I'm not a Slack user, but relying on Discord for business purposes seems like a bad idea. They can decide they don't like an account at the drop of a hat, and out of 1000 users it probably isn't an unlikely scenario.
You are right that they can close them down whenever they want but 1000 users isn't even a drop in the bucket for their infrastructure. There's tons of discords with 100k+ members. I have one with 15k members and it's considered small by them (and I don't pay a cent).
There are tons with over 500k[0]. At this point MidJourney might be paying Discord since it seems they're the first to be allowed over 1M members, and a lot of their infra is running with Discord hosting the images and real-time interactive elements.
OP says in a few different tweets that they are synced between both Discord and Slack free-tier, which seems like somewhat of a solution in lieu of your point
IMO discord is not great. I might be in the minority but everything these days offers a discord because it's simple. I'm not a fan of it and would prefer IRC. Part of that reason is discord is just spying equipment dressed up with a nice UI.
I couldn't imagine using discord for a company. Slack actually provides some value outside of just chat that makes it legitimately nicer than the mid 00's solution of AOL messenger (or MSN) that companies used to use. I don't think self hosting a chat of similar value would be much cheaper if you did it properly. 1,000 users will require plenty of servers and failover, plenty of storage for messages (even if you cut it off at 90 days), etc. A lot of people use slack as an ad-hoc note storing service with search so go ahead and add even more hardware. On AWS this would get prohibitively expensive quickly. Honestly I could do without 90% of the features and would be very happy if I could just run IRC in my terminal for work. Unfortunately IRC is non-trivial to get a normal person started on.
Note - this is for Nomadlist that has a community of 1k people, not a corporate employee base of 1k people. Different value proposition here. Discord is actually a decent fit for them.
As much as I can get behind "Discord is not great", the idea of putting IRC in competition with Slack and Discord is absolutely laughable.
IRC provides probably at most 2% of the features of those two, even stuff that I use daily like settings a status, having a profile picture, editing messages, pining messages, and other very basic stuff.
Anyone suggesting IRC as an entreprise solution is a greybeard of thr highest order.
> I use daily like settings a status, having a profile picture, editing messages, pining messages, and other very basic stuff.
These are client side. I got by for a long time without any of this. I continue to get by without it today. I use about 2% of slack's features and remain as productive and "available" as needed. Slack is a complete waste of time and space to me. The only people who seem to REALLY like it are normies. Which is the market anyway.
Can't speak for the parent, but I suspect they're referring to two things:
1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate
2) Discord decrypts and then re-encrypts content on its servers, allegedly for efficiency reasons
I think for a small startup that is making games/software which are non-controversial, Discord might still be a fine choice. For anything requiring assurances of enterprise-grade security, I'd avoid it.
> 1) A good chunk of Discord is owned by Tencent, a big Chinese conglomerate
The most credible source from this is this article[0], but since it's VC we have no idea what the ownership looks like. For all we know Tencent owns 5% or less of Discord, especially given two companies are listed before them in the article:
> The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners.
In general Tencent has more pull in other big gaming companies[1], which is more concerning imo.
It's not e2ee, but I imagine it's a tall order to ask for communities with thousands of members to support E2EE while also supporting message history (since you want things like old messages searchable) and complex mentions (ie. @role notifications) with maybe a thousand messages per minute being sent across all channels/topics.
Discord monitors all running processes on a user's machine so it can tag users with a "now playing ..." status text. The content of chats/private messages is also accessible to them. Their ToS allows them to sell/share this data.
> The content of chats/private messages is also accessible to them.
Not only that, the attachments on private messages are publicly visible.
Send an attachment in a private chat. Grab the link. Open it in a browser unaffiliated with your Discord login. wget it on a VM a thousand miles away. Its now publicly hosted.
Attachment links include the server ID but not the channel ID, so it's not like you can enumerate for files in a server by obtaining the server and channel IDs.
Each attachment's ID is in a snowflake[0], so the urls are
Without any shred of evidence? Lmao. Lets start with the privacy policy [1]
"We may also use content posted in public spaces to help power features like Server Discovery and to help us identify harmful content on the services."
So they monitor all chat for badthink.
"We collect information about the device you are using to access the services. This includes information like your IP address, operating system information, browser information, and information about your device settings, such as your microphone and/or camera."
Inappropriate access to hardware and private information.
"We may collect or share personal data if we think someone’s life is in danger—for example, to help resolve an urgent medical situation."
So not only do they monitor chat they monitor it for someone's life being in danger. Not sure how this is their responsibility.
