The Spring 2025 Semester has been quite a bit seething for me. Mainly because I feel like I’ve been helpless. There’s been a ton more group work to do, and a lot of assignments that have forced me to bend over backwards in uncomfortable ways that have resulted in me needing to do more work than I need to . While this could be a fear of change taking over. It’s mainly just that when you hear the excuse “well you better get used to it because you’ll have to be doing this all the time at work”, at least at work, you get paid for your trouble, which gives a valid incentive. When a college tuition is thousands of dollars for hundreds of hours of work, you expect that you should just be able to submit things without much hassle.
I should probably start out by actually describing the way I work:
The way I work involves 85% preparation, and 15% work. I spend more of my time getting setup and ready than I do actually working. As such, I hate having to set everything up again.
When you’re doing online learning, that means most of the time, software is going to have to be your lifeline to doing anything. And these are the apps that have been giving me the most trouble:
Discord
One of my biggest frustrations this semester has been Discord. Discord isn’t (as far as I can tell) an officially supported University application. But that hasn’t stopped the students and professors from relying on it.
Discord is a frustrating app that goes beyond its status as nagware. It’s a fundamentally flawed app with serious usability issues, and while quite a few of it’s issues have been solved over the years (including the addition of an official server rules onboarding process, easier role selection). The process of engaging with a server still feels more intimidating and cumbersome, especially when you have a goal in mind, than it should be.
My second biggest gripe about Discord has, and always will be its blatant usability issues, especially surrounding moderation and server management. Discords power for collaboration can only be obtained by someone willing to expend hours configuring it correctly, and there are plenty of servers (especially for smaller, more casual conversation ones) that simply do not need 6 dozen channels of everything from #general, #memes, #cooking, #vacation-photos, etc. And simply try to police the flow of conversation without actually questioning if there is much of a need to do so.
While bigger, more prepared servers may not have these problems, and may even have a genuine need for creating. For an average person looking to set up a small group. Discords server functions lull them into a false sense of superiority that they have more than everything they need, but in reality, have actually very little need for it.
It’s choices to eschew a channel selection list (similar to what Slack offers, or in most IRC clients through /list) in favor of simply muting channels and toggling “hide muted channels” means needing to wade through the entire list to find every channel I will never visit and turn it off.
One of my professors has made a server that includes channels for literally every single one of his classes. Resulting in an extremely long laundry list of channels to wade through. His rationale for us creating yet another account (and also stating that the web app will not suffice for the class despite only ever needing to sign in to the server for an initial set of points for the class) is simply because of wanting to bypass Slacks message retention (despite having plenty of other professors who live with it).
This alone puts me at a disadvantage, because while the University may have access to plenty of other, more accessible, less obnoxious options. Many will simply stick with what the professor recommends because they simply don’t care.
I won’t blame people too much for not liking email. It can be frustrating to learn not only the process of working in email threads, but email just isn’t acceptable for long term collaboration among most people. The Linux kernel may be able to develop through one. But that’s also because of the use of an external tool like Git.
The biggest gripe that’s been impacting me about Discord however, has been it’s absolute lack of account flexibility that likely stems from the fact that Discord wasn’t really built to ever be a productivity platform to begin with.
I have two Discord accounts, a personal one with my online alias, and a more limited account using my real identity (to comply with my professors demands) with it set with a ton of privacy restrictions and notes on the account to discourage others from contacting me there as much as possible. I even noticed 40 or so days after that my professor requested to start a PM with me on the platform (having toggled off direct messages and turning on message requests). Perhaps it could backfire one day, but at this point, I don’t care.
My main gripe about all this however, is how difficult it is to switch accounts on Discord. It’s flat out not possible without logging out on mobile, and even on desktop, while you can still be logged into multiple accounts, only one session can be active at a time. This makes it incredibly difficult for me to balance classwork and life.
It essentially feels like a punishment for being more conscious about online privacy and not treating everything like Facebook where you use your real life identity for everything.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is a little more tolerable, but I mostly dislike the vision of Google. The vision of all of your work being done in a web browser (especially Google Chrome), coupled with a heavily abstracted “cloud” that hides away most of the system. My mother recently had to change jobs as well to a new one that uses Google Workspace after having used Microsoft Office for 20 years, and the change for her has been quite rough.
I’ve had to use Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps) ever since middle school, when the district decided that they would be implementing a 1:1 learning program with the cheapest, most sluggish, most locked down Chromebooks possible. No BYOD, no looking at alternatives, not even changing your homepage or miserably insecure default password (which happened to be are fixed student ID for lunch plus two zeros at the end).
Simply put, the entire system was built around making sure that there were absolutely no excuses for a K-12 student to not be able to get any work done by locking down the system so much that there would be no way to break it.
The result was a Chromebook we had to carry around in the bulkiest case possible (there were technically reprimands for not doing so, but nobody really cared). And the system only continued getting worse. In high school, they announced that they would be scaling back some the government mandated web filtering (In the US, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 requires all public schools and libraries to implement filtering for pornography and other obscene content in order to qualify for government funding) in favor of an MDM mandated monitoring and blocking web extension.
This extension was miserable, while others had been used before it pretty much eradicated all hopes of being able to get around the system, even if you had a good reason to. It also monitored your every page and sent it back with proactive alerts (I would know because I was boredly browsing Wikipedia during class one day, clicked on the article for Suicide, and promptly got a call down to the councilors office 15 minutes later).
This, coupled with other recent programs in high school, such as the recent (now also considering to be mandated by some sates. And is also the primary reason I invested in Apple Watch) of placing your phone in a holder, resulted in a lot of frustrations that you don’t get much control over.
I can’t get too mad in some places about the system. Schools, especially publicly funded ones, are always miserably underfunded by the government. And this was during the mid 2010s when everyone knew they needed to get future students ready for working with the computer, but simply do not have the IT resources or funding to make this happen. And considering that Google, in a completely unsustainable move that would hook customers, offered schools unlimited storage for years until they didn’t. They managed to get a lot of bait, and make the concept of Degoogling unrealistic for many young students (but that’s a topic for another post).
Thankfully, during the second semester of my senior year in 2021, I did manage to sneak out a bit more freedom in working the way I wanted as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to pretty much improvise a lot of things (even with systems they already had working), so I pretty much had the ability to take advantage of the clutter by bringing (I was technically even exempt from wearing a mask due to having a disability, but I chose to wear one anyway out of the greater good)
Having access to better computers now and not just the cheapest netbooks possible, Google Workspace isn’t nearly as unbearable as I found it in high school. But it still isn’t a favored platform compared to the tradition of local desktop editing.
Anyway, back to Google Workspace specifically, my University pays for both Google Workspace, as well as Office (while disabling OneDrive). And of course, having this many options, means that professors basically get to mandate what gets used. And simply put, right now I have an assignment that only accepts a URL for a submission, and not a DOCX file for whatever reason.
(Yes, this is a wall of text that has mostly just listed a bunch of minor inconveniences . But I really want to drive just how much my tolerance for these things wasn’t just some singular mishap, but something that has been continuously eroding for years.)