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Discord had like $300M invested and they created unparalleled piece of software that ate whole market, damn.

One of the most impressive softwares that I've seen and use after years of using ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak.



Honestly, I find discord super frustrating. Can't have multiple chats open at the same time, can't close the right rail, etc. It's UX is subpar in almost every way that matters to me. I use it because _everyone_ uses it, not because I want to.


Samesies.

It's not bad per se but there's plenty of crap in there.

The shortcuts situation is absolutely dreadful for one, I don't understand how gamers can cope with it:

* there are all of 5 actions you can bind to custom shortcuts

* discord defines dozens of built-in shortcuts you can not rebind or disable, if any of those conflicts with something you need you better hope the OS has a way of overriding it

Large chatrooms as well, the moderation tools seem rather limited, maybe it's better for administrators but as a user all you can do is block someone and you still have to see that they're posting comments. It' incredibly frustrating.

Then the linking and jumping to old message works half the time, maybe, search is absolute dogshit, and I've rarely seen a less reliable @-autocompletion, half the time I have to find old messages of the person I'm trying to ping before discord remembers they exist and lets me actually @ them.

And I don’t think support actually exists. You just post into the black hole that are tte support forum thing.


Slack sold for approximately $30B and it has a lot of the same limitations (or maybe I'm just missing something extremely simple). I think Discord is doing pretty great job all things considered. By focusing on gamers, they unintuitively created a great product for casual and business users.


I second this.

Find the UI very confusing. Perhaps I'm just old; but damn, my intuition in using discord's interface constantly lets me down.


Going to be the dissenting voice here and say I find the UI usable, and have no major gripes. The Member List can be hidden by the user icon to the left of the search field, and there's a convenient "Compact mode" to make things more dense information wise.


I can't think of many reasons Discord "ate the whole market" besides smart marketing, honestly. It does audio rooms incredibly well, but everything else (even their developer support team) is just terrible.


Everything else was/is much worse.

Even years later it's still the only platform I know of that combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place, all accessible from your 'server' as they call it.

It also has clients for many platforms, including a web client, all of which look and function the same.

Any alternative out there does one of those things decently well, but either completely lacks or is utterly awful at the other things.


>combines text chat rooms, voice chat rooms, and video streaming into one place

and unlike skype (and probably teams too) supports PUSH 2 TALK which gaming oriented voice chats had close to 2 decades ago and is even more useful now, during WFH.


I think the most direct competitor to discord (for gaming and related communities) is guilded.gg which is basically a clone of discord that offers additional features as well, including offering most of the features that discord has paywalled behind "nitro" for free.

The big issue they have is building up a large enough network effect. I really can't see the discord communities I am a part of moving over there any time soon. Also, they were recently acquired by roblox, and nobody knows for sure what the new ownership will end up doing to the platform.


Because most people used ventrilo, teamspeak or mumble, which required running or paying for a server, and had limited chat/ social network functionality, and skype which was just terrible. It came at the right time as gaming hit its stride in the mainstream when people needed a place for 'local' communities that was basically frictionless and discord was there to capture that audience because there was basically nothing else.

All the features afterwards are mostly just them throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.


Discord ate the market because it is free and good enough voice quality. Before that everyone was paying for voice server hosting or doing it themselves. Is that smart marketing or just the standard operating procedure for startups around that time?


I agree, but also worth mentioning that Discord really did Chatrooms correctly.

The ability to easily create servers, invite users to your server, and then make that server your homebase with its own channels and emojis, is pretty novel and perfectly fit into the gaming community which is basically a loosely connected graph of friend groups.


Also, RBAC which allows huge flexibility for users to run their community in whatever fashion they want.


Technically Skype existed but lost with the new sms-looking ui that everyone hated and it was hardly suitable for anything larger than a friend group. Then there were long-standing issues of voice chats being P2P and thus allowing users to find the IP of other users, enabling DDOS attacks on routers.


Yeah I think people forget that Skype actually owned the video game voiceserver market for a few years.

Ventrillo and Teamspeak and Mumble were all good. But you had to assign someone in your friend-group to manage the server. This meant paying for hosting to do it "the right way", and in turn one friend either paid the hosting themselves or you had to figure out how to split the cost. Then if someone else joined the group you had to split it with them, etc.. Some people would self-host teamspeak or ventrillo at their houses so you could avoid those costs, but now you are reliant on an unreliable system of one friend hosting your voiceserver on their desktop computer. This means that router mishaps could send it offline, them turning off their computer could send it offline, or if the teamspeak/vent daemon wasn't running then your whole server is offline.

