[morinted]

It doesn't help that emoji and giphy are listed as prime features in this new offering.

You're right that the applications can be used productively. I find that my work Slack is a lot less focused on being productive than the dev channels that I follow in Discord for open source projects.

The other big issue is the discussion of asynchronous versus realtime communication: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

I do find that in some Discord servers we accidentally exclude people living in different time zones, which is not as much the case with an async medium like Google Groups or other mailing lists.