[1] "We've raised over $30,000,000 from top VCs in the valley like Greylock, Benchmark, and Tencent. In other words, we’ll be around for a while."
I would happily still use Discord if they provided the exact same thing with a monthly fee. Hopefully at some point they throw in some extra features for a pro version and start charging.
I just use Discord for gaming and haven't used Slack a lot, but I think Discord will be great for work as soon as they release search.
[0]: www.discordapp.com
If not, I don't understand why they bothered mentioning "how will we make money?" on their website, and then why they didn't answer with, "By charging game vendors a ton of money for the SDK!"
In other words, if you and one friend join a game you can either talk/listen to that one friend alone or the entire 6 man team, and switching between the two requires multiple menu clicks.
So we use Teamspeak alongside the game to allow us to talk privately with each other seprate from the whole team in game. With any modern gaming PC the "wasted RAM and CPU cycles" are negligible.
> mine that data [...] more addictive [...] games
Oh, fuck no. No, no, no. I can not think of a more abusive thing for a company to do to its customers than that suggestion right there. How little respect would a company have for their fellow humans that anyone could even consider such a move?
Maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm ok with that.
I don't mean to imply that you yourself are being dishonest or that you will go back on your word at some point. I'm sure you have noble intentions and want the best for your users. But it might be beyond your control.
If the company gets sold or goes public, you could have drastic changes in management and their philosophy. You acknowledge this outright in your privacy page, under the "OUR DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION" heading:
https://discordapp.com/privacy
Discord has a policy in place that explicitly says they can do whatever they want with the information without limit, including selling it or transferring it without consent. This directly conflicts with employees' public claims about intentions.
The difference is that one of them is a legal acknowledgement end users must make before they use the software and the other is a 'feel good' thing to hear on someone's blog or forum post.
If they just wanted protection against an accidental slippage of data then that privacy page could be changed substantially. Instead, they pave the road for the explicit sale of data at a later time.
Or, if they wanted to leave the option open in the future they could say "This privacy policy is subject to change" and give users an opportunity to opt-out when it changes without historical data being subject to undisclosed future use. But this weakens their value in an eventual acquisition by someone who wants to monetize the data.
As it stands right now, in an eventual acquisition or even just some internal shifts of philosophy in the organization, all historical data is up for grabs for any potential use.
Discord really shouldn't have employees state that they will never sell users data when they explicitly allow and plan for that option. It may not be intentional dishonesty, but it comes close.
No, if it's from a known employee, it counts as a legal advertisement.
How about if streamers wanted to put ads in their channel, and the company would take a little handling fee? eh?
"Support this other streamer/studio/client, subscribe to remove ads"
Destroy IRC
Getting flagged for a Danger 5 quote? Someone just lost all their nerd cred.
They have found a pretty good niche with a lot of users. Just like how reddit did with subreddits. There are a lot of "smallish" communities out there, based around games, likes, twitch/youtube channels, etc, and they all need some place to hang out when they're not in saig game/channel.
I think right now what matters most is who comes out winner with the biggest community, monitezation can come later.
As soon as screensharing lands it'll be an across the board upgrade to Hipchat at my work (only missing feature I can think of is video calls, but quality over hipchat has always been a bit sketchy so we usually fall back to Hangouts).