> We may share information in response to a request for information if we believe disclosure is required by law, including meeting national security or law enforcement requirements
Say something 2 years ago that is logged forever and law enforcement goes on a fishing expedition when the party in power thinks its wrongthink.
> We retain personal information for as long as it is needed for the purposes for which we collected it.
Information is never deleted.
There's even more in the privacy policy but I'm not going to keep rooting around in it to prove my point that you're wrong.
Funding [2]
Discord has taken funding from Tencent which means they're liable to the CCP. Moreover, the list of funders includes large companies known for suing/taking legal action against users historically. Sony, for example.
Moreover EVERYTHING YOU DO including interacting on unrelated websites that support discord goes to them. They MINE YOUR DATA and you have no control over it.
Your argument my claims are gradiose is false on its face. I assume you're a paid shill. Discord is spyware by any other name. Maybe you're willing to accept the risks but most people use it ignorant of the fact they are as bad as Facebook when it comes to spying.
"Badthink"? Please. They engage in automatic moderation based on keywords and maybe some ML to detect spam, like any other company. And only based on chats that happen in already-public servers that have opted into the server discovery feature.
> Inappropriate access to hardware and private information.
Inappropriate? Private information? Name one server that wouldn't store some analytics data about your user agent and IP.
> So not only do they monitor chat they monitor it for someone's life being in danger. Not sure how this is their responsibility.
If Discord gets a T&S ticket about a possible suicide attempt, what do you think they should do about it, ignore it? I would hope that Discord would use their best judgement and the information at their disposal to notify the proper authorities, as long as the authorities in question could be trusted to act in a non-confrontational manner (unfortunately, most can't and often inflame the situation)
> Say something 2 years ago that is logged forever and law enforcement goes on a fishing expedition when the party in power thinks its wrongthink.
Okay, and? How is that "discord is just spying equipment"? If you have a server with archival logs and search capabilities, which are feature that users really, really value out of discord compared to e.g. IRC, then you're not going to get out of the requirement to present those logs to authorities if legally required.
> "Badthink"? Please. They engage in automatic moderation based on keywords and maybe some ML to detect spam, like any other company. And only based on chats that happen in already-public servers that have opted into the server discovery feature.
Even if you call it "automatic moderation" it is a privacy violation. I don't really are how you spin it.
> Inappropriate? Private information? Name one server that wouldn't store some analytics data about your user agent and IP.
Just because it's done often doesn't mean it has to be done. There's a difference between incidental IP storage via a firewall or edge router, and actively storing the running applications, IP address, geolocation data, camera status, images, etc on a device. One is incidental (to make that abundantly clear) and the other is deliberate spying.
> If Discord gets a T&S ticket about a possible suicide attempt, what do you think they should do about it, ignore it? I would hope that Discord would use their best judgement and the information at their disposal to notify the proper authorities, as long as the authorities in question could be trusted to act in a non-confrontational manner (unfortunately, most can't and often inflame the situation)
I can think of all the fun ways this could be abused to SWAT someone. Again to restate the conclusion: it is not discords problem. Legally, or otherwise. It likely endangers people more than it helps, and of the people it does help, they are likely better serviced by the people in the channel or their family and friends.
> Okay, and? How is that "discord is just spying equipment"? If you have a server with archival logs and search capabilities, which are feature that users really, really value out of discord compared to e.g. IRC, then you're not going to get out of the requirement to present those logs to authorities if legally required.
First, you're not required by any law enforcement to carry logs. A subpoena can ask you for logs, but if you have none there's most likely nothing they can do. If you get busted withholding data with a valid judge signed a court ordered subpoena then you are in trouble. Do you honestly believe they'll send the marshals to your door when you say honestly and under oath you have no data to give? If they want logs they'll just tap the line. See room 641a, and assume that they likely have one in every telco and every major service including discord. If they really want the data they will go to great lengths to get you to do something to give it to them (See: Edward Snowden's case) but this instances are so extremely rare they almost aren't worth considering.
I've ran online services for a number of years, worked in numerous companies, and none of them had a legal department for logs of chat. Since email is persisted it can be subpoena'd easier. Same with SMS, etc. IRC logs, etc can be transient (they really aren't needed) and so are far less likely to be requested.
Further, storage of logs pursuant to lawful warrants where the user base is notified of the existence of a search ongoing is different than logs who are given, without a fight, to authorities.
Discord falls into the category of services that give up information without a fight. This is, yet again, another privacy violation on several terms.
