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Comment by Froyoh | Hacker News Reader

Time to use Discord

Discord has all the same problems Slack does. It's a proprietary VC-funded app without a sustainable business model.

What's Discord’s business model? Slack has a paid-for tier, but I haven’t seen anything like that on Discord.

Discord has a paid subscription, but since they've committed to be ad-free and not paywall off key features... well, there's almost no compelling reason for it.

https://discordapp.com/nitro

They also seem to be data-mining the chats, and preparing to sell off data assets. From the Privacy Policy: " Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."

They are pretty open that they collect a lot of data about you, and this is not even the full list ("not limited to").

"...we may conduct research on our customer demographics, interests and behavior based on the information collected. This research may be compiled and analyzed on an aggregate basis, and we may share this aggregate data with our affiliates, agents and business partners"

Shared for dollars, of course.

"As we develop our business, we might sell or buy businesses or assets. In the event of a corporate sale, merger, reorganization, bankruptcy, dissolution or similar event, your information may be part of the transferred assets."

They can sell your data, including all the chats they have collected.

It is of course a Privacy Policy and not a Business Model strategy document, but it is pretty far-reaching and allows for monetization of anything you do with Discord. You are the product.

This is pretty good explanation.

https://media.8ch.net/file_dl/25ece2fb253fc4e6cdd3ac4ed99e4f...

A file download is a pretty big commitment for an "explanation". I'm going to pass on that. :/

What browser do you use that can't play webm?

Clicking that link in Firefox immediately offers up a file download. So does IE. I'd test with Edge, but my Edge is broken. :( I'm guessing you use Google's browser and Google doesn't assume Google's video format is a download when passed as a URL?

I've used Slack as part of a few organizations. If I'm starting my own ad-hoc technical organization, is there any reason not to use Discord? Seems to have all the features I need.

I've used Discord extensively and it's high quality software.

The only reasons I could see someone choosing not to use it are:

- Doesn't have the same plethora of plugins that Slack does, although it does have a fairly complete API.

- It is a gaming product and it shows, which might make some more straight-laced people balk at its perceived unprofessionalism.

It's also not open source and you can't self-host it if needed. I'd recommend a IRC server and https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Love Discord. Only one bone to pick: Every time I sign up to a new Discord instance, I get to jump through all the same hoops to prove to Discord that I'm a Good Person There To Engage As A Proper Human Being. It gets old fast. I wish that Discord instances would talk to one another and say "Oh, that gal, she's probably OK..." and give me at least a step or two up the ladder.

Does Discord even support XMPP or IRC?

Bitlbee has a plugin: https://github.com/sm00th/bitlbee-discord

Note that using that (or anything else that logs into discord using your username and password) constitutes a breach of Discord terms of service.

That means they may ban accounts for using it.

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