[1] https://twitter.com/jonsneyers/status/1420765059739914243
Public post-based discussion is moving to quick chats in private servers. It started out with Slack spaces but has moved to Discord because of Slack's inferior UX/UI/business model.
This makes taking part in a community a lot easier as you can actually talk to the people working on the stuff you're excited about, like you could with good ol' IRC except you don't need to log in at the exact right time to send them a message. Some open source projects opt to use Matrix rather than Discord or Slack, which is an open standard but the problems still remain.
Especially, finding a solution to an obscure error message can be a real challenge if you don't want to join some random chat room full of existing conversations to ask the question yourself, even if ten or twenty people before you already did the same. I much prefer the forums for this type of stuff but most of the world seems to disagree.
Having never used Slack, this statement astonishes me. It is difficult for me to imagine a worse UX/UI than Discord is.
This is particularly bad for projects with a high-traffic general chat, and low-traffic chats which are topic-oriented, because the 10k limit is per 'server' not per chat, anything low traffic ends up having little to no history visible.
Discord copied the channel system Slack uses but allows for fast and easy switching between workspaces. Slack lacks that, there's a dropdown somewhere but every workspace asks me to create a separate account rather than giving me the option to reuse an existing one, even when I enter the same email address I've used elsewhere.
Slack got off to a good start but it's like they stopped innovating at some point. I don't remember any new feature they've added that other chat apps don't already have.
Discord is also free with paid features per account (that most people don't really need imo) whereas Slack keeps your messages hostage if you don't pay (you van only scroll back a certain number of messages but once you start paying you can read them again).
Their model is clearly oriented at businesses paying subscription costs per user within their organisation. Discord's allows for much more organic server creation because anyone can join for free and only those who need the extra features need to pay.
One benefit of Slack is that it gives some kind of guarantee in regards to data processing. Discord isn't business oriented so its setup isn't great for companies who don't want their data to leak. Last time I checked, Slack's guarantees were a lot stronger than Discord's.
This can lead to pretty funny hybrid use. I've seen people have digital meetings over Discord (because Discord's voice and video channels are excellent) with Slack open for sharing text, documents, and all other kinds of attachments. Using Discord is probably against company policy (mandating stuff like Google Meet or Zoom) but the Discord UX is so much easier than many competitors. Its performance is also pretty good! During COVID lockdown my university gave some lectures over Discord when the dedicated video lecturing system (set up for a few small lectures a week rather than hundreds of people joining tens of lectures around the clock during working hours) got overloaded and went down hard. It took the university weeks to get enough capacity for their streaming setup and switching to Discord took one suggestion and an hour or so of setting up for every teacher.
I think the difference between Discord and all other companies is that Discord is clearly targeting normal user adoption, luring people in with easy to use features and tools, whereas its competitors target corporate contracts, locking down a whole group of users at once that don't really have a say in their messaging platforms.
I don't think Discord cares much about the business market but with a few small adjustments (i.e. only accepting accounts with a certain email suffix into a certain server, allowing an organisation to pay for Discord for all users within a guild) I bet they could start competing with Slack quite easily.