[fpvracing]

How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?

I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.

[lewisl9029]

Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels.

But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples:

- Can't change avatar based on server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...

- Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...

I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows.

FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).

[erichurkman]

And you still cannot leave a channel in Discord. You can mute, but that's not the same thing — it still clutters your sidebar, and still downloads contents from it.

Then, join any random server and there can be dozens of distinct channels, many of which are meta-on-meta channels: rules, announcements, shout-box, bot-sticky messages, bot commands, and a plethora of other noise, on top of the multitude of automated bot messages you get over time.

Discord bots are out of control. They remind me of the days of IRC and eggbot scripts and eggbot hosts: every channel went out and bought a cheap VPS or eggbot host to run their scrappy little bots. Except somehow worse and incredibly annoying.

I don't think Discord is ready, or even trying to be ready, for enterprise use. Not yet!

[vehementi]

Obviously downloading contents from muted channels is not an issue. Also you can both mute and hide the channel which effectively leaves it. And obviously slack bots are just as powerful as discord's so it's just a matter of servers electing to add crazy bots or not. Everyone bitches about giphy... these are some real stretches if these are your actual complaints about enterprise readiness, rather than data/admin policies, account segregation, etc. Do you have a vested interest somewhere?

[danielscrubs]

Didn’t know about Discord but those are some glaring issues I’d say.

[fpvracing]

For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.

Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

[vehementi]

The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).

Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.

[lewisl9029]

It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.

Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.

Wish you the best on your launch!

[fpvracing]

I will check it out and thanks!

[kaiby]

FWIW, The ReasonML, Rust, and Elixir language all have active communities on Discord. It really is pretty good for the use case.

[jmspring]

I want the multi-account support without a workaround.

People have been asking about if for awhile (a year plus) now.

[jMyles]

> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community.

At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack.

It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business.

The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher.

Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.

> I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional.

I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean?

Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.

[fpvracing]

> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.

Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?

[mffnbs]

It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone.

The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration.

It's not a problem.

[markmark]

And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.

[jMyles]

> we're talking about Slack's use in business

> t might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.

But these two are not mutually exclusive. Many business use cases eventually require a public community chat, and Slack is a dead-end for them. Discord on the other hand has served us well.

[ec109685]

They have since marked messages from an integration in a way that distinguishes them.

[snarfy]

We use the api in our CI/CD pipeline to send messages to the teams about build status.

[dleslie]

Discord has far superior voice chat with groups.

Discord has better options for channel control.

Slack has better integrations with software development tools

[fpvracing]

For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.

[Lucadg]

We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.

[radlad]

Tapatalk is pretty solid for forums on mobile.

[Lucadg]

Thanks I'll check it out!

[alaties]

Discord attempts to monetize by offering a sales platform for game developers integrated into their chat server.

https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game

[nexuist]

This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers:

"Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."

"Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord."

"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."

From the Discorc Privacy Policy: https://discordapp.com/privacy

I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.