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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

We abandoned hipchat because the latest app was horrible; constant signouts, lost configurations, sso issues.

Skype is also a mess right now; with chat application bugs, UX issues (why does the freakin' mute button move around) calls that can't be joined or start cyloning, participants are suddenly dropped mid call. Throw in the spying allegations ...

Hangouts is great for video but is a really clunky experience otherwise.

With everbody dropping the ball, there certainly is room for Slack to come in and take control of this space.

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We're trying out Discord for work here. It's mostly targeted at gaming, but it feels far more like a "better Slack with voice chat" from my side.

With that said, shoot them an email first if you want to use them at a large company ... it's not an enterprise product.

Seconding Discord. It rocks for real time communication and works very well in a browser, with rock solid native apps.

And they send you really friendly emails.

edit: heh. Apparently I tried posting it to HN before. Perhaps they're going a little hard on the "for gamers" branding when it could really be for anyone.

Indeed, the React community moved from Slack to Discord. Slack has made it clear they are a tool for small teams. I don't necessarily see this announcement as a change from that.

Rather, Slack isn't a tool for a 8000-person community.

8000 people? Is it like a forum with many threads and topics going on or is it really like an IRC chat room with 8000 people in it?

Is this the biggest react community? Is being on Discord something they prefer to being on reddit or perhaps a forum?

I exaggerated a bit - they have 7656 at the moment (after being 'shut down'). It was the mostly-official place to discuss react, flux, webpack, other tech and libraries in the react ecosystem etc.

In it's peak, there were lots of channels for all the different parts and facets, including geo-oriented channels as well.

Now, its mostly just the dancing shark gif http://i.imgur.com/I2CBRBZ.png

> 8000 people? Is it like a forum with many threads and topics going on or is it really like an IRC chat room with 8000 people in it?

I'm a member of the UX Slack (https://www.designerhangout.co/) who have ~6k members, and it's pretty active. It's a cross between a forum and IRC, and (from a user perspective) fails pretty badly because of it :)

A major reason is Slack's limit of 10000 messages per free Slack. So conversations get lost within 2-3 days, there's no way to find them unless you've starred them. With no threading discussions don't happen well - there's a lot of noise (like IRC) which can't be filtered out.

Summary: No way to organise/archive knowledge (same q's again and again); noise of IRC interspersed w discussions, Slack's hard limit of visible messages.

Ever consider moving to Discord? No chat history limit there.

Not my call :) But I think the network effect of Slack has got too big for a move - it's become the GitHub of chat systems.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Discord is exploding right now.

Well, we'll be finding out at my work if it is, where we just adopted it company wide for about that many people.

If you're not paying they won't be too keen. Slack just doesn't work very well with that many people and channels - the app just grind to a halt on my Mac.

If you're paying 35k/year however, it would be interesting to see how they react to that...

Yeah, we're paying as a company, not sure of the amount though.

Oddly enough, Discord started out as a chat/voip tool for smaller gaming groups too, but as a side-effect of awesome engineering we've been able to handle large communities really well. Over the winter break, one community sprung up, going from no users, to about 2400 concurrents at peak, with about 600 of them in voice chat at the same time.

Also, our tech stack for the native/web client is React & our iOS app is React Native, so it was pretty awesome to see Reactiflux migrate to Discord.

Thats pretty exciting. My work tried slack and it started dying around the 2500 user mark, and hipchat, what we use currently, is pretty horrible.

Do you guys have retention policy settings and are able to handle something like 7000 member rooms for announcements?

We do not have any retention policy settings right now. Messages are kept until you delete the channel they're in.

Our product focus is on making VOIP the best it can for gamers/gaming communities. Definitely not huge enterprises!

However, 7000 member rooms for announcements? No sweat. We've had @everyone notifications targeted at upwards of 20,000+ users at once in a single server. I actually wrote the code that handles that. Lots of streamers, game developers and stuff actually use discord for announcements. One of the bigger ones in my recent memory was the Star Citizen PTU server, the devs used it for chat + announcements.

You could make a good amount of money if you focus on the few and relatively easy enterprise features of retention policies, sso & message export. Many large corps are sticking with hip chat but hating it because it's the only thing that kind of works.

I would say Discord is missing 2 crucial features that prevent it from replacing old software like IRC for large chat communities.

