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Comment by tracedddd | Hacker News Reader

$27.7 billion. Seems quite high given Discord’s momentum. Haven’t really been spending much time on Slack for a couple years and most new companies/projects seems to be selecting Discord. I suppose Salesforce has the money, though. I wonder if they are going to try to reposition it.

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Discord seems like a good choice for communities, but I've never seen a company use Discord for internal company chat, whereas almost everyone seems to use Slack or Teams.

Anecdotally, I see Slack as something I use for professional purposes, and Discord as something I chat with my friends on. I have Slack on my work Mac, and Discord on my personal Mac. I see Slack as an extension of Skype for Business/Lync/other business tools, and I see Discord as a better Mumble/MSN Messenger.

To add to anecdotes here, I've consulted in two companies that started using Discord this year.

They replaced Teams+Slack with Discord.

Discord could easily fix that with a more professional offering (perhaps under a sub-brand with slightly tweaked designs, but general UI familiarity).

I think a good third of the engineering teams at my company tried out Discord at the start of stay-at-home because of the way it integrates voice chat right next to the text channels. It was probably the most similar replacement to an open-office floor plan we could find (very low friction to start conversations, and anyone watching can choose to hop in if they want).

We quit that after screensharing was super low quality compared to Zoom — apparently (even paid for a Discord “server boost”, but no fix. I think it was an issue with the Mac client or something). I think one or two teams still use it, but for the most part everyone’s back to slack + Zoom now.

> We quit that after screensharing was super low quality compared to Zoom

Zoom's screen sharing is really far and above all others. The quality is razor sharp (framerate suffers but who cares about that when sharing a terminal or document), the collaboration features are amazing (scribble on the content), it has so many useful niche features (draw on your ipad/iphone).

Is Discord used in the enterprise? I've only used it for a gaming community a long time ago.

I'm an academic. Since the pandemic began I've used Discord on multiple occasions for work -- for example, if someone runs an online conference it's common to create a Discord and encourage chat among the conference participants.

But these are all fairly informal use cases, initiated by individual academics and not by "the university".

If you ask university IT about Discord, they'll probably tell you emailing .docx files back and forth is just as good.

My university's IT staff is surprisingly good. But they seem to be hamstrung by questionable decisions being made over their head.

To be honest, I’m not that in touch with enterprise. Despite Discord’s appearance as a platform for gamers it has pretty much dominated slack for a non-self hosted solution for the areas I’m familiar with. Small teams, OSS, cryptocurrency, strongly distributed WFH type startups, conferences, etc. Private channels are role based so the general public can integrate communication tightly with the main team while they work behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Discord launches a professional de-gamer-branded version soon. Target markets aside you simply get more from Discord for most general use cases and it feels like Slack is playing catch up rather than leading (like they used to) on some popular features.

Also, Discord has capable APIs and a fairly open developer program. You can make some really amazing and useful bots.

I'd use discord over slack if they had account switching, but there's no way I'm going to cross pollinate my leisure communications platform with work.

I'm not even thrilled about integrating all of my leisure time stuff under one identity (you can have a different nickname per-server, but the underlying account name is still quite visible).

I posted a comment here about why this is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24832204

On the topic of Discord for professional use, does anyone know if it’s possible to have different display accounts for the same login? I’m in a few different Discord groups for real-life friends, an online-only game, and one for FOSS development. I’d like to have different display names and profile pictures for each one, but so far all I’ve found is having to maintain 3 email login accounts and log out and back in when I want to switch communities. Is this really the intended way to do this?

You can change your display name on a per channel basis after you join. They can still see your account tag if they click on your account, so there’s no way to disassociate accounts with a single login. There’s also no way to change avatars per channel, AFAIK.

Per-server* and only if that server has it turned on. Servers can disable the ability for users to change their name

Yes, per server, thanks for the correction. I believe it’s on by default, I’ve rarely seen it turned off.

When I freelance, I bounce around a lot of different Slacks. I've yet to see a company use Discord.

I don't think enterprises are using Discord. It's a gamer thing really isn't it? It doesn't have a very grown-up image.

Discord is used heavily by OSS communities and other such projects; but I've yet to see it used by companies.

It really doesn't target the enterprise customer, or even SMEs

Also Gitter?

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