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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

Discord would be crazy to not take this deal. They could go public, but they have no clear monetization path to ever reach that valuation.

For Microsoft, however, it holds incredible strategic importance to their Xbox division. If suddenly the #1 gaming voice and text chat on PC is fully cross-compatible with Xbox and Xbox services it puts Sony at a huge ecosystem disadvantage. When added to the context of Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda and their shift in strategy to Xbox as a service it makes perfect sense.

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If they start requiring a Microsoft account to sign in like they did with Mixer then I know a bunch of people will be out, including me.

If they treat it like GitHub and let it be it's own thing then maybe I'll stick around. I doubt they're going to treat it like that though because they don't treat gamers like they do devs.

Maybe now's a good time for somebody to start building an alternative.

I wonder. You are right, they would probably force accounts become Microsoft accounts at some point.

I think there is also going to be higher public expectations of moderating and monitoring of what is discussed on Discord if Microsoft owns them. That may not be a headache that Microsoft even wants to deal with.

There is an alternative, and it's quite good. https://www.guilded.gg/

The issue is that we are entering a phase where secondary services are adding value on top of discord. Things like Patreon integration for content creators, numerous service specific bots and a growing number of VOIP related integrations (for example https://craig.chat/home/) make it harder to consider alternatives as replacements.

There already is an alternative which HN loves https://element.io/ https://matrix.org/

They haven't messed with Mojang / Minecraft too heavily (or altered the login flow)

> or altered the login flow

Mojang recently announced that all mojang.com accounts would be migrated to Microsoft accounts. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/mojang-account-move

Shouldn't Amazon also be bidding on Discord? Discord and Twitch are already a perfect marriage and any chance of losing that could seriously stunt Twitch.

OBS kind of solved the UX issues of setting up a Twitch stream with a single host in a nice fashion. But there's no simple way to set up shows that need to mux multiple source streams from multiple hosts (e.g. interviews, discussions...). Discord could probably fill that niche with a good integration.

IMHO vertical integrations through acquisitions on such a scale and of such importance ( Microsoft gobbling up studios and gaming tooling such as Discors) should be investigated and stoped on anti-trust grounds, or at least MS should be forced to do interoperability. It will drastically tilt the scales towards Xbox and MS cloud gaming if there's a tight integration with Discord and many Microsoft-owned exclusives.

Discord is basically Slack but slightly better.

Continuing to silo it into the gaming niche when Slack was just bought for 3 times as much makes no sense.

I know it's tempting to compare Slack and Discord, but they really are different applications for different use cases. Discord makes a terrible Slack. Slack makes an okay Discord.

They're different because of branding only.

Feature-wise they're 90% interchangeable.

Microsoft can slap a white theme on Discord and rename it to something stupid like "Agile Teams" and have a ready-made Slack alternative.

The permissions models for the two are wildly different because of the different use cases. Discord has a lot more by way of moderating and exposing different defined subsets of your server to different admin defined user groups. Slack has opt in on a per channel basis per user and unlike discord channels, any user can just create one rather than being these things admins have to set out and organise ahead of time. Slack has pinning as a "anyone can pin" default, the thinking being users pin stuff for theirs or others future reference, discord ties it to same permission as deleting other user's messages, thinking pinning is a moderator activity for making announcements.

Server admins control users on slack on the other hand. Your server admin can deactivate your entire account, DMs are tied to a server and your server admin can read them. It's a business tool, the expectation is employers have access to your business communications. The same on discord would be a massive privacy violation. But now as a business, how do you ensure that users aren't sharing passwords in chat, that your departed employee doesnt have a ton of company secrets in their dms etc

> They're different because of branding only.

Their UX and APIs are incredibly different and their server management and moderation tools aren't even comparable between them.

The 90% interchangeable is only in feature checkboxes for the client application.

The whole channel model is radically different, with Discord having terrible defaults (for any use case imho, but definitely for companies). Discord and Slack are superficially similar, but it breaks down once you get down into the details. Discord is built around having a larger 'untrusted' community, whereas Slack is built for employees at a company who are trusted that little bit more.

You cannot leave a channel in Discord, and by default it will notify you of every message sent in every channel on the server. The best you can do is mute a channel and select 'Hide muted channels'.

Discord has far superior voice comms - in both quality and features (Voice Channels are great), and then there's the whole "roles" system.

IMO you vastly overestimate the corporate use case.

In my experience in places where Slack was settled on as a corporate messaging solution the three questions asked (in order of importance) were

  * "Does it support custom animated emoji"?
  * "Does it have website and document previews"?
  * "Can I send my notifications to it"?

(It's silly but that's how it is.)

I still think Discord doesn't make sense or is very good in a corporate setting.

Out of the box it doesn't, but it's 99% of the way there.

What I would do for cross-platform voice chat with Playstation. I held a small amount of hope for Discord coming to Playstation (and Xbox), but I guess that's gone now.

I don't know if it's a huge money maker, but I see a lot of my friends buying their Nitro subscription service at $10 a month, so they should at least be breaking even?

Well, my friends and I don't, so perhaps not.

I have a small server, and I can't see the point of paying for Nitro just to have animated custom emojis. Not worth the $10/month to me.

There's a $5/month Classic option which still gives you all the vanity features without the server boost scheme.

If you get value from Discord, would be sad to see it go out of business, and have steady income, consider subscribing at that tier.

$5 feels right to me for cross-server emoji, control over your user hash, and the animated avatar. I never really bought into the server boost thing, myself.

Only if their primary motivation is profit.

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