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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact, Goldman built a Slack-like chat service in house that they've spun off into a company called Symphony. It's pitch is that it's more compliance-friendly for heavily regulated orgs like banks. Also, it sucks.

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Oh Symphony was nothing like Slack. It was meant to be the Bloomberg IB killer[1]. You see, banks weren't happy paying 20k per user for chat. Turns out that the network effect is a thing and banks suck at building products, all Bloomberg had to do was sell Chat as a product and that was it [2].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/symphony-a-messaging-app-b...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f16d73ee-a910-11e7-ab55-27219df83...

I sold hosting to symphony in their earliest days. Before they disclosed who they were they said "money is no object" which is a common thing heard when quoting hosting. When I learned they were backed by GS I laughed...money literally was no object.

Point of symphony was the privacy focus. If you are a bank you could imagine the issue with have all your data in Slack or a Bloomberg chat DB.

I don't think that the security of Bloomberg and Slack are even comparable. The nature of chat in finance requires messages to be stored by a third party by definition since most of the communications occur in group chats and between banks/traders.

The funny thing about the whole compliance thing is, a lot of traders were using AOL Instant Messenger before it shut down, to the point where I believe Bloomberg Terminal even integrated AIM. Some traders ended up moving to Discord, which is nearly as strange.

What is kind of funny was that it varied by markets: Yahoo Messenger was big in commodities markets, especially oil.

I think if Discord ditched some of the gamer aesthetic (or had a pseudo-internationalizion setting to replace the meme-y loading screens strings with a reminder to turn in my TPS report by Friday) they'd get a lot more use in corporate environments

That's not their market though, and they seem to be quite fine with that. Their latest feature: buy games through the Discord client[0]. They know who they want using their product.

[0] https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001265609...

It's kind of silly though that it's not their market. It would cost them very little to create a brand for Discord-Enterprise that uses the see technology but markets at companies.

I really think they're doing the right thing. It is unfortunate given how universally useful it is as an application, but way too many services and companies try too hard to be all things to all people. Discord has had a single direction and a strong vision, and it's really hard to have that if you just want to be the world's best chat app. (Telegram feels like it tried to do that and well, it really hasn't gone as well as it feels like it could've.)

Splitting it in two is of course possible, but that comes with its own set of caveats in my opinion. Enterprise users have quite a different set of priorities from gamers...

Either way, I've worked at companies that don't know what they want to be, and it frankly sucks for many reasons. Good for Discord to know what they want to be.

I'm not sure if silly is the word here or that I agree. They've found a niche, the reside comfortably in it, and judging from their blog posts: their developers are very happy doing it.

Doesn't seem silly to me if it's working for them.

Are they profitable, though, or are they floating on VC money?

(worked at Goldman)

Despite having this, all the traders just end up using Bloomberg chat. GS tooling often gets in your way more than it helps.

Worked in finance (prop trading) and we used slack. There was some collaboration with Slack to get the compliance requirements right (eg. storing all message histories including edits for 7 years in sufficiently backed-up storage as is legally required).

It's okay, Slack sucks too.

Try Mattermost.

Last time I seriously gave it a try (4-6 months ago or so, it was during the last major slack outage for 4-6 hours or whatever it was) it was .. not pleasant to use really. Next on my list is zulip.

It's super performant for me these days.

It literally takes 10-20 seconds to switch between chat windows in Symphony, Slack is bad but not this bad.

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