After reading tons of reviews about Discord on blogs and Reddit, I get a further insight on what is good and bad about Discord and what functionalities are expected.
Let's start with the advantages. I believe a very important reason that Discord is getting more and more popular is that it is 100% free. Its competitor, TeamSpeak for example, charges $30 per year for a server with 32 slots while Discord is free with no limit on how many channels a user can create. Why pay for something when you can get it free? Besides, Discord is designed for use while gaming which means that it has minimal impact on users' CPU. The game's performance won't be affected in the slightest. Maybe it's time to ditch CPU hogs like Skype? Moreover, unlike apps like IRC, Discord enables different user permissions within an easy-to-use UI. TeamSpeak also supports permissions setting but it requires a package that is ridiculously complicated.
Then what is ugly about the app at current stage? First of all, no user profile. Though Discord doesn't actually require users to login before joining the chat but a user profile is really necessary for logged-in users because I do not want to encounter situation where I find myself texting the wrong Jack. Second, Discord doesn't support search function for text chat. Users have been complained about it for more than a year but it seems to be a very complex problem to fix according to their technical team.
What can be improved then? Of cause, starting from fixing the problems mentioned above. Other than that, some users asked for video chats because they want to play online card games while seeing each other's faces. Screen sharing is also quite nice to have because gamers always want to learn all the fancy moves from each other to improve their skills and screen sharing will server their need.
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