[kevingadd]

Pay-once-per-user has always seemed like a perfectly clear business model to me. Maybe not one that can properly fund the company, but a reasonable one. In comparison every Slack I use is filled with nag messages scolding us for not paying a per-user fee just to have casual chats about meeting up at local restaurants, as their business model is 'earn $200/mo for every person who uses our service because they have to join multiple slacks'

Due to the fact that I'm on one for work, Slack is already earning more off me than Discord is but they still want more. It makes it impossible for me to like them. Discord having lower friction for joining multiple small servers is a plus here too, because it means I'm not stuck joining a big poorly-moderated community just to chat with a small group of friends.

It's not game-changing but I also think things like 'high quality group video calling', 'screen sharing', and 'high quality group audio calls' are perfectly reasonable things for Discord to sell. IIRC some stuff like that is currently gated behind Nitro. The ability to use emotes cross-server is also quite popular so I see many people buying Nitro just for that. I personally have a small Discord server for my family and I use it for my personal collection of cross-server emotes.

[blowski]

The benefit of paid Slack is more for the company than the user, hence why the company pays for a workspace.