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Comment by brenryd | Hacker News Reader

Discord could be interesting as Amazon has already shown interest in the gaming / streaming / online community space with their Twitch acquisition.

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One could copy-paste Discord, replace all occurrences of "gaming" for "enterprise" and it would be a much better business communication platform than Slack.

And replace all instances of “Discord” with “Harmony” and you have the perfect Enterprise chat tool!

No no no, it should be called Synergy

Someone already thought of this. https://symphony.com/

I don't think this is true. You can't really join/leave channels on Discord (yes I'm aware you can use roles to give permissions but it's not the same).

I've never used Slack but in Microsoft Teams there are Teams and Channels and they pretty much map 1:1 to Discord's Servers and Text Channels.

You cannot leave individual channels of a Team though you can mute them and you have even less permissions than Discord.

So maybe it isn't a 1:1 replacement for Slack but it certainly could compete in the field.

Teams is garbage compared to Discord or even Slack imo. Complete garbage UI.

This is my biggest complaint about Discord, and the reason I rarely check the few servers I'm on. There are three channels out of 80 I'm interested in. Just let me leave them!

You can mute channels and hide them, or mute sections, or mute chanells and collapse the sections they are in. There are lots of ways to get channels you don't want out of your face.

This isn't scalable. My employer has many many thousands of channels on our slack instance. Opt in is so much better than opt out at that level

You can opt-in with role-based permissions. Discord has been used by massive servers with hundreds of thousands of users, it's a bit involved to set up but it's not impossible. You can even automate a lot of it with bots.

You understand that an admin needing to set up a channel, a bot and a role is a bit more involved than any user just hitting create channel and inviting the relevant users/users searching and joining the public channel, right?

EDIT: Another example of discord's permission system being a poor match for the business use case is pinning messages to the channel is the same permission as deleting other user's messages. Additionally, the channel per server limit is 500.

Message threading would make it better though.

God please no. I would disable this in slack in an instant if I could. I dread the day it becomes available in any other platform I use.

Underrated opinion right here.

It's like they took IRC, saw it worked for businesses, and were like "how can we fuck this up, slowly, to destroy the very essence of what made chat channels useful in the first place?".

Why? It's a really fantastic feature in my opinion that turns a noisy chat room into more of a focused forum.

The issue for my Slack workspaces is that they are not noisy. So what happens is, people (inadvertently?) make threads, which then turns off notifications about that conversation for everyone else, therefore taking them out of the loop. And because the room is not noisy, they may not notice that they've missed the conversation until hours or even days have passed.

Ah that makes total sense!

They're inching towards this it seems, they've been incrementing rolling out revisions to the new reply UI for the last couple of weeks.

Twitch already purchased Curse Voice about four years ago and renamed it to the Twitch Desktop application. It was what Discord is now before Discord existed. That was already a losing battle when Twitch made the purchase though so they ended up stripping out all of those features. It would have made more sense for them to buy Discord back then.

https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/Ending-Support-for-Voice-Ch...

> Twitch already purchased Curse Voice about four years ago and renamed it to the Twitch Desktop application. It was what Discord is now before Discord existed.

Curse Voice released in June 2015. Discord released in May 2015.

At best you could fudge the numbers and claim that Discord and Curse came out at the same time. A claim that Curse Voice was anything before Discord existed is flat out false.

Curse Voice actually released in early 2014[1][2]. I remember mainly because that year is burned into my memory from the CTO at the time snapping his fingers non-stop into microphones testing noise/echo cancellation and latency.

[1] https://www.player.one/curse-voice-vc-funded-skype-gamers-be...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/17/curse-gets-a-million-game...

Google needs to buy Discord, do the gluey bits to integrate it into GSuite, shut down all its other chat offerings, and then let them do their thing.

What Google heard is: buy discord, glue it into everything and then shut it all down after 2 years.

I'm imagining a meeting a few years back, at Google:

"Ok, you know our motto, 'Don't be Evil.'?"

Heads nod.

"What if ... what if ... what if we simplify that?"

"How so?"

"Just cut off the first word, 'Be Evil.' Simple, elegant."

"I like it!"

----

Jokes aside, I think Google does a pretty good job of keeping the major products steady. Our little cohort on HN isn't a great sample for determining what "major" is.

Seems to me that either "Hangouts" (or whatever it's been most recently renamed to) is "major," and so many might argue it proves you false regarding "steady," OR it's not major, and discord would thus not be major and likewise not be kept "steady".

That's a fair assessment.

Google Play Music, Hangouts, AngularJS, Works with Nest API....

They've killed off a lot of buds, but they've also killed some great products.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Given some of their moves with Google Workspace tying together Gmail / Meet / Chat, I doubt they could get away with this without significant antitrust issues.

They still haven’t fully closed on their Fitbit acquisition, so I’d expect they’d have a tough hill to climb for a Discord or a Slack.

Yeah, Google has a chat app addiction that’s not going to be solved by buying yet another chat app.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

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