I'll lay out my problem from the get-go: I have absolutely no idea how anyone can find Discord useful as a tool for long-term or ongoing discussion of anything. I am a member of a number of Discord groups (and have been for a few years now). Several of these groups use Discord as a sort of forum-like substitute and, honestly, they are all a complete fekkin' nightmare to use as far as I am concerned. No matter how the groups are divided up into subject-specific chat areas, they still always seem to end up an absolute mess of people talking through each other. Reading a conversation in real time is bad enough but going in to find something historic is nigh-on impossible with the conversation that you want to look at requiring you to scroll back through potentially hundreds of messages and wade through the liberal pepperings of "lols", "hehs" and elements of other conversations that intersperse the actual conversation that I am interested in.
And the software layout (browesr-based, desktop and phone app) to my mind is utterly crap too. I can never find what I want to do first time. It makes Blender look like the most user-friendly interface on the planet. Someone in another community told me, on a forum, to "just" send them a message on Discord. It took half an hour to find them and then to figure out how to do it. And then the message didn't even get through because of their preferences!
Even on a very small group (6 friends) where all we use it for is to play music during Zoom role playing sessions, someone always struggles to log in with sound. They then get confused and have to be talked through how to get sound working - every single time.
So, my experience tells me, Discord is an absolute nightmare, not fit for the purposes that people use it for (which may not, of course, be the purposes it was intended for). To me it is a confusing mess of hundreds or people all speaking at once and no clear organisation or user friendliness whatsoever in how it does what it does or in the basic layout of the interface. I have no idea why people haven't just fired it up, gone "this is shit" and binned it immediately.
And yet thousands, no, millions of people swear by it and use it as their go-to way of communicating online. So what am I missing? What is the secret to success? How on Earth do you actually use is successfully? The only way I can see it ever being possible is if you are on it 24/7, constantly monitoring conversations and messages and in a position to both do that and respond at the time.
I'm genuinely asking for help because I recognise that I'm going to be stuck using Discord for the foreseeable future (at least until the next great online communication tool becomes popular) and I simply cannot fathom how to get anything productive out of it.