[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.