reply feature
I don't generally pay a huge amount of attention to new features etc. Whatever is implemented I just go with. That being said... this new 'reply to' feature is so absolutely awful that I have to leave feedback. Please either just scrap this completely or give server owners the option to turn it off. I moderate in a very active server and the only thing this option has served to do is promote spam. It's just plain ugly to look at. It's not easy to read. It does NOT help with the flow of conversation... even a tiny bit. In fact it completely breaks it up. There hasn't really been much I haven't liked with discord... I think the stickers are dumb but I get it... and there are certainly features we would love to see added but this is absolutely not that. At the very, very least.. please give us the option to disable it. It's so terrible and clunky and just not good.
-
I agee its just getting in the way you it forces you up and out of the conversation to see an image and does let you see long messages its a mess that doesn't fix quotes problems and just creates more
5 -
I actually like the feature...it's an improved version of quotes...if people are causing problems with it then that's on them and mods need to start banning
-7 -
My server doesnt have it how do I get it
1 -
Try updating your discord? Or maybe they just pushed it out to a few people to test it
-3 -
Get rid of this feature, or at the very least add Quote back as an option in the right-click menu.
You want to allow for being able to click and be taken to the post that's being replied to? Neat, add that function to Quote, because I have been waiting on Discord to develop a fully function quote feature for years anyway, that part isn't bad.
But the way the Reply looks is crap. It shrinks the text too much, it makes it blend too much with the dark theme background, I imagine it's still annoying in light theme for those that for whatever reason like that.
No joke, I've gone back to using the old pre-Quote workaround with markup rather than put up with using Reply.
Bring. Quote. Back.5 -
I hate the new reply system, it’s ugly and you have to add something to post your reply, meaning it’s less easy to re-state a point
5 -
Dral Atin you need to get your eyes if you think this is ugly...
As for razor (who's name is too generic for me to tag), idk how you think it looks like crap...it's beautiful. It's not realistic to having linking messages be part of the quote feature BECAUSE quotes are more utility than just replying to a message...you can quote something said in a different discord or even not on discord using the right markup, you can change the quote, highlight parts of it, whatever. It's useful and discord needs both but you can't say "just throw this away" when thousands of users have been asking for this very feature for A LONG TIME
-8 -
You confuse me for someone that cares about your personal liking of it as well as your notions of "beautiful", assimilater .
I've already muted the servers that seems to be infected with that obnoxious feature. Thankfully most of my servers haven't been, so I hope the devs prevent the infection from spreading to them as well.
If it becomes Discord wide and I can't at least turn it off via a setting then I'll probably just quit Discord entirely.
So either toss it or retain Quote feature Discord wide and allow those of us that can't stand the damn thing to turn it off from our own settings to avoid having to deal with it.3 -
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/profiles/382718064692-Assimilater I’m entitled to my option on it, you don’t need to attack me.
2 -
Razor....two can play that game of not caring about your personal liking, This reply feature has been asked for by THOUSANDS of users for YEARS. There is no metric in the standards of app development by which you can call this ugly...discord has implemented a LOT of features NO ONE asked for and they FINALLY implemented something LOTS of people have been ASKING for for a LONG time. So ya, I don't care that you hate it.
-5 -
Dral Atin idk why you linked my profile...I just don't see how you can call something so beautiful ugly...
-3 -
Then do us a favor and get out of this thread, assimilater . This is for those us that are objecting to this poorly made feature, not for you to cheerlead for it and go "But THOUSANDS has asked for this!" as if there aren't millions of Discord users such that "thousands" is a rounding error.
