ratio is low.
> The biggest problem is a lack of threading. I can often find questions matching mine, but the answers are impossible to search for because a lot of replies won't ever @ the question asker.
And what if they don’t click the thread button? You’re back in the same problem. So the issue isn’t with discord, it’s with users.
User convos on discord are (thankfully) not indexed by google, so how? Did you also know google search devices are a thing and you can implement google search in your produce quite easily?
That’s basically how I use. Just as a replacement for Ventrilo or Mumble for voice chat while playing video games. It’s rather good for this use case. I think there’s maybe 10 people on our server, and I’m pretty happy with the UX.
> 2) I use Discord maybe once per week, and every time I do, I have to log in again. The phone app quietly disconnects after a week or so.
Do you perhaps have multiple sessions of discord open at the same time? I only get the login when I accidentally open discord multiple times, otherwise I never really get asked for a login.
Yeah, the company I work for actually has a public Discord server for providing support (and hosting our "community" - with some exclusions due to privacy concerns).
Because of that all of our internal staff discussions takes place in Discord, in channels that can only be seen by the "Staff" role (though modded Discord clients can show these channels' names - because channel listing, both voice and text based, seems to have been relegated to client-side so the server just sends ALL channel names, but not the actual contents unless you have the role since that is checked server-side).
While we do have a system that management based staff are invited to (I won't name it because NDA, but it's incredibly easy to guess), but it is only used in case there's a *massive* Discord outage and the staff end up in an extended communications "blackout" because of the outage - however it has _never_ actually been used, at least in the time I've been part of it.
Yes, most of my work conversations happen on discord servers. Discord provides a better chat service than slack, so I don't see how it would be unusual for people to use Discord over slack.
Discord is also great for people that don't mind having just one identity on the internet. There is basically no support for multi account, so your account for talking with your friends, taking classes and finding information on that video game is the same. Lots of people seem to not mind doing that, but I've always thought that this was terrible if you want to protect your identity online.
To be honest, I do like Discord, but I only really use it for gaming with friends. We set up a server and use it for multiplayer games, occasionally share memes, etc.
I really do not like it for communities, there's too much noise and too many annoucements.
In the last years I saw same amount of jerks on both. Trying to get help, any form of help or giving a feedback result in same canned replies, or irrelevant comments where you can clearly see people want to have own 5 mins of the Internet fame of becoming a meme. Also, on discord you have still a chance to reply but on forums people who become mods and who clearly shouldn't have been given such task in first place, will lock your thread and you can bite the dust. It's like you'd give the mythical Karen a chance to become the manager /s.
I was surprised to see that it's used more and more for work, instead of Slack. At first I thought this was a good thing (Discord feels much snappier, doesn't have the same search limitations, has voice channels) but it's been awkward. There is a way to change your name on specific servers, so you can be anonymous on gaming ones and recognizable on work ones, but people can still track you across (for example with the "servers you're both in" profile feature). Changing your avatar on specific servers is also a paid feature.
I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
> I kind of want to run two instances, but this is apparently a ban-able offence.
As far as I'm aware, Discord usually only hands out bans for this when you use an alt-account to ban evade. Though I can certainly understand not wanting to risk it if you use it for work (I'm affected by this as well).
This situation becomes obvious when you want to use the search box to retrieve old conversations. I use Discord every day, so I fall in the first category in your post. However, every time I try to find an old conversation, Discord UX and search engine make it super hard, if not downright impossible. I can feel the pain of a user who would have just arrived on the server.
I mean, people aren't really keeping up with the top posts 3 weeks ago on HN, reddit, or twitter. That's why reposts are so common.
The first two are easily indexed by google, so that's one advantage. Twitter has a site-wide search. Discord doesn't (yet?) have such a thing, but I think the focus being private communities might keep that from happening... unless they get bought out and some MBA says "how can we better get clicks?"
USP, Unique Selling Proposition, a term I'm shoehorning for wan of a better one.