You honestly cannot argue that we should accept these violations as normal. The constant encroachment of corporations and law enforcement into our homes is bordering on constitutional levels of violation. If you don't recognize this stuff and act to stop it, it will simply get worse. They already convinced 93% of the earth to carry a tracking device in their pocket. Now you're being followed around in great detail on every major website and every major chat platform. Arguments aside, the only people not worried about this work for Them.
I too prefer IRC. For those that want the message history and scrollback that IRC lacks they can front-end it with things like TheLounge [1] or Convos. TheLounge uses a Redis cache for messages. And for the Slack-specific features, one could implement them either in IRC modules or IRC bots. UnrealIRCD [2] is very modular.
For people who like living in 2022 or don't know/care about setting up their own chat infrastructure, there's also Matrix which offers pretty much all modern chat features with little more than creating an account as setup.
No one wants to self-host, and normies especially don't want to learn or care about self-hosting. Discord does what it does, normies like it, and people make bots and utilities for Discord because people use it. It's a network effect.
The free tier of Slack has no member limit, so an open community could sign up 10k members in their workspace if it wanted to. However you can't search or see messages older than 90 days. That might be fine for most, if you look at alternatives like IRC you typically need an external logging tool anyway to keep history, so that's still doable with a Slack bot.
I do see that the person posting on Twitter may have a different use case than me. But what keeps my small business on Slack, even though we have a perfectly good replacement (Chat) baked right into our Google Workspaces account, is inter-company communication. Slack isn't ubiquitous, but it's common enough that we have multiple clients who use it. If we terminated our Slack Pro account, we wouldn't have a way of continuing to chat and DM with those clients without requiring them to establish new accounts on an unfamiliar service, just so they can work with this one vendor (us).
I could be wrong but I think the issue is that I'd be bridging Matrix to my Slack organization, which I would be downgrading to 'Free', and so any communication that happens with external people via the Slack/Matrix bridge will be doing so via the crippled 'Free' account. As it pertains to inter-company communication, 'Pro' allows for channels and group chats, whereas 'Free' only allows one-on-one communication.
So, again I could be misunderstanding, but I don't think much is really gained here, relative to (say) implementing Matrix for internal use and also asking employees to keep Slack running for certain external chats.
A slack bridge might be too invasive for a company looking to prevent any data loss, ie. a Rockstar Games situation. If they can, they'll require linked companies to use the official client, even if it costs something.
Chat is horrible, it’s really barebones and doesn’t have any features.
Also it’s been like that for about 4 years now, with very little development or investment by Google, so that should tell you that it’ll just get cut one day.
The best engine for generating a startup idea? Find a successful company that charges per user, then build a competing product, and don't charge per user. That's it.
It would be nearly impossible to this for Salesforce. But for a lot of other applications like Slack and Dropbox, you could carve out a profitable niche.
As part of it we released open source platform covering all use cases from chat to events, videoconferencing, etc. And it interoperates with Discourse and other open source projects, in case you want to use them instead.
Microsoft Teams now has the most users but they have been pumping money into it like it's free. It's a typical SV move, let's see how long it's sustainable, ie. enough time to kill everyone else.
Notice I said profitable niche. You won't magically become the profitable behemoth that Slack will. But you can build a company just on this one angle.
The model I hope we eventually get to is using an open protocol like Matrix. You start with a free hosted service a la Slack/Discord. As you grow you start paying them a (reasonable) fee. If you grow huge you can switch to VPS or in-house hosting to manage costs. Never at any point would your users need to know what's happening behind the scenes.
It seems to be a recent (last 5-7 years?) trend from what I can tell. I agree that forums are much better and more organised for community discussions, but generations seem to drive these things. I'm in some Discord communities, but just get lost amongst all the channels and regularly miss "big" announcements and news. Discord seems to require a lot more of your active attention, versus forums permitting passive "check ins" every few hours or days.
A large part of forums was basically refreshing the page to see if anybody responded to the threads you commented in. It was basically slow and more annoying chat thus easily replaced by rich chat platforms like Discord.
Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person.
Forums are good for lots of things, but don’t discount chat.
> Frankly, real time chat is a big way to get to know people. It’s basically conversation. Meanwhile 10 years on HN and I don’t know a single person.
How many chat channels/DM/etc do you still message with 10 years later?
I’d guess very few if any.
If that’s the case, what problem is the company trying to solve with a community section? Do they want long term engagement by its users (like you on HN for 10 years) or do they just want tourists stopping by for the short “chat”?
> How many chat channels/DM/etc do you still message with 10 years later?
Not OP, but I’m decade plus on here. I am on good terms with people from the internet from back then still. it will be a lot more in a couple more years. Like the person says, OTOH they don’t know a single HNer. Same with me.
