RE: The Steemit Bar is Getting an Upgrade & Moving to Discord! (Instructions & Tutorial inside)
Well I am not in any way affiliated with the company behind discord so there are no specific benefits to me to sell discord the server to you. It is just a recommendation i make based on what I have found to be beneficial to me. And so to make that more clear, I would say that (and I believe I speak for a lot of discord users) once you get used to the smooth functionality and the many customising settings to suit your personal needs it is really hard and a headache in fact to return to a platform that really isn't up to the same standard.
I can add friends, use my voice to talk to these friends for the purpose of collaboration or otherwise. I can block notifications or prioritise notifications from specific channels that matter to me more. I can make my own channel and make it visible or accessible to specific users and then choose my own moderators for that channel. And I've created a server where you can create your own channels where you choose who runs it and who sees it and who moderates it etc. Personally I've just found the possibilities and the functionality to be far too good to bother with a less functional platform.
I do understand though that when a car was just designed to do the bare minimum they were far simpler and nowadays they're so complex it can be a headache - same goes for lots of technology such as phones for example, the old brick-like ones that never broke in comparison to our smart phones that seem to have a self destruct timer programmed into them. Because discord is more complicated it isn't really user friendly when you start off. I'm going to continue to try to make that easier for people. Whether you choose to give it a try is up to you.
Thanks to taking the time to write a thoughtful answer, @beanz - you bring up some really good points. Somewhere there must be a "complexity vs. functionality" graph, where Apple products tend to find a sweet spot for maximizing capability with simplicity.
But along with that is the decision, as you point out, of weighing benefit vs. effort. I guess like many things sometimes it's hard to see "why" so we're less willing to deal with a painful looking "how." Sometimes what helps is finding people we enjoy being around, as we get over the learning hump.