Take your very suspect notion of "beautiful" where it'll be received as mattering.1 -
I linked your profile because I wasn’t sure how to ping someone on here, and it’s just my option it’s ugly. Anyway, I’m done with this conversation now, so don’t bother replying
1 -
People using a feature that is inherently spammy to begin with is far from a reason to start banning people... There are a few people who like the feature, to each their own! and I do understand it can be useful to some, but overall the overwhelming majority despise it (from what i've personally seen and heard of course). Several people said outright they muted the server as soon as the feature went live because it's awful and spammy and annoying.. not an ideal thing for server owners! and a perfect example of why options / control of a feature are needed (ie server admin controlling who can use @everyone / @here - a very common reason why servers get muted = unnecessary spammy pings..). At the -absolute very least- we should be able to turn the feature off. It's just not asking a lot. Give individuals the option to turn off / block the feature entirely so we don't have to look at it, and people can't tag us -through the feature- if they decide to use it. Give control of this feature to server owners/admin! Give us an off or on button within individual servers! And as for the feature itself... you should not have to click the ping option 'off' every single time you use it. That's absurd, and an extra step, and people are lazy and we all know, in general, they aren't going to bother. Which means countless unnecessary pings simply because it's what's easiest.
3 -
@mouse if they use the feature as intended it's not spammy at all...if you reply to someone normally in conversation you @ them so they will see it in their mentions when they have time...that's not spam that's using the program...now if someone is replying 50 billion times that is absolutely ban worthy
The problem when talking about majorities is you only generally see people talk about if they're complaining about it. The only difference between you and me is I've seen thread after thread begging for this for years. Those people aren't gonna have reason to come back to the forums now that they were finally heard. Heck I'm only here because I had suggestions to improve it because there are issues with it. It's just I'm not on board with the idea that it should be thrown away because I honestly love that they did something people asked for for once
-3 -
it -is- spammy. By it's very nature it's spammy in that it instantly adds 'noise' to the conversation by doubling the amount of text you're looking at any given time. It makes it convenient for people to ping you which makes it inherently spammy. Rather than typing out your name to ping, which a lot of people won't bother doing, they just hit reply and insta-ping. And because the default is ON ... unnecessary pings.. tons of extra text... it's spammy and ugly.
And as for the majorities thing, one will see whatever one looks for I'm sure.. but I did make sure to cover that base already by saying it's what i've seen so far and also acknowledging that yes, some people do like it and that I can understand that it can be useful to some degree.
I do not like the feature. I don't think it was well implemented at all and IF they decide to keep it there needs to be a lot of improvements. I don't care if they keep it or not, getting rid of it is not the point. Fixing it is. And giving control of what happens in individual servers to the people who 'own' and run them needs to be -the- focus when implementing things like this.4 -
My suggestion for this new tool implemented is that there is an option to enable and disable.
If it is not possible, I suggest an improvement of the tool, because it is very confusing and ugly to see. 0/10.
4 -
This new feature didn't please me neither, i'm very unhappy with it, totally unecessary and cofusing, simply horrible to see. 0/10
5 -
i strongly dislike the reply feature as well, i liked the quote feature a lot better. i'd be fine with it still being an option, but could there at LEAST be an option where quote appears in the dropdown menu?
3 -
Oh my god yes.
Finally, I have found people who aren't swooning over the damn thing. My personal difficulties with it:
- It's difficult to read
Sometimes, I'd rather not have to go to the message link to see whatever is being said. Quoting allowed for that- you put the original message in yours, and then gave it feedback text. With reply, you either need a short message that isn't cut, or you need to take yourself away from the conversation for a minute to read what the reply was to. Additionally, the reply is outright unclear.
- They're spam-y
With the introduction of "reply," users feel they have to use it for everything. This significantly increases message size, and makes it difficult to moderate. Plus, nothing breaks up the flow of a text-based conversation like an awkward space from a reply that was literally right above the sent message.
- A feature similar to it (but better) already existed
Discord already had a feature to reply to given messages: the quote. It's still possible to do quotes, for everyone who is protesting replies, and that is by using the "greater than" symbol (>), but it's significantly less convenient now. Quotes would automatically format your message to show the previous one, and add the person's tag who said the message, and then you could easily explain your thoughts on the idea. Why replace a good feature like that with one that causes as much controversy as the reply currently does?
