Same. Can't imagine why they've been using it for so long instead of building a reasonable UX for this use case. I think this will cost them a bunch of traction.
I believe the fact that it's in Discord is actually the main reason it became so popular so fast. The number one thing that makes something popular is other people already doing it.
When you go into a Discord and you are watching hundreds of people use a product in real time, you almost have to try it. When Midjourney first blew up, it was probably one of the most profound moments in marketing of the internet era.
As usual, people will happily give you the worst advice possible. There were people telling them to drop the Discord interface on day one. If they had listened to them, they would have killed off their amazing marketing advantage and stunted their growth.
Completely correct. They did a lot of testing of a variety of user interfaces before choosing Discord.
With a web interface, new users would come in a prompt “dog”, “funny dog”, “two funny dogs”, get bored and leave. But, when a bunch of new users would prompt together in a Discord channel, they would riff off of each other constantly and get creative and detailed with immediate feedback from other users. Engagement and retention were both incredibly higher.
From Day One people have been telling them that Discord was a terrible mistake. All while Discord was measurably a huge success. MJ has been working on a web interface for a long time now. But, Discord has been tough to beat in the big picture.
Midjourney became famous by being ahead of the competition, using the Discord interface is convenient but it doesn't make them any favour at making the service more popular.
>When you go into a Discord and you are watching hundreds of people use a product in real time
The ability to use MJ outside of the server is relatively new, so it has not had an impact on awareness of the service.
The chat, admin and moderation features in discord have huge value and are costly to build. The anti-bot protection and built in permission system especially.
They focus their resource on their product, while exposing it to mostly geek.
I would have never though it would be a good idea, but it proved to be a good choice.
The social flow of prompting together with other people is unique when it happens. (Sadly the channels on the main server are now mostly a flood of random people who are ignoring each other.)