Skype solved a lot of those problems because it was always online, no one had to manage a server, and it was free. It sucked in just about every other way as a game chat option, but the benefits of no-server-management, always-available, and no-cost, made an objectively inferior product dominate the world of game chat.

Discord simply took the features of teamspeak/mumble/ventrillo and combined it with the service benefits that skype offered. No more server cost sharing and no more server administration. But you still got the benefits of actual game chat servers like voice lobbies (as opposed to initiating calls like skype).

I really don't think Marketing is what made Discord successful. This is truly an example of someone who solved a need. We needed a product like teamspeak/ventrillo/mumble combined with a service like skype. Discord was that creation. It truly solved a problem for gamers. Gamers were not looking to cling to skype, but they were all using it. Discord created a product that fit into the market perfectly and the masses ran to it because the need was so big, and Discord solved the problem that gamers needed. The ease of setup also helped. Sending a single share link that someone simply clicked was all it took to join a server and start talking. I think that ease of setup is also an incredibly under-rated strength of Discord. In fact I would venture to guess that most gamers joined their first Discord server by clicking a discord share link that was sent to them via Skype.


I don't think they did much marketing. They provided, for free, a replacement for a chat room, forum, and voice chat, which was in total easier to set up than any of the previous options any gaming community had for those, with similar levels of functionality.


uh, how about the fact that vent/mumble/Skype were all awful?


Mumble client is awful. Mumble audio quality and latency is fantastic.

Mumble is also self hosted, and nobody wants to host anything anymore when there's a free alternative that's good enough and hosted by someone else.

Skype is just universally terrible.

EDIT: since I'm part of that tiny minority exception that proves the rule: s/nobody wants/the vast majority do not want/


The only bad part of mumble calls for voice come from:

  * Where the server is hosted / quality of server
  * Poor client UI
The client UI issue is how easy it is to work-around bad audio from other users. It's possible to do, the UI just completely sucks.

User interface and end user fulfillment just aren't great generally for OSS. I think it would take a commons improvement project with either government grants (infrastructure) paying for results AND/OR a university spearheading the development project.


i totally disagree. the worst part about mumble is that it was a pain in the ass to set up. creating a discord server is trivial: all of my nontechnical friends have used the software just fine. mumble is terribly fiddly in comparison.


I don't see how that's relevant? I don't even prefer those over Discord, but I don't think it's enough of an improvement to warrant the market share it has now.


So what do you think happened? That people were manipulated in to using discord? Or that they don't know what the alternatives are?

Everyone I have spoken to loves discord and thinks it is one of the best programs they have. It's only a select group of hacker news style users who complain about minute details the average person does not care about.

I know it's hard for most people on this site to understand but the average user has very different priorities. Being able to create a "server" with the click of a button is worth more than every other issue listed in this thread. Having to pay or self host to create a group is a total non starter in 2021.


What I think happened, as someone who's been using Discord daily since 2015, is that they came up with a slightly better product than the alternatives, spent enough in marketing (to gamers specifically) to convince investors that it was a platform worth investing in, and only then slowly started improving their faulty software.

To say people were manipulated into using Discord is obviously not true, but it's also disingenuous to deny the massive amount of marketing Discord pushed back when it first started, not only in advertisement but just branding in general.

I'm not going to address the latter part of your comment because I don't understand what you're trying to say. I'm of the belief that I'm allowed to voice the legitimate issues I have with the software that impact not only myself and other developers but users in general.


The last part of the comment was probably a reply to this: "I don't see how that's relevant? I don't even prefer those over Discord, but I don't think it's enough of an improvement to warrant the market share it has now."

You don't see how those valuable those improvements are but the average person does and that's why it has a massive market share.


Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.


What do you prefer?

The fact that you can:

(1) Find a server with a simple URL (no pw needed, no port or IP, etc.)

(2) Find your friends easily with a unique username and use chat as a fallback

(3) Create an audio room (that scales!) that has great audio quality (doesn't "drop" calls and

(4) Client that auto-updates to provide more and more features

All within a few minutes is a HUGE upgrade or Ventrilo.

This doesn't even mention the network effects, bot integration, gif/photo capability, etc. It's superior in almost every way possible.


