The more proficient the user of a tool is, the more sensitive they are to changes in that tool's interface. Discord is kind of a victim of its own success here; a lot of its users are power users who spend a lot of their time on discord and expect to be able to use it without thinking... moving or changing things in seemingly-irrelevant ways can create friction for users where previously there wasn't any.
I think the way software is released now – ie, it isn't, instead new features are just rolled out in a continuous and seemingly constant wave – also contributes to users feeling like they're in quicksand. Nothing about the app feels solid or reliable; you wake up one morning and something has inexplicably changed, for reasons that are typically unclear to you, and this happens distressingly often.
Imagine if we treated more seriously important UI like we treat most end-user software. You sit down behind the wheel of your car one morning and suddenly your shifter is mounted to the steering column instead of the console. Imagine if in between flights we rearranged all the instruments on the dashboard of a commercial aircraft.
Obviously nobody is using Discord to do something as dangerous as drive a car – I hope – but users still spend a lot of time using Discord, they rely heavily on it. I think it's not an exaggeration to say that for a lot of Discord users, Discord has a comparable importance in their lives to a car.
I think this implies that the UI for Discord should be treated with the same seriousness that car UI is treated (by auto makers other than Tesla). And it just... isn't. Instead it's this ongoing experiment being endlessly iterated on.
At a certain point the frequency of changes and the apparent meaninglessness of changes is itself poor user experience.
Even more so I think users have an outsized response to that because almost all software feels like this now. Good software, bad software, everything is constantly auto-updating, everything is constantly being tweaked, and it feels like you can never get to grips with any tool because they're never the same shape you left them in. So it's never this one insignificant change to Discord's layout, it's that it's the umpteenth thing that has shifted underneath the user's feet that day.
Part of the cause of this problem, I think, is the death of customizability. It used to be that GUI applications were made out of modular widgets that you could drag around, reposition, replace, often hide or bring back. Because users had this structural control over the application, well... this did not necessarily lead to 'better' UI, it probably led to worse UI, but I think it might have led to happier users. A sort of 'ikea effect' for GUI. 'My brother in christ, you made the GUI.'
A particular thing that these old customizable GUIs were good for – still seen in a lot of professional software, eg Photoshop – was just hiding irrelevant affordances. Not everything needs to be visible or accessible by default; some features have niche uses, users have different levels of engagement and proficiency. You could go into the menu and toggle aspects of the UI on or off depending on whether you used them.
Discord doesn't give itself the affordances to selectively veil parts of its UI, and as a result every user sees every change to every feature. Often a change that is welcomed by the users who embrace a given feature appears as just a pointless alteration for the users who don't use the feature. This, again, contributes to the sense of instability.
Another thing about this is just that software nowadays is often unreliable, because software is often web pages trying way too hard. When was the last time you accidentally clicked or tapped the wrong thing because a UI element loaded and popped into place while your finger was moving?
Increasingly, the software industry fails to meet the most basic standards of UI design. Standards like "don't shift UI elements around after a view loads". Standards like basic performance... I can tell you that I use the web version of Discord on this machine because the desktop version chugs so slow as to be unusable. This is a gaming desktop whose only crime is running Linux; I can run Cyberpunk 2077 on this thing, but not Discord.
So generally speaking, apps have not earned themselves a whole lot of benefit of the doubt from users. The quality of most software has always been bad, of course, but I think the era we live in now – where every desktop application is just a full fat install of Google Chrome with a different website on it – has really gotten to a point of complete egregiousness in many ways.
Which is all to say: Yeah I think casually shifting a UI element in Discord 1px to the left actually is not a great idea, even if from some objective design standard that UI element needs to be 1px to the left. I think that there's value in stability and I think the conventional software development process – where you just iterate constantly and make changes and push those changes to users ASAP – is not actually appropriate for a tool with the role that Discord has in people's lives.
But, unfortunately, the way a business like Discord is run fundamentally disallows a rational approach to any of this. There's a whole other post to write about the parallel between how 'publish or perish' might be destroying our ability to create knowledge and how the drive to ship things might be destroying our ability to create software.
