Reply “feature” is cluttered, obnoxious, and moreover, inaccessible

The Reply feature is the latest of numerous missteps in app and web design that keeps making me feel like I've been staring at a decomposing corpse since May 2020.

It replaces a feature that nobody, I guarantee, nobody, wanted to be changed. Quoting a message was quick, easy, and simple to understand. It lets you remove the ping with just the backspace key if you desired. You could even quote multiple messages!

The new quote design clutters up the chat with inconsistent, hard-to-scan messages. For real, the quoted body text is darker and smaller than the text that says "[username] replied to [username]." Plus, it takes up over the full width in a lot of cases! Voilà:

If you like adding random rounded rectangles in the background of anything, why don't you use it here where it would actually have been beneficial? It's so clunky, and the longer I use Discord, the more it keeps seeming like the design team is a bunch of monkeys on Adobe InDesign.

The worst part is, in servers with replies enabled, you took away the ability to quote. Sure, you can manually copy the text and quote it manually, but removing a feature just to add a worse, more cluttered version of it is just unthinkable.

In addition (and this is important) I've seen complaints from people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and blindness on this very forum that not one Discord staff member has seen to my knowledge. At this point, I won't hesitate to state with utmost confidence that Discord is ableist.

Firing the entire Discord design team and hiring all new people wouldn't be able to fix Discord anymore. The existing design team needs to learn what good design looks, feels, and uses like.

To users reading this

Please use the hashtag #NotMyPlaceToTalk to spread the word about Discord's horrid lack of accessibility and clear design. Previous issues raised in the campaign include:

• the mobile sidebars that move the entire chat
• the mobile composition bar that takes up too much space and jitters left and right when composing a message
• the useless mobile bottom bar that adds no utility
• the mobile behavior when tapping the avatar (i.e. reverting to conveniently adding a mention instead of showing the infrequently used user menu)
• a real tablet app
• actual improvements instead of clutter