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Discord has always seemed like a Slack clone with better voice chat to me.

With an emphasis on the gaming space and open communities, whereas Slack focused on corporate and closed communities.

I've been in the Go community for a while and they had to write a bot to get access to it (as Slack works invite only) and iirc had to work with Slack engineers to work with the scale they had. Meanwhile Discord's success is down to it being open, anyone can create a new channel and get instant access to things like voice chat.

Of course, this has its downside, and I'm sure Slack deals with a lot of abuse, ranging from porn to doxxing to it being used as a C&C server.

I think it’s a good product. The problem with all these chat apps (as companies to invest in) is there’s no moat; as soon as a more convenient or better option comes along, people will switch. There’s not a big integrated community or advantage to sticking to one app. Which doesn’t mean they can’t and won’t make plenty of money, just that I don’t buy into any hype around them.

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