Forums are something possible alongside chat but it isn’t for everyone. Just like chat isn’t for everyone.
This is besides the point completely but HN isn’t a community in the same way. No one really gets to know any one else on HN. Since there’s so many usernames and most are anon. There is no DMing. Chat is totally diff.
If you can only have one I would vote for forums, since they're flexible enough to handle a lot of chat and even wiki use cases. But I think realtime comms are different enough that it's worth having a dedicated chat app.
Instead of Slack, you can use Discord, Gitter, Telegram, or you can install an open source software like Discourse or our platform Qbix (which integrates with it to add events, meetings etc.)
Why pay third parties for some black box solution that bundles everything, to host your company's data, when there is open source software and free market of hosts that compete on price?
I find it an fascinating insight into the HN mind that with about 50 comments posted, Discord is mentioned in about half the comments but Teams currently appears nowhere in the discussion.
Teams is the worst software I have ever used, including betas, proof of concepts, and works developed by students. It is both consistently broken and has horrible UX. At this point, its only use is a as a litmus test for how penny pinching and incompetent leadership can be (with exceptions being Microsoft, I guess).
The movement in this space has been an overall negative in my opinion. These closed gardens aren't searchable, they're expensive, they don't work on open protocols, and in Discord's case they are extremely invasive about imposing their values on communities in the name of "safety".
What we really need is IRC 2.0 that supports the quality of life features these companies offer without all of the negatives.
Trying to search Discord for anything is so bad, and it's hurting communities because they're centralizing their knowledge there. Things that used to be on forums for things like fighting games are now buried on Discord, indexed terribly, and are a pain to find.
If you like the structure of Slack and are considering a switch, I'd love to see people switch to Zulip[0]. I've always wanted to see how well a team/org likes it after a serious trial. They have self-hosting options, too.
Gods, I hate Slack. And Discord. Sure, you can ask and get answers on those channels, but finding answers to questions already asked? Terrible. The software does nothing to build a repository of knowledge.
It might be counter intuitive, but many subscription services actually make more sense at larger scale. At scale, the financial implications of downtime and security are way more severe.
Indeed, we use it professionally. If you can server boost to level 2, it's quite nice for screen sharing. In my opinion, it's also set up way better than slack for voice channels. Krisp is the icing on the cake.
I'd actually not seriously considered it before, but in many ways Discord is a lot better and friendlier UX than Slack.
Paying $120k/yr for 1k users is just madness, I was thinking I'd rather force everyone to use a self-hosted IRC server rather than pay $10/user/month for a basic text chat application.
I like the Discord solution much better :)
What would Discord cost for a comparable organization size?
Edit: Womp, womp.
Discord "Nitro" is almost the exact same price per user as Slack: $9.99/mo or $99.99/year.
Maybe you don't need premium Discord, but these are the accounts subsidizing the freemium users and thus making the business viable.
What should the annual cost be to provide chat to 1,000 users? The amount of data can probably add up kinda fast, and retaining and indexing it all to make it searchable at scale is not trivial. Hmm.
Conclusion: I guess the outrage I felt when I upvoted this story was just sticker shock :)
It sounds pricy but not crazy unreasonable, if $10/mo for a core productivity tool (per employee) is too much, I wonder what that 1k employee business is actually doing. In the USA the median wage is $41,000/yr per employee, with tech companies paying far more, so like 0.02% per employee? Does Slack make an employee more than 0.02% productive vs trying to use IRC or Discord? I'd argue it's pretty obvious that it does.
Yeah, we're in agreement @oceanplexian. Thanks for the sanity check!
As I've stated in the edit in the grandparent post, my initial reaction appears to have been only early-morning groggy sticker shock. I'm now going to open my computer and proceed about my day, a significant portion of which will be spent on Slack. :D
I mean in the high-flying world of well-funded VC businesses with billion dollar valuations, $120k is a rounding error. But what about any number of hobby communities that previously had to pass the hat to pay for the $40/month Meetup.com fee? Knitting communities and metal detectorists. Salesforce bought it and so is free to price their chat app however they want, and yeah there is a free tier, but don't walk away thinking $$7.25/month is at all affordable for many communities.
Slack is not a community forum. If you ask Slack support they will explicitly tell you that and ask you to use Discord or something else. I'm not sure why people are surprised or outraged here.
I suspect people are surprised because Slack just changed their policy[1] on free tiers, and not everyone has picked up the news in the past few weeks.
Up until then Slack was used by a number of communities. I ran one of them and Slack never told me to use Discord.
