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013a | 5 years ago

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is.

* iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives.

* WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users.

* Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2]

* Discord, 100M monthly actives [3]

* Slack, 12M daily actives [4]

* Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse.

The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable.

I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world.

[1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-...

[3] https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-...

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-mil... (this was also announced on Slack's blog, but that's down).

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jjice|5 years ago

I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio and video service that I've used, especially kicking Zoom to the curb.

013a|5 years ago

Discord is definitely in the same realm of scale as Slack, and probably bigger (they publish different metrics, so its hard to say for sure).

The really impressive thing about Discord's scale is the size of their subscriber pools in the pub-sub model. Discord is slightly different than Slack in the sense that every User on a Server receives every message from every Channel; you don't opt-in to Channels as in Slack, and you can't opt-out (though some channels can be restricted to only certain roles within the Server, this is the minority of Channels).

Some of the largest Discord servers have over 1 million ONLINE users actively receiving messages; this is mostly the official servers for major games, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends.

In other words, while the MAU/DAU counts may be within the same order of magnitude, Discord's DAUs are more centralized into larger servers, and also tend to be members of more servers than an average Slack DAU. Its a far harder problem.

The chat rooms are oftentimes unusable, but most of these users only lurk. Nonetheless, think about that scale for a second; when a user sends a message, it is delivered (very quickly!) to a million people. That's insane. Then combine that with insanely good, low latency audio, and best-in-class stability; Discord is a very impressive product, possibly one of the most impressive, and does not get nearly enough credit for what they've accomplished.

For comparison; a "Team" in Microsoft Teams (roughly equivalent to a Discord Server or Slack Workspace) is still limited to 5,000 people.

pr0zac|5 years ago

I really agree Discord is amazing and wish I could use it for work instead of Slack.

I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model (even though I hate it when people use threads in Slack) and the whole everyone in every channel except for role-based privacy settings. The second one especially is a big deal because you can't do things like team-only channels without a prohibitive amount of overhead.

That said (with zero knowledge of their architecture) I have to feel like both of those missing features aren't too terribly hard to build. Its very likely Discord is growing as a business fast enough on the gaming and community spaces they don't feel the added overhead of expanding into enterprise (read: support, SLAs, SOC, etc) makes sense and are waiting until they need a boost to play that card.

davidwparker|5 years ago

We use Discord exclusively at my day job.

We have a few bots we've integrated with things (deployment, stats, etc).

We use it for all our voice/video calls.

Edit: We've got roles setup well for things like contractors, devs, marketing, etc, so it's easy to lock down different conversations in channels.

It's been fantastic.

The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is the (IMO) poor implementation of threaded discussions.

Edit: it definitely has issues with connectivity from time-to-time too, but not bad overall.

TBH, I'm not sure why companies use Slack (I use it for other organizations, so have experience with it too, but not extensive).

gruez|5 years ago

>I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack

Keep in mind you're comparing daily active users vs monthly active users. I'd guess most slack users are online weekday for pretty much the entire day (because it's for work and your boss expects you to be online), whereas a good chunk of discord users are only logging in a few hours a week when they're gaming.

screye|5 years ago

Just anecdotal, but as someone who has used Teams continuously for 1.5 years, I can say that it has never been down for me.

That being said, individual instances of the app are notoriously unstable causing random annoyances. But, I am on a very early build of Teams, which is buggy by definition.

gmmeyer|5 years ago

Slack and the others have different contractual guarantees and different regulatory environments. Comparing them is not really fair because the reality is that these other services probably just lose tons of messages and slack/teams can't do that! They have to have better guarantees.

johnmaguire2013|5 years ago

IME, Slack is far more likely to lose my message than iMessage. I believe that's part of the point being made above.

gilbetron|5 years ago

It isn't just # of users, though - SlackOps is probably unique to Slack in that list (minus Teams, I guess) - so # of messages per month is a better metric. Not that I'm letting Slack off the hook, it still may be that their codebase and/or dev process is just nasty.