[krilly]

Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

[Macha]

It doesn't have the "enterprisy" integrations that give companies control they want, such as where you integrate logins with your AD/SSO/whatever system. You could kick employees that leave from your server, but that doesn't mean there's no company information in their DMs with other employees. You can insist people set up a work account, but you still can't deactivate it when they leave.

You can't enforce password length requirements, or whatever your security team recommends this year.

You can't disable parts of the offering, like voice chat, to enforce people use hangouts or whatever your company wide solution is.

At the same time, things companies may want employees to do easily but gaming communities don't want, such as allowing any user to create a channel are not possible with Discord's permission model.

If you want users to see only self-selected subsets of information, you can't really. You could break your company's chat across multiple servers, but this is tedious compared to just having channels users can join or not. For example, in my last employer, I was in 40 or so channels out of several thousand.

---

I think for a startup or small business, none of these things are that important. But for medium or large companies, they become more of a problem.

[kminehart]

Honestly, it's probably because it's marketed towards gamers. It's a really useful product for sure but the gamer marketing definitely affects people's perception.

[hnick]

I think in the past they did make a point of saying they don't support business use. As in, it's fine if you want to, but don't pin your daily success on it and complain if it breaks.

I use it at home and it does occasionally go a bit weird and need a reboot, or stop sending notifications on my phone. Not a big deal for me.

[teach]

Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

[tomaskafka]

This. For any serious discussion you need to have topics and async slow-motion discussions for them. Like forums.

Slack should definitely add a 'forum-like' kind of channel before someone creates a new 'forums with native client' product.

[asdff]

If you need threads, there's always email. No need to reinvent the wheel solely because the app is written in electron and gives off pleasing beeps.

[geniium]

That could be seen as an advantage

[Zarel]

For what it's worth, most gaming startups I know (including my own) seem to use Discord.

[bhl]

It’s part marketing, part functionality. For example, with Slack you can filter sign ups based on email. That being said, I would still love a discord for work where chat and invites overlays on top of a working document.

[chdaniel]

Always wondered that myself. I can't "get it" since I'm not a Slack user (nor a Discord user), though I interacted with both

[gugagore]

Is it still required to have a phone to sign up for discord? That's what puts me off.

[aliceryhl]

It's not required for everyone — only people Discord find suspicious for some reason.

[lmm]

That's never been required as far as I know?

[swarnie_]

Negative stigma?

I personally don't use it because everywhere I've seen it previously is in gaming/twitch communities.

[kkarakk]

1. Can't share large files with discord

2. Customer service doesn't respond quickly even with nitro plan

3. Confusing UX