I think you misread my comment. I definitely prefer Discord over the others, but I still think it has a long way to go before it becomes a chat experience that's not insufferable to use.


Got it, definitely did.


Small amounts of friction make a big difference. Back when my gaming friends were using Mumble, half of the group wouldn't bother joining voicechat (and we were lucky to have someone technical enough to run the server in the first place); with Discord it's easy enough that everyone does it.


Slack was/is pretty terrible too. Having every workspace require a new user is the pinnacle of idiocy. So annoying and even worse if you have different emails for different workspaces.


There are plenty of reasons to do this, all of which have to do with, say, privacy, and Slack has managed their way into making it dramatically less annoying.

1) They send magic links. Pretty easy.

2) They make all known workspaces you've logged into before discoverable and allow for a one-click "add to desktop Slack" option, which makes dealing with the whole "different users" issue. And to the extent that I use different emails for different workspaces, Slack accommodates that and allows me to do so within the same desktop instance, so not really sure what the concern is there.


That's true, but it doesn't change the user story going from "I click a link, I join the workspace" to "I click a link, I fill out yet another registration form, decide which email to use, add another password to my password safe, then join the workspace". Minor differences but friction does matter.


To add onto this, you also have no cross platform user consistency, so if I DM a user, if I want to search my DMs there, I might have to search my DMs in 10+ servers for the specific message I want. There are a million other problems with this model but this example is definitely one that I frequently ran into before people I knew switched to discord


People love it, marketing has nothing to do with it. I've heard any Discord when I followed open source programming project (Leela Chess Zero) and it was obvious after a few minutes why it's a fantastic fit. I moved my project there shortly after as well and it's fantastic.


Could marketing not be the reason people loved it, or the reason it was allowed to reach the point where it became lovable?


I'm not even sure it was a lot of marketing, for the new generation, it's just what they needed, chat+voice+screen on a html5/css3 visual language.

I despise discord quite a lot btw :)


Their moderation and community management tools are fantastic.


It's definitely improved over the years, but every remotely populated server I'm in uses bots for basic moderation features like ban words, proper bans/kicks (for example, temporary bans), warns, etc. There's still a long way to go in my opinion.


I'm not aware of anything that does a better job than discord. So they can be doing a fantastic job relative to the competition while still leaving stuff to be desired. Although bots are not really a bad solution and they leave the tools in the hands of the users who can now do just about anything.


I disagree. In my opinion those tools are the bare minimum for effective moderation, and while I love that Discord gives developers an API that allows them to implement those systems, I think it's something that should be handled by Discord themselves.


The audio quality of discord is incredibly bad when I compare it to teamspeak3 (opus music 10)


In indie game dev, everyone’s on discord and so are your extremely-important potential players. Whether you enjoy discord or dislike it, you’re going to be on there. It has really strong networks effects


You may enjoy Ripcord if you're not happy with Discord's UI. I've been using it for a few months, and it's made Discord enjoyable to use.

I do have to open the official client whenever I do voice calls though, because there's currently an issue that can cause incoming audio to sound terrible. But for text chat, it's great.

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/


It would help if discord would stop threatening to ban people for using third party clients.


I've ditched the client for web only with custom css. Also allows me to block every kind of tracking (opened programs). I only use it as a chat client and still run a TS3 server because discords audio is just garbage


Would it be possible to share this custom CSS please? Also, what tracking/how are you stopping it?


Ditto, feels fast and has a lot of features but to me the UX is very confusing.


Personally, I find that Discord feels extremely bloated compared to almost any other program on my computer. Probably has to do with the fact that Discord has still not released a native ARM version of its client for the Apple M1. Nearly a year after its release there really is no excuse for any Electron application to stick to x86_64+Rosetta 2.

Discord is literally the only x86 application that is still installed on my MacBook Pro M1.


Discord recently downgraded from 64-bit to 32-bit on Windows as well, I imagine there were issues with the interconnects with other, native parts of Discord like screen-sharing that were easily 'solved' by only distributing 32 bit binaries.


Discord is somewhat of a power user UI. They cater to people who are in 10+ large communities and use lots of the features provided.

It's not the simplest tool if all you want to do is PM a friend or two.


everytime I open an irc client I feel lighter.. something about the discord web client is so dreadful. the android app focuses more on notifications and quick switches.. a bit better somehow.


The top problem I have with discord is that you cannot have a list of favorite channels.

I really prefer IRC.


