Discord’s been trimmed down a little in order to stay fighting fit. Two of the voice and text chat platform’s bigger features have now been removed as part of a goal “to improve Discord with new features that don’t make it bulky and take away from the core chat experience”. This means the Activity Feed and Library are now gone.
In an update on the Discord blog, the platform’s dev team shares its reasons for removing the two features, starting with the Activity Feed – a feature it says “was meant to give you an easy way to stay up to date with game news and let you quickly see what your friends are up to”. It reveals this tool wasn’t doing what the team had hoped it would, and was cluttering up Discord to boot: “It wasn’t serving either of these purposes well and added bulk.”
Instead, the update says, the Channel Following option released towards the end of 2019 will let you “beam important announcements from Verified and Partnered servers directly to your own server”, which gives you greater control and options for customisation over the “updates you receive from your favourite games, communities, content creators, and streamers”.
No more worrying about launching Discord to discover updates for games you tried once, months ago, the blog post assures readers. Sweet.
We’re tidying up to declutter your Discord experience! Please tenderly whisper “goodbye and thank you” to the following features:
◆ Activity Feed
◆ Universal Game Launcher
◆ Library TabWe wrote up some words about the change here: https://t.co/DBsYtTQBrv pic.twitter.com/5S7N4QMiWf
— Discord (@discordapp) January 30, 2020
Next, the Library tab – and associated Universal Game Launcher – have been cut loose. The team says it’s taking these away “to keep your Discord experience fast and clean”. However, if you’re worrying this means you won’t be able to access the games you’ve bought or intend to buy – “your games will always be accessible”.
The Library tab will stick around for you if you have bought games via the platform, the update says, and you’ll get the choice to disable it from within the user settings options. Lovely.