I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it makes Teams and Slack look primitive.<p>The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots.<p>You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...
I still don't get why they aren't selling an "enterprise" version of Discord. Something that would be completely separated from the "public" one, with different account and a strong privacy policy.<p>They could really deal a massive blow to slack & other with how well the voices & screen share feature work.
> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion versus slacks 12 billion valuation?<p>Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.
Discord is one crisis away from imploding if they don't get serious about moderation tools and parental controls. They're turning a blind eye to the issues around tweens/teens interacting with much older folks online in pursuit of growth.
It would be great of dev communities didn't use chats for everything. I get that the casual nature of chats is great for getting a sense of community but the same issues pop over and over again. Users with issues or questions should be redirected to somewhere that can indexed (Forum, Github issues, etc).
Might as well ask here as it's trending, what happened to Discord's store? It was unceremoniously shuttered and removed from the UI. How much of a loss was it? I imagine months and months of work, nevermind the deals needed to be set with the publishers and game developers.<p>Can anyone inside comment? What was it removed so secretly?
Discord is also proprietary software and is backed by Tencent. Read the privacy policy, it might surprise you.<p>Please try investing in Free, Open Source alternatives first.
People don't often talk about <a href="https://spectrum.chat/" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.chat/</a> when it comes to this topic and I don't understand why. Personally I've always thought the Q&A style chat seemed a better fit for open source communities. Too often when I'm looking to pose a question in Discord, there's five other questions before me with no answer. Context easily gets lost in a flood of messages.
Spot on, the 10,000 free limit is much more limiting than many people think. I've seen very small businesses of even 3-4 people lose tons of institutional knowledge just because they wouldn't pay for slack. With larger tech groups you can start losing information after a few days. And the larger the group the less likely they will pay for it. I like the UI of Slack but am happy when I see tech groups using Discord instead.<p>I have more thoughts here if anyone is interested, including alternatives, "Why tech groups can use Slack for free but open source projects and businesses of any size shouldn’t": <a href="https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-away-with-using-slack-for-free-but-open-source-projects-and-businesses-of-96c427aaefbb" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@gabriel_wilkes/why-tech-groups-can-get-a...</a>
We've been using Discord since the official developer server days - it just made sense given the flexibility and pricing compared to others such as Slack.<p>Hope they find a decent monetary model and don't shift things too much. It's pretty nice as is minus a collapsable user list by role.
Voice? Really? In the communities I've hung around in (gamer & tech) it sits idle, unused. Curious why it keeps being placed front and center as a major feature, when people don't seem to actually want it.
I find this post odd. As far as I'm aware, it seems like the momentum of Discord has <i>slowed,</i> if anything, since ~2014.<p>That may just be because "Join My Discord!" has become a fixture on almost every single site on the internet, though, and enough exposure causes blindness.
From the title I thought this would be Bret Weinstein's the "dark horse podcast". Check it out if you like evolutionary psychology. Even better is his brothers podcast, "The Portal" (<a href="https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/" rel="nofollow">https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-portal/</a>). Its brilliant, in a mad scientist kind-of way. Its where the dirty laundry, of the science community, is aired.