I'm no fan of discord or Slack...but the fact that companies are using slack, and the slack 'threading' is sooo bad, drive me bonkers...


-


> There are alternate Discord clients, and — unlike Slack — Discord doesn't try to actively prevent people from writing alternate clients against their API.

Yes, they do.

https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless:

> Hey, so I know this is somewhat of a bummer, but I got banned because of ToS violation today. This seemed to be connected to creating a new PM channel via the /users/@me endpoint. As that's basically a confirmation for what we've believed would never be enforced, I decided to not work on the cordless project anymore. I'll be taking down cordless in package managers in hope that no new users will install it anymore without knowing the risks. I believe that if you manage to build it yourself, you've probably read the README and are aware of the risks. I'll keep the repository up, but might archive it at some point. And yes, you'll still be able to use existing binaries for as long as discord doesn't introduce any more breaking changes. However, be aware that the risk of getting a ban will only get higher with time!

https://github.com/atlx/discord-term:

> Disclaimer: So-called "self-bots" are against Discord's Terms of Service and therefore discouraged. I am not responsible for any loss or restriction whatsoever caused by using self-bots or this software. That being said, there's no one stopping you from risking using an account, so go head!


> There are alternate Discord clients, and — unlike Slack — Discord doesn't try to actively prevent people from writing alternate clients against their API.

It's again TOS and people have copped bans for using alternate clients.



For reference, this tweet from @discord says:

"All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them."


It's not in the ToS, as the people in Twitter point out.


discord is maha complicated UX. close to nightmare


Well it solved a lot of pain points with the target market.

I remember my friends and I kept bickering who would pay for this month's bill for the vent/mumble servers. That kept on for years until I had enough and hosted my own in a droplet in digital ocean. None of my friends knew how to do that since they're not very technical.

Discord you just had to click a couple buttons and its free.


It's free for the same reason everything is free these days. VC funds anything that will attract a lot of users to mine data from so they can sell the data. Discord didn't do anything that was groundbreaking or even solve a problem that had no solution; they just came along during a time when investors are willing to fund a company operating at a loss for a decade until FANG buys them.

Discord's a pretty good product, and they've got the engineers and money to get better, but the only reason they won is because of timing. Same for Slack; there were identical products to Slack that tried for decades to gain traction, but they weren't free, because that business model didn't exist at the time.


Slack isn't free, they sell you history-in effect, you generate the data that they sell back to you.


Holding your data hostage until you pay up, isn't that ransomware?


Not if you voluntarily provided it in the first place.


> Same for Slack

The ux of Slack is essentially screen+irc implemented in JS with emotes. It enabled technical and non-technical people to use the same tool. The key to success is not technical, it's that they tailored the product to a specific group that would then lock itself in.

I didn't understand Discord's success, but comments here point that gamers couldn't find free group-voice apps at a critical time. Here again, they tailored the product to a group that would then voluntarily lock itself in.

Later, they sell the companies with valuations based on the captured user bases.


I wasn't referring to things like IRC. When Slack was initially released, it was no different from Campfire and a whole string of other web-based chat systems that came and went going all the way back to the dawn of AJAX in the late 90s. Slack's improved a lot since then, with app integrations and other features, but fundamentally it wasn't any different than its predecessors. It's easy to think that Slack did something groundbreaking, or figured out the magic solution to the problem that sank its predecessors, but just like Discord, the reason Slack won is because it came along at a time when companies can raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to float them for years while offering a free product. Then they can upsell later, and/or commoditize their users' personal information. Those business models weren't as easy to come by in the past, so a lot of products failed. None of this is to bash Slack; it's an adequate product for what it does.

Another big thing that the current crop of winners has going for it is that cloud hosting allows applications to launch literally for free and scale quite a bit without paying much of anything in infrastructure costs. That also wasn't an option 10-20 years ago.


It works nice and is free, but for how long?

How long can they keep paying for that bandwidth and message data storage while keeping the thing essentially free?


> It works nice and is free, but for how long?

I wonder about this a lot. I wonder if they have some big 'whales' that help sustain their business OR they're just selling all of our data (is that enough to make money at discords scale??).


one of the founders and current CEO Jason Citron had a previous org called OpenFeint, which:

> was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications" [1]

Of course that doesn't mean anything about the current model of Discord, but good to be aware of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFeint#History


IMO its a good competitor to slack. They probably make money from businesses too. They have lots of options for permissions/roles and all kinds of API access to write bots for.