Different USPs, or pseudo USP as it's a weak U, more a network effect.. The USP of Facebook being closing a circle Facebook controls around you. Of Reddit being indexable/discoverable communities/interests, of Stackoverflow focused, transactional answers. Of Twitter being bullied into change from their earlier premise to serving bigmedia noise. Of Discord wasting users time for the reward of 'being part of..', that's their USP and Discord would die without the waste time through repetition that holds membership (for now).
The fire comes fast for sure, but also goes fast. Unless there is enough people just to keep the war 24/7.
On the other end, this is much easier on forums. You can fire a war, and bump the thread again next day you come back. Without the admin kill the thread, this can goes forever.
One thing I never understood is why so many forums neglected to implement sage functionality like what you have on imageboards. There would never have been bans for so-called 'necroposting'.
If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
Some servers have created processes where you can only access the FAQ channel until you prove your knowledge, and only then you can enter ‘general’. That clearly shows that something is wrong with content discovery on Discord.
> If you go to technical discords you’ll find that there’s someone joining almost everyday who asks a set of questions that was aksed the day before.
I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
In fact, Discord is better than IRC in this regard, because it has history in the client. You can easily search what's been written by a member or in a channel. I've used it many times to find relevant information in the Home Assistant server and similar.
You also get the history when you join, so you immediately get some sense for what kind of channel it is. Is it very active or not? Are they discussing relevant things or not?
IRC has none of that. Sure some built bots that recorded the conversations, but you'd have to know where to find the logs. When joining a channel it was blank. In fact I did this just yesterday when I had some SystemD question, and hopped on their Libra Chat IRC channel. Took me a few hours to realize this was a dead place.
That being said, I do think open source projects should consider alternatives like Gitter.
> I've been in programming IRC channels since the late 90s. People asking the same questions as someone else asked the day before was the norm back then too.
With the huge difference that IRC did not have chat history, unless you used a bouncer
Sure. But when you first join there is no history which means that anyone new to the channel would ask the same questions because there was nothing they could search.
> These people annoy existing servers members and get angry replies because people are so tired of answering the same basic question multiple times a day.
From the numerous Discords I'm on, this problem is either fixed by making the members answering have a mindset to always help, or by using a bot with canned responses.
That sounds indistinguishable from forums or subreddits, which are usually touted as superior alternatives to Discord. Your final point actually makes Discord look preferable to the other two, as Discord servers have found a solution to a problem predating Discord.
Past discussions are invaluable for providing context. The worst thing that can happen to a (technical) discussion is new people repeating points that have been resolved already while the discussion has since moved on.
Admins and regulars alike may waste time and screen space repeating past conclusions, something a quick forum search avoids.
I don't necessarily agree with that. On IRC you could have a specific rule listed explicitly in the topic and newcomers would still ignore it. The idea that they would trudge through megabytes worth of text to find the info is... optimistic.
Your only hope is to have a curated, wiki-like resource that you point newcomers at, maybe with an IRC bot to easily reference it from the chat.
I think people will generally read the log up to one day in irc/telegram/discord. Log of one day in these type of applications can be thousands of messages in a big group. Require everyone to read every message before sending a message is just unrealistic.
That actually done quite well compares to other message apps. The search query can be multi tags (text content, author, mention, is a file, contains link, before date, after date, at which channel) applies at same time. If you know what did you want to search, you can probably find it quickly.
Time passes by, memories fade away and sometimes you have to find that very piece of information you remember it's somewhere in there. I had to look for information on forums I was active in ten years before. Some of them were there, easily searchable or not, some went away. It seems that Discord is on the hard side of the searchability spectrum.
You are missing the meta of informational channels which are read only channels which come with information for people to reference. Past information can be collected in these channels.
The problem arises when you have people that just now-and-then hop into the Discord. These people are not in the "clique" so they don't feel comfortable talking/discussing too much in the channels, and they also really have no clue where to go for any of the lost information these super users don't even think about. This is probably why I never really use Discord except for voice, since I just don't get anything at all from reading an endless chat log. It's like being someone stepping in to a tight knit friend group with a long history and no way of looking into it.
Discord will most likely have to figure out how they can keep it so that it works for these super users, but somehow make the information organized for people that aren't hard core community members.
Edit: Wrote "clique" wrong