It's the too much completely useless information flying at my face that I despise. So much empty space, the UI is so weirdly verbose for everything but the actual content. You need discord in full screen to manage reading messages properly. It's also slow switching channels and server.

Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.

And yes, I enabled compact mode.

I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)

We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.