The top left “back” button in threads is really awkward and disorienting
(I’m on iOS, but I’m told this affects Android as well)
Normally, when doing anything in Discord, there are two ways to return to the channel list: You can swipe in from the left to “pull” the list in, or you can press the “burger” button (three horizontal lines) in the top left of the UI.
However, when viewing the contents of a thread, the top left button changes to a “back” button. Instead of bringing up the channel list, this returns you to the parent channel, but you’re scrolled back to the start of the thread. This happens even if a thread is days, weeks, or months old — for some of our threads, I can press the “back” button and end up back in 2021.
This can be incredibly disorienting — for users who have gotten very used to using Discord on mobile and quickly switching between channels using that top left button, often we’re not really thinking about what we’re doing, so we don’t notice that we’ve ended up in another channel rather than at the channel listing.
At this point, there’s basically two possible outcomes: Either the user realises the mistake, grumbles (it’s genuinely annoying), and hits the “scroll to end” button in the bottom right (also skipping any unread messages in that channel); or, they don’t realise the mistake, and they end up scrolling through and reading and even replying to messages that are months out of date (which then confuses everyone else in turn).
I would argue that the “back” button shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t exist at all on the desktop / web version of Discord (as far as I can tell). So given that “return to where this thread started” clearly isn’t an essential feature of threads, I’d argue that it should definitely not be replacing a core navigation button in the mobile Discord client.
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