- P i n g s
I quite literally cannot put into words how difficult it is to find pings with this. Fun fact, they don't highlight in yellow for some mobile devices (granted, mobile UI is a whole other thing that I have severe issues with). This makes finding where I was pinged and what for a pain. "Why not just use the recent mentions button," I hear you asking. Simple answer, I don't want to. Longer answer, I should not have to go somewhere else so that I can just return to where I just was but barely scrolled up. I just shouldn't. The ability to see what pinged you and why is essential sometimes, and it can be aggravating when it takes excess time.
So, what do I suggest to fix this? I've given a ton of things I absolutely hate about this, what can be done to make it better?
I propose an option in each users' appearance settings, where they can choose to have quotes/replies show either as quotes or replies, both when typing and when read after being sent. This would increase users' ability to personalize what they want, and give users more comfort when using this platform. I would be perfectly happy with bringing the quote thing back and getting rid of replies, but that might not settle well with others. Changing appearance based on a setting would allow a compromise for both sides, where everyone understands what is being said.
Alternatively, add the ability to or not to see replies, and instead use quotes (change "reply" to "quote" in right click menu). It's a pain to have to copy/paste text just to use a feature that was already well-implemented, and I quite pointedly hate how replies look - it feels unnatural to try to read text in reply format.5 -
I actually really hate this suggestion, as someone with both Borderline Personality Disorder and Autism taking a tool away from me that I use to clarify tone when I have trouble reading tone or knowing what to reply to. I, therefore, view it as an invaluable accessibility feature since it makes it so much easier to avoid easy miscommunications between neurodivergent and neurotypical(or in some cases, several neuroatypical people). Can it be distracting? Yes, absolutely! Does it LITERALLY FORCE you to jump back to the previous message being replied to and yank you out of the conversation? Absolutely, not. You have the option to either respond to the previous conversation or reply to the reply, it's your choice. The quotes on the other hand which some people thought were better, tended to force you to pay attention to them due to the sheer amount of text that was sometimes being quoted. And were, in my opinion far more distracting. Especially so, for some neurodivergent people.
While I can understand that it might be a hard feature to adjust to since it was a recently introduced feature, I feel it is important for anyone in a moderator position to learn to use such a ceaselessly useful tool and if it becomes too great of a burden for current moderators to help make the load easier to bear by opening mod applications(if possible and if necessary temporary). While it could use a few tweaks here and there and I realize that it isn't perfect, I have to respectfully disagree.-2 -
I'm not a big fan of the reply system, but don't feel it should be scrapped.
Perhaps make the reply text a toggle you can click to show or hide the replied message (but hidden by default) so as to not double the amount of messages in a conversation and reduce clutter. This way, people can get the context of the message if needed.
What it really needs is the ability to, as a user (not just as server/admin/etc) be able to turn off the notifications when someone replies to a message. I'm in a few discords where some people use reply for every message and that just floods us with reply notifications every time it's one of our messages, which, being in different time zones, I don't need a flood of notifications going off at 3am as they go through the discord and reply to messages in multiple channels.1 -
tunabee, if the Reply feature is itself inherently spammy and thus winds up necessitating additional moderators to prune the things in a given server, then I would say it's probably poorly designed in the first place.
Also, it sort of does involve having to be yanked back to the original post if you want to read more than half a sentence of what someone is trying to reply to. I don't know about you or a lot of other folks that seem to like Reply, but I'd like to have what I'm replying to fully visible as I'm typing below it, otherwise it results in having to bounce back and forth, between typing field and the post being replied to. This gets especially onerous in a fast moving channel, making the bounce between points very jank.
You mention neurodivergent being a factor? Okay, I know more than a few people that qual as that, so I'm certainly sympathetic there; you can communicate tone without needing Reply as it is designed. Within Quote you can underline, bold, italicize, combine. So there already were options for visually indicating tone with specific words for selective emphasis no less (and easily done as markup on the fly while typing), which honestly makes it more flexible than Reply being all or nothing. Plus you can also tailor your replies to a Quote to specific sections instead of having to use Reply to reply to an entire post in its entirety in effect (which Reply cutting the post so short makes matters worse there).
