Adding new features to platforms is hard, because everything you add or change is going to affect someone. In the past few years, Discord has really wanted you to know that someone is in a voice channel, and this has been severely affecting me.
For some reason, seeing people in voice channels begins to trigger severely self destructive behavior for me. I call this practice "kill your friends and yourself tycoon." I don't know why this happens, and although I would like to know, whenever I look it up I get scared by seeing the words "cognitive dissonance" on my screen. The whole situation feels helpless for me, because its not like I can't join these channels. I can.
The problem is that Discord has so many indicators now when somebody is in a voice channel doing something, I can't escape it. There are little to no ways to hide these either, and they are everywhere across the interface. Such indicators include:
This icon on servers whenever someone is streaming or in a channel:
User statuses:
Pictures in the quick switcher:
Even if you collapse a section with voice channels, profile pictures still show:
On top of this, Discord also sends you mobile notifications in some servers when people join voice channels. These are as far as I'm aware the only things you can disable. But the rest haunt you around the interface and there is nothing you can do about them.
Additionally, for a few weeks Discord tested a "Who was here" feature that would tell you who was in a voice channel in the past 24 hours. Thankfully, it appears this is no longer a feature, but this was a horrible few weeks. I don't want to know what I missed. What do I even gain from knowing that people were having fun and I wasn't there?
Look, I get that some people like these features. I understand that companies are always trying to increase engagement and other metrics. But when everyone I know uses Discord and I have no other alternatives, I feel trapped using a platform that constantly makes me feel sad and isolated. I'm not saying these features need to be completely removed, but please let us turn them off. But I know Discord isn't going to do that. Instead, they're going to make servers bounce when someone is in a voice channel like a macOS app being launched.