file under: design history things i think about all the time.
why was AIM so good, and why are Slack/Discord so bad? https://t.co/pjhEY2Fhoc
— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) April 24, 2022
A few reasons. Slack and Discord are mostly made to be friendly to corporations, not to users. The priorities are different therefore. Another is that the entire society has gotten more authoritarian and developers have followed right along with this. Devs believe they know better than the users they are developing software for, so offer fewer — and worse — choices.
But yes, AIM and ICQ were far better than Slack or Discord. So superior it’s not even a contest. Slack is fucking terrible, designed by complete clowns.