And I'd definitely be down for improving accessibility with Quote if enough folks like yourself feel it could use more fine tuning. The link back to original post in Reply is something I was hoping they'd simply add to Quote, for example, that way it'd be an optional quality of life feature.
And no, it's not something some of us will simply "adjust to". Me? I've simply resorted to muting the larger servers I'm in anymore because of how nauseating the Reply feature is, it really is that badly designed.
This isn't a mere case of "Oh, well someone will always hate any new feature, they'll get over it and accept it". In some respects, this is egregious on the level of Cyperpunk 2077's launch.3 -
I've pointed this out previously, but Ominous Giggle makes a great point; Reply pings by default, and there are a lot of people who use it for every single message that they send. What ends up happening is that some user then gets 20+ pings from 2 individuals who just want to reference their message. So now not only is it being used as spam, or to ping a user, but it's doing both simultaneously, and is a huge nuisance. As someone who insistently reads most/all pings in case there is something important that I need to see, it's overwhelming. The ping feature should be reserved for something important, but is now being used for chit-chat, for trivial-- almost useless conversation. This could lead to users muting servers, whereby they will no longer receive important pings, and may even end up leaving out of frustration for this thing.
Also what Razor said is very accurate; if some feature warrants having more people to observe chat, then perhaps there's a fault in the feature, not with how chat was being moderated to begin with. Quotes were a very streamlined and accurate way to give context to what you needed, allowing you to format the quote and choose exactly how much you quoted. Plus, because they were a little larger, users used them significantly less often, lest they be counted as spamming the chat, but somehow replies aren't counted as spamming? Despite making the user ping someone else 20+ times?? Finally replies are very.. awkward. You either need a 5-word message to reply to, or people looking for context need to just click the hyperlink to see the message, and may thus miss some new important happening. To me, replies are a 5-word quote with a link and auto-ping. It's clunky, unnecessary, and would be better off just giving the full quote instead of 5 words and a link. You absolutely need to click on that link if you want the full message, unless you have a TV screen as your monitor but all the UI scaled down to below manageable levels.
Finally, whilst I understand some users find (for some reason) that they absolutely need this thing, Discord has existed for years without replies, and suddenly people can't live without one feature in one update. Like I mentioned, I'm in a few servers where reply pings are used for almost every message. The members are genuinely some of the most caring and polite people I know, as well as very logical thinkers, but they become outright dumbfounded when I ask that they just don't ping me with every reply. "What? Why?" Because, it is annoying and spammy. What isn't clear about that <User>?3 -
Yeah, I don't get it either, Stardust. I understand that some people thought it was a "great" function on Telegram and it's more "efficient" and "sleek" or something? The arguments for it seem to be a perception that they don't want to clutter up a fast-moving channel with Quote, but then I have to wonder...are these channels moving like Twitch stream chat? Or is it just preferable for people that only ever use phone for Discord for some bizarre reason (ugh, PC app is so much better)? If the latter, then surely that would be better handled by some sort of user customization settings for an upgraded version of Quote in the phone app or something. Really does feel like a bad solution in search of a problem. And yet, apparently there were a number of people wanting this abomination for a year or so. I just don't get it.
And if someone is concerned about taking up chat with Quote too much, then either prune your Quote since it's very user tailorable for length or take it to PM if it's becoming a really involved back and forth. I heard one person say it was useful for talking about something that's off topic for a channel. To which I would say...just stay on topic for the channel. Shouldn't be hard as long as server channels are set up with appropriate places for common topics, members mind themselves like adults, and mods actually do their job to stop hijacks when occasionally necessary. And if the members find they can't mind themselves enough then it's timeout.
I dunno, maybe have a collapsible option for Quote for those that really can't stand, uh, clearly readable words for responding to...?3
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
25 comments