The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?
The first assessment isn't wrong but limited in its scope to people like them. The blind and illiterate might 'overvalue' it as a priority. Getting the actual value is hard to tell prior to knowing the whole state of the market with a lot of work. It might become a best selling memetic "gag item" like the horse head mask or be useless even in the target market practically.
Source: worked on one such team at Amazon in 2017.
Slack is not an alternative.
A lot of large open-source projects have Slack communities, often alongside IRC ones. Take Clojure for example, with its 14k-members “Clojurians” Slack project.
Yes. It’s free for non-profit orgs.
I wasn’t clear. It’s free for non-profit orgs. Open-source communities that aren’t registered organizations are by definition not non-profit orgs.