Infamous for it's bad UX? This thread is genuinely the first time I've ever heard this, all of my extended circles were overjoyed when Discord came onto the scene and displaced the patchy, hodgepodge UI's of Mumble, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype simultaneously. Both from a feature and a visual perspective it was a breath of fresh air for the programmers, gamers, and casuals alike for everyone I know. Maybe the only thing that still survives alongside it for the folks I know as a preferred communication channel is sporadic Whatsapp among the EU guys and iOS group chats for the Americans locked into the Apple ecosystem.
What about it makes it terrible UX for you? Feature set seems to get better every year as far as I'm concerned, inclusion of ads aside.
My single biggest complaint, other than it being an Electron app, is their insistence on changing the notification sounds seasonally. I do not want surprise Halloween music when I'm trying to start a video call with someone, nor do I want it themed. You can offer it, sure - I get that it's free, and they're trying to keep users on their platform - but it's just grating to me.
I love Mumble and IRC. You could put a gun to my head and I still wouldn't use Discord. When all these proprietary chats are dead and the kids have moved on to something else, Mumble and IRC will still work. They are eternal. Anything proprietary and centralized can't compete with that. IRC outlived AIM and MSN and so on.
my latest annoyance is the way they keep making the gift nitro button bigger and more likely to be where you tap when trying to send a message. I don't know what their PMs are smoking to think that gifting nitro is something people do so often that there needs to be a permanent flashing button on screen to do it.
To be honest, I don't think most people's first interpretation of someone's claim to a "Discord-esque feel" when describing the UX of their open-source IRC client is that it's therefore riddled with dark patterns to sell an upgraded version of the service. I think it's probably more likely that they were referring to the general layout (eg: having circular server icons as a vertical list on the left hand side). I'm guessing that that's also why they mentioned Slack, since that has the same layout too.
What about it makes it terrible UX for you? Feature set seems to get better every year as far as I'm concerned, inclusion of ads aside.