1) offline mode

2) different names for each server

Offline mode?

The ability to appear as offline or at least away. It is a feature present in almost every modern chat application.

No linux support either, sadly. The linux client has apparently been due "Real Soon Now" for nearly a year.

i've been using https://github.com/XNBlank/discord-linux for a while now, and it works quite well.

We came to Discord from Hipchat... mainly because I'm championing it. The killer feature to me are the voice channels when you're dealing with remote staff. They nailed this.

However, for a company, there are a lot of missing features, so definitely take some time to evaluate it first to make sure it's a fit. For example searching chat history (something we miss a great deal, but can live without). Also, the permissions are horrendously complicated and the fact that you can't remove or lock down the "public" room is super annoying.

That being said, we're still using it and pretty happy. It probably doesn't measure up too well against Slack if you don't value the group voice channels.

Just saw the threaded discussions feature for Zulip from a thread in here. Wow, that would be killer.

Chat history search is something that's coming soon.

Although the permission system may be something that's complicated, it fits the gamer clan niche well. A lot of people actually have been requesting that we add more complex permission hierarchies.

I think your permissions are fine but the weird permission locking of the default room needs to go away. There's no reason that room should be more special than the other ones.

It'd also be nice to make it clearer whether someone can view a specific channel or not (eg see it in the list).

Oh and... IRC gateway? :) Or at least open spec on the protocol, pretty please.

After trying slack we decided to use rocket chat.

It is a very good piece of open source software.

+1. To my knowledge Discord is and will always be intended for gamers for the forseeable future. They don't have the infrastructure to support enterprise expectations like LDAP/SSO, dedicated account managers, support hotlines, guaranteed SLAs (although I know their tech team is highly competent), etc.

I just took a look at Discord and it's really funny how it seems more of a Slack/Skype alternative than a TeamSpeak/Mumble alternative, even though they try to target the gaming market.

For example, there is no way to self-host a Discord server. While that might be OK for Slack/Skype users, some TeamSpeak/Mumble users might not like that.

It hasn't stopped it from becoming widely popular in the gaming community though. All gaming-related projects I follow are on Discord. This includes streamers and guilds.

My thoughts exactly. Since adopting Slack, the only time we use anything else is Hangouts for videoconferencing. Even using the attached chat in the hangout feels clunkier than using Slack chat during a videoconference.

When you really feel it is when Slack goes down and you have to go back to using something else. There are just so many little details in the presentation that make a text chat in Slack feel right. Adding videoconferencing to their platform is the logical next step.

In an ideal world they'll find a way to improve on video chat similarly! I'd be plenty happy though with an experience comparable to hangouts, but without leaving Slack.

Zoom (zoom.us) is really good for video conferences. It's got a slightly clunky interface, but the excellent audio quality and graceful fallback are clutch.

Skype is absolutely a disaster, but it's the only video chat solution I've seen that handles audio well at all (things like echo detection). The super-expensive fancy solutions like Cisco's offering are probably better, but I haven't tried. All the web-based tools seem to be different UIs on top of the same fundamental technology. I think Slack is nice and they generally seem to understand how to make software for humans, so I really hope they pull this off.

You would think that... But at $10k per room for video conferencing, it was a disaster half the time, phantom calls, all kind of problems. I can't tell you how many times we just put my laptop at the end of the table and fired up Skype or a Google Hangout. We've pretty much abandoned Skype for anything and use Hangouts when we need group video, otherwise it's just FaceTime.

I'll be happy to see how Slack integrates voice/video. If the quality is 80% of Hangouts and the experience is better, I'll take it.

I found the usability of Hipchat pretty subpar vs Slack as well. Things like editing or deleting messages, extensibility with integration, alerts and syncing across devices..

Snippets!? Come on! These should be basic, foundation features.

Once you go Slack..

Hangouts is great for video if you don't need things like readable smaller text on presentations or detail in design reviews when casting your screen. Our designers hate it and our customers are always asking things like "what's that button say? I can't read it". We used to use BlueJeans which had much better video quality, but the in-room systems were an order of magnitude more expensive than chromebox for meetings.

That was my first thought as well - in light of recent discussions here on HN concerning just how terrible Skype seems to be these days (I wouldn't know) it feels like an obvious next step for Slack. Good for them.

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