[VoodooJuJu]

So discord is something I use for voice-chatting and shitposting with friends, typically while also playing video games.

Can anyone tell me why they would ever use it for anything remotely serious? Can you tell me why you'd want to stake your livelihood on a walled garden designed for video game voice chat and sharing rickroll videos?

Not only that, I can't take seriously a business that uses discord. Like, what are you doing? Are you selling curated rickroll videos? God-tier cat memes? Do you do shitpost editing and enhancing? Like that what the fuck are you doing that your business needs to use discord, an app for vidya gaymen? It just gives me this puerile vibe, like this "hello fellow kids" kind of thing.

I'm genuinely curious what this app does for your business that seemingly couldn't be fulfilled by anything else.

[atomicnumber3]

Discord is a very featureful chat and voice app that is similar to slack in terms of managed-ness but they have completely different roots.

Slack is basically just business email but IMing instead of email, if you know what I mean. It's very business. Business happens there. Synergy and collaboration and so on.

Discord, meanwhile, grew out of some combination of gaming/tech IRC servers and gaming ventrilo and teamspeak servers. It's a completely different vibe and clientele that just happens to have a very similar feature set to slack.

So having a discord for anything that's gaming or programming/techy-adjacent makes a lot of sense and there's a big preexisting community there. I launched an OSRS plugin and we set up a discord channel for it. It was a niche thing, very niche, and we never really took it very far (it was sort of partly just an excuse to try out using managed k8s for the backend server that the plugin was a client for). We did 0 marketing aside from listing in the OSRS plugin marketplace and putting the discord link in the description.

Suddenly me and my pal had like 100+ people in our discord and as many users of our site. With 0 marketing and a very simple MVP.

And we didn't do any BI or anything but afaict the attach rate of discord joining to using our plugin at least once was very high, well over 50%. People even asked a few questions and said the project was cool.

So yeah. While I wouldn't literally run my business on it, as a "fan site" it's very useful and valuable.

[CSMastermind]

> Discord, meanwhile, grew out of some combination of gaming/tech IRC servers

For the record this is exactly where Slack came from as well.

From Wikipedia:

> Slack originated as an internal communication tool used within Stewart Butterfield's company, Tiny Speck, during their work on the development of Glitch, an online game. These communication tools were initially built around the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and included scripts designed to automate and organize file exchanges among their development team.

> In August 2013, Slack was launched to the public and continued to maintain compatibility with IRC, reflecting its origin. Additionally, it was also compatible with XMPP messaging protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)

[oneweekwonder]

> However, in May 2018, the company chose to close down these corresponding gateways due to limitations inherent in those protocols.

It was a way to onboard tech people and once they were big enough they closed the door for those audience.

Which really hurt me because i live in a country with a small tech community and was happily interacting with them using irc, until slack changed into a walled garden.

[IshKebab]

In fairness, can you imagine implementing all of Slack's features over IRC? Nightmare.

[grayhatter]

or... and stay with me here... you could not implement them for the IRC, but keep the gateway available for people who want to willing trade the "degraded" feature set for the ease and familiarity of a simple, low noise, low distraction environment.

Aka, not behaving in a user hostile way.

Dropping irc was more about control than it was about adding features.

[deviantintegral]

The real problem was when Slack added message reactions. Those weren't visible at all in IRC. They absolutely could have been surfaced, like how Apple sends reactions in SMS chats. In a business context that means missing critical acknowledgements of messages and generally forced our IRC bridge users to switch.

It was a pretty user-hostile way to reduce the number IRC bridge users (to then justify killing it), especially given it took them many years after to get the Electron client to the point where it wasn't a laptop-killer.

[IshKebab]

Surely you can see the issue with having some features just not work for some people? Reactions is the most obvious one. They aren't just for fun - people use them for polls for example.

[nullc]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

[nurumaik]

Discord is slack that works, that's all

[Cthulhu_]

Midjourney is a great example: Discord offers a customer base of potentially hundreds of millions of individual people using it to generate and send images to one another.

You seem very dismissive of it, but what about businesses running on other chat platforms like Whatsapp, WeChat, QQ, etc?

Sure, it CAN be fulfilled by anything else, but is that where your customers are?

[muzani]

Yeah, I wish some platforms would just die, and that includes Discord and WhatsApp. It's where the customers are for a reason. There's this naive mindset that says, "If you don't like it, don't use it," but this does not apply to communication channels. I'd rather everyone just go back to IRC, but we won't have that because of Discord.

[mdwalters]

Not a "buisness," but the project I volunteer on used to bridge to Revolt, a FOSS clone of Discord. The Revolt server got raided, as my friend, who also worked with the project accidentally leaked the invite, which would lead to the server's deletion. Me and my friend asked the project leader and co-leader to re-bridge to Revolt, I don't even remember what their responses were. My other friend made a hobby project that bridges directly to the project's main product, and that became the de facto Revolt server. My friend then asked me to make a replacement for the bridge with the library I made (for Node.js/TypeScript), as it was faster and stays online longer (sending a websocket message to the server every 15 seconds - the same as the main client) than my other friend's (for Python - the project leader dropped a backwards-incompatible release in the websocket library, so my other friend was pretty screwed).

RIP, volunteer project's Revolt server, 2022 - 2022.

[quickthrower2]

Having a discord link probably sets some expectations about what to expect over there: chat, community, maybe voice chat, chilled vibe, temporary. All that from seeing the smiley joystick logo. It also signals cool modern startup. It may be be super convenient if your audience typically has an account already. Yes a tonne of downsides of course.