Unless businesses are paying for server boosts[0] (which would only be useful for 1080p60 screen-share or a 50mb upload limit), there's no way to use Discord for business or pay extra for business use outside of creating a free server like any other; there's no real reason to choose Discord for business either, since it has no real retention policy (other than storing messages forever, for now), DLP is non-existent, there's no SSO/SAML, etc. The only reason to use Discord for business is if you really like Discord and/or other parts of your business are on Discord, like if you run a video game.

0: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...


There are "businesses" that have communities, and want to own/manage them. Discord works much better than Slack as a platform for "official" managed open-membership communities; it's seemingly a use-case the Discord staff have put a lot of thought into.

Think: every content-creator or streamer.

But also: regular corporations that provide platform services that people build their own stuff on top of, such that people want to talk to each-other about the service rather than just talking to the corporation about the service. (The sort of thing you used to stand up a hosted forum for.)


Yep, I agree about limited industry but it does work in that respect. I see it used a lot for content creators as a way to organize and tier out their fans as well.


I have some contacts who work for organisations use it instead of Slack for SMEs of 100-1000 employees.

Unsure what their billing looks like, but it works pretty well for them apparently.


we're trying to use Discord for our multi-site grant-funded healthcare project... it's pretty messy to use. Would love to pay for some decent support... People are getting locked out of their accounts for some reason and working with their support team is very painful.


It's a spy and data mining operation for some intelligence group same reason why twitter and facebook got traction.


Nitro pulls $10/mo and has enough benefits that a lot of people pay. Plus server boosts. I bet that they have good cash flow.


Our only source is this WSJ article (excerpt from qz[0]):

Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled.

0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game....


we use discord for work and to "boost" your server to a level where you get reasonable streaming you need to pay ~$60 and a higher upload limit, or ~$110 for the max. Which is pretty good in that it applies for all users

It's a bit of an odd model for paying for businesses, but works well in the gaming world where multiple people can essentially help pay for a server (if you want the extra toys)


Why did you pick Discord over Slack or Teams? I'd be driven crazy if there wasn't any SSO or fancy admin features, but then again I'm a nerd who cares about things like that (and also why I really want Discord for Enterprise to happen). Is it just because it's easier to use?


I pay for nitro, I don't use discord non stop but it's great for a bunch of niche channels i'm on. I'm happy to pay $10 to a platform that makes it easier for me to find information and I know a bunch of my colleagues pay as well. All in we still support individual projects as well but truthfully it's the cost of a beer a month.


I don't get it, you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house, you don't need to pay to have it hosted somewhere. Works find running on any box on your desk.

Discord makes you the product. It's gratis in exchange for letting them spy on you. If you don't know why that's bad...


> you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house

That seems easy to you. That would be easy for me too and most likely 90% of the people on HackerNews.

But the average person doesn't have a "random Linux box" in their house. Most people don't even know what Linux is. Most people would be overwhelmed just looking for the terminal emulator on their computer, before they even typed a command into it.

Most people don't want to manage an always-on linux box for a voice server. Most people don't want to manage port-forwarding on their firewall/router. Most people don't have static IPs at their house and wouldn't know how to setup dynamic dns to solve the problem. Most people don't even know what DNS is.

MOST PEOPLE just want a program they can launch when they want to talk to their friends. That is why Discord has been successful.

I'm not saying that's good. I am just saying that its the way the world is.


I find it astounding that people here can not even grasp the concept of why Discord is popular. I am perfectly capable of hosting my own server and doing everything manually. But it is clear as day why discord wiped out the competition while most of the comments here seem dazed by the fact and are left wondering why people don't just use IRC.

It's no wonder so many projects and FOSS tools fail to gain large userbases when it seems that most developers seem to be living on another planet entirely.


This is an important point. I write that with no disrespect to all those FOSS developers who have devoted themselves to the work of creating new, interesting and useful things. But the fact is that usability, like intuition, is usually a very subjective matter. That's why QA and UAT were such an integral part of traditional software development, and why community engagement needs to be a two-way street.


Best comparison for Discord is to think it as social media site, Facebook or Reddit. Find or get invite to server, everything is there trivially. Creating your own space is simple, easy and fast. Everyone is already there.

