Today in discord I got an ad for loot boxes. Every time I hovered over the ad blocking the bottom right of my screen it crashed. Everytine I played a YouTube video in the client it crashed. Every time I watched some screen share it crashed. Every time I shared screens it crashed. Discord has been mostly very nice for me but it’s a weird coincidence that when ads appeared the client became immediately less stable for me.
speaking as the project lead for Matrix: I haven’t done a great job of balancing “build new stuff to show off how amazing Matrix can be” and “make current stuff super polished and amazing”. However, we’ve spent the last few years plugging away addressing that, and I’d like to think the situation has improved significantly.
Another consideration is that nobody yet has consciously gone out to build a Discord killer on top of Matrix. Element is currently focused on being a WhatsApp replacement for government users (as a way to bring in $ to make payroll), which often explains why folks expecting it to be a drop in replacement for Discord users have to readjust their expectations a bit. That said, Element could certainly end up competing proactively with Discord in the longer term.
Meanwhile, Matrix certainly suffers from being successful enough to engender very strong feelings from folks who are disappointed in it. Whether that amounts to being run badly is probably a matter of perspective.
