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Comment by fpvracing | Hacker News Reader

For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.

Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.

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The historical context of discord, is that every gaming group would have some sort of chat app (mainly IRC, more recently hipchat, yammer, slack) as well as a push-to-talk voice app (ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble, ...). Discord is merely combining the best of both (slack, and all its api support, with built in voice channels).

Nobody has to use voice. In many communities, most don't. But as the above said, it's a super frictionless way to talk if needed and is a lot less formal than "starting a call/meeting". You just publicly hop into one of a dozen visible channels and anyone else can hop in with you to discuss an issue or just hang out mostly-not-talking.

It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room.

Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines.

Wish you the best on your launch!

I will check it out and thanks!

FWIW, The ReasonML, Rust, and Elixir language all have active communities on Discord. It really is pretty good for the use case.

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