IRC is pretty similar, but much more fragmented and not really very user-friendly.


somehow the only real challenge for the tech community is how to wrap all that self-hosting complexity so that most people could just use it with the click of a button.

its not a technical challenge, its a moral challenge. it means doing what is good for the users even if they don't really know it


>you can run mumble on any random Linux box in your house, you don't need to pay to have it hosted somewhere.

if you have public IP or use stuff like hamachi (at least that's how we did it decade ago)


I vouched for your comment. A lot of the rise of Discord can be attributed to convenience, network effects, and pretty features like animated reactions, but ultimately it is still surveillance capitalism. Unfortunately, it appears that the masses don't care about things like privacy, as they're more than willing to sign up for these kinds of services.

https://www.pcgamer.com/how-private-is-your-private-discord-...


Discord's smart move was emulating the concept of servers (including all the teenage drama coming from having administrators and moderators more interested in (ab)using their power than community building) while making them accessible to anyone without technical knowledge.

But it's important to remember that Discord is not that. Discord holds all your data, in luxurious detail, with no option to delete. They go as far as ignoring GDPR when people ask for their messages to be deleted. "Deleting" your account will not even anonymize your ID, it unsets your avatar, renames you, kicks you from all guilds and disables logging in. That's it. And if they ban you there is no place to move on to.


and you aren't going to get DDoSed if you join server of not the nicest people :)


That used to be a huge issue, less with Client-Server model software, but more the P2P mechanisms in Skype.

These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable.


>These days? Well, most server providers have some sort of basic flood mitigations in place now, and even more advanced protection has become affordable.

Hmm

I didn't meant your server being DDoSd, but you being DDoS (but probably that's what you meant with Skype P2P example?)


Well yeah. Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin).

Skype (at the time, no idea now) was a very shoddily written piece of software. It was trivial to query the IP of any online user, even if they were not on your contact list or appearing offline.

You had to use a VPN or carefully conceal your Skype ID, I did work with a somewhat popular live streamer back then (so a VPN wasn't feasible), and their ID was a very random string that was not to be shared under any circumstances.


Skype wasn't shoddy per se, but it was extremely aggressively peer-to-peer, which resulted in exactly this kind of exposure of connection information.


I'd say exposing the info of any user, even if they're not on your contact list, is pretty shoddy.


>Though Vent, Teamspeak and Mumble never had these issues (if you could trust the server admin).

In some games where people were often switching teams, you couldnt.


I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!


At my work we use Discord to have virtual "desks" (really just audio channels) so people can drop by and chat while you are at your desk. If you're busy or don't wish to be disturbed you can 'lock' your desk to prevent people from joining it (it limits the room size to 1, aka just you).

It really has helped the social factor of moving nearly everyone in the office to remote working. Every department that has adopted the "virtual office" Discord setup loves it over Slack and basically never uses Slack anymore. It's way less awkward to call people, it's easier to not incidentally disturb them when they're busy, during breaks/lunch you can go to the "breakroom" and hang out and chat with everyone else. And it was all very easy to setup and with the Discord server template stuff we can even clone it for each department with very minimal work (renaming channels to that departments' people).


Slack implemented something similar called Huddles, but I think is for paid plans only. I personally think Slack calls quality in general are much worse than other services or platforms like Discord or Meets/etc, so I don't know if it'll really help reaching people and companies that are using alternatives for voice.


Huddles uses Amazon's chime backend for audio, so it should perform much better then the current "audio calls" that slack had, though I haven't tried it yet.


My company was also using discord for virtual desks and have moved to slack huddles. They work as good as discord voice channels.


Slack uses a language that is like markdown, but is not markdown, which is annoying for engineers.

Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.

Discord uses proper markdown and supports syntax highlighting.

These are two things that make me think Discord is better specifically for engineers, aside from it just being generally way better.


> Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.

It does, but only if you make your code block into its own post as a "text snippet." (I assume this is because Slack's internal markup doesn't allow regions to have parameterized metadata, but there is parameterized metadata at the chat-post-event level.)

You also get other benefits of doing this, e.g. being able to collapse the snippet, download it, etc. Code pasted into Slack should really always be pasted as a snippet. I just wish it auto-detected you were trying to do that and offered to make a snippet.


Yeah, I have done that. It’s really clunky. I’ve also done it to be able to use headings and other things that I’d prefer just worked in the main chat.


> Discord uses proper markdown

Not even remotely.

Discord supports:

* fenced code blocks (but not indentation)

* quoting, a single level (nested quotes don't work, properly replying to other comments is painful)

* inline decorations (italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, code)

* inline spoilers (an extension)

* disabling autolinking (an other extension)

It doesn't support: headings, paragraphs, lists (ordered or not), labelled links, tables, images, footnotes, images (you can only use the image upload feature which puts a single image below a comment).

It also has a limit to 2000 char (4000 with nitro), which can be rather low when posting code snippets.


I hadn't noticed some of those. I don't use Discord a ton, just enough to know it works better than Slack I guess, at least what they do support uses markdown syntax.

No bulleted lists... that's disappointing.

Maybe worth upvoting:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600400...


> Maybe worth upvoting:

My experience of the community forums is it’s only worth if you like venting or seeing people vent, the folks in charge of discord really don’t care.


The most frustrating thing is that somewhere on their website they mentioned that most people are not familiar with the Markdown syntax, so they chose not to use it. But instead they created their own syntax that even less people are familiar with...


That does seem bizarre. Was there some special reason for them introducing almost markdown but-not-quite as a feature?


I think which fits your community is really dependent on your use case.

Discord has great tools around moderation and membership tiers; it's designed for users you don't trust.

Slack is much more for a community where everyone knows each other (or at least trusts each other a bit, like you'd trust a coworker).


Agreed. If you want to manage a lot of people who you don't really "know," then Discord has all sorts of roles and rules you can set up.


The free discord tier is better than the free slack tier. That’s honestly why 90% of ppl use discord over slack.

Also paid discord is 100x cheaper than paid slack, for non-corporate entities. You can get top tier discord for like $100/m while slack price goes up with each user. Not to mention that discord allows users to easily assist in upgrading your server while slack doesn’t have that functionality at all.


They also pivoted their marketing message away from being "for gamers" and towards anyone who wanted "a place to hang out," like developer groups or high schoolers.


Discord’s pushing for school groups to use it, especially with the .edu pop up on launch

Discord School Hubs page: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/p37s7s/so_disco...


Kinda makes perfect sense, Discord is very good addition to subreddit or Facebook group. And barrier of entry is low, just like those two. It fills a niche for audio and chat of large communities.


It's the TikTok effect.


Discord hasn't gotten bloated yet the way Slack has, which makes it much more pleasant when all you actually want to do is chat and maybe hang out on voice and sometimes with a screen broadcast.

Once you're in an enterprise space, Slack's features become actually useful.


> it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work

One of the best hammers I own is a screwdriver.


Well, slack is extremely expensive IMO, so I'm not surprised


Yeah I always thought Slack is explicitly intended for Real Work and not much else (pay per user!), so it's pretty natural that Discord took over.


> ventrilo/mumble/teamspeak

To be fair, Mumble is FOSS, and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005. Discord is pretty mediocre software (remember when they accidentally allowed iframe XSS RCE attacks? A very amateurish mistake), but the incumbents were an absolute dumpster fire.


For Mumble in particular, the devs had their heads in the clouds for so long that it is no surprise that it is no longer relevant.

If you had a mic that had issues in any way (buzzing, volume, balance), "The Wizard" and "AGC" were supposed to fix it for you. Do not fret little one, for you do not need nor want to manually fiddle with settings, The Wizard will make everything right [1]!

The pivotal feature that was the reason so many people I know stopped using it is the ability to change the volume of an individual person [2]. It has been a requested feature since the beginning of time, yet it took until 2016 to implement in dev branch and didn't actually make it into a release version until 2020! Too little, too late.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200223143654/https://wiki.mumb...

[2] https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/issues/1156


That issue is pretty amazing, especially the developer straight-up accusing those saying 'this is a killer feature stopping us from moving to mumble' of lying (considering the substantial overlap between the features of the various options competing in the space at the time this is really obviously the kind of thing which could be a deal-breaker: I remember the arguments over which option to use based on far less substantial differences than this).


> and Ventrilo and Teamspeak have literally not iterated since 2005

True, but to be fair: the next iteration of Teamspeak will be based on the Matrix protocol, which is quite a big iteration. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25743874 .


IMHO it is even better than Slack.


I don’t know about your definitions, but 300M is a fuckton of money to me.


If that's 2017, imagine what it would be in 2021.


Elixir ftw


Want to build a real time chat app? Best build it on the BEAM.


its just slack for gaming. the ui is ripped off as suck. it is better than ventrilo but its not like they are that much better, just they realized a good concept and took it.


Better engineering than Slack, but not as good of a business




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