It is even more surprising that by just adding a few privacy features, they can start targeting the corporate market.

I would gladly pay them.

Privacy is a huge concern. It's difficult to phrase this properly without sounding like an asshole, but Discord's development team has a lot of very young people (no proof, but I'd swear some of them are 13-16 years old). If you've ever listened in on their Discord voice channels, the level of immaturity is astounding. Power to them - it's great to see talented youth create a great product. I just wouldn't trust them with a business's confidential information.

Discord's specifics aside, it blows my mind that people use any off-site SAAS for internal communications, including Slack. The database set contains so much critical information, including infrastructure passwords, private SSL and SSH certs, etc. Employees will send anything and everything over the company's chat client. Even if you trust the company's employees and general security, the fact remains that your uploaded attachments typically have a public URL not requiring authentication to download.

> Discord's development team has a lot of very young people (no proof, but I'd swear some of them are 13-16 years old)

Someone spreading FUD?

Everything with Discord feels like a super mature well develoved product.

The technology is there to solve this. End to end encryption solves this problem and lets the devs wash their hands off the privacy concerns.

End-to-end encryption is essentially useless/unsolved when it comes to large, dynamic groups like Slack channels. Any new member who joined wouldn't be able to see any history in any channel.

But this is not a problem of Discord but of all group chats. The initial discussion point was that Discord might be insecure because of young hackers building the product.

Do you find Discord to perform better than Slack? Any thoughts as to why?

I've used Discord for gaming related purposes on another computer, but it didn't feel... "better" to me. Sluggish at times, but in understandably large rooms with lots of traffic.

I'm mainly curious in your statement as to how Discord performs compared to Slack, and if better, how they achieve "better".

Onboarding is a millions times easier.

With Slack you need for every chat a new login/password and 100 clicks for sign-up, skip tutorial and email-verification, WTH why? Getting users into Discord is one single click. With Discord you have one login and you can have different names per server.

And Slacks admin pages are just a confusing pile of mess, my .vimrc is light-weight compared. Slack is so overrated and people just use it because everybody does.

Discord has never been sluggish for me.

However, both are timewasters.

> Slack is so overrated and people just use it because everybody does.

Sidenote, I use it because the integrations take a burden off of me. Ie, my CI might not have integrations for Discord. My CI has plugins, and do those have integrations for Discord too? Etcetc. Being the most popular is not always just due to "we use it because everyone does".

Personally, I dislike how expensive Slack is. I'm not sure if I prefer Slack over Discord or not, but even if I preferred Discord, I'd still choose Slack for the integrations that I don't have to write myself.

> My CI has plugins, and do those have integrations for Discord too?

Yes and if not there is a Slack-compatible API, check Discord's API doc.

Just try Discord, takes one minute and will know yourself if you like it. It's not a behemoth like Slack.

I've already used it, quite a bit, as I mentioned. Not for work specifically, though. And never the API of course. Heck, I probably have it open at home right now haha.

Discord is too branded as a gaming tool. No way I could convince any professionals to use it.

I've done this already. Definitely an easier pitch for startups.

What?

This is where they started and you can also use the product for everything else than gaming.

And if you mean the dark theme you can change this to a bright innocent I-am-serious-engineer Slack theme.

FWIW, I tried Discord recently and it felt more sluggish and heavier than Slack on macOS.

I made the opposite experiece and just made a test with some medium and similar sized chat servers with many users amd history (bitcoin related chat servers) on Slack and Discord in Chrome which should represent their native Electron apps:

Data from Chrome Inspector's network tab:

          Slack Discord
  Req.       93     103
  Transf.22.4MB   5.2MB
  Finish 39.19s   6.48s
  DomCL.  6.53s   4.01s
  Load   21.70s   4.16s

Maybe some more of us could do some tests as well. Anyways, I really can't believe that Discord is sluggish. Slack definitely is. First I thought it is so slow because they load all the chat history but they don't.

Do you use discord at work?

I do for outside-asking-for-help. At my current client internal communications have to be self-hosted so neither Slack nor Discord is an option; if I were still at the startup where I worked previously (where teams chose their own tools) I'd certainly be pushing Discord.

Discord feels very responsive and lightweight. Anyone knows what their stack looks like?

They have some fantastic dev blogs[1]. Their backend seems to mostly be elixir.

1: https://blog.discordapp.com/tagged/engineering

Elixir for the backend as others have said, and the frontend is React on Electron.

Elixir for the backend, they have around 5 million concurrent users.

Electron

It's a wonder that any of these services enjoy success when IRC exists.

As an IRC, Slack, and Matrix user and netadmin, I will say that Slack and other nextgen chat services have a few advantages over IRC:

- automatic backlog resumption

- server stored pageable backlog

- continuous presence (you don't disappear from the channel when you leave, you're just marked as away)

- authentication built into the spec rather than implemented using a "services" layer

- general upgrades to what is allowed in the chat, such as long pastes, inline images, and file uploads

If you haven't tried Matrix yet (the best client is probably Riot at https://riot.im/ ), I encourage you to give it a try. It's essentially next generation IRC.

That sounds like having an irc client connected to say ZNC. It has all of the same features and has been around for years..

Sure, but a bouncer is another layer on top of your connection to the server, when architecturally it's much better to have the server manage that for you.

Why should end users care about the architecture? It's architecturally a hell of a lot better than a massive electron app that eats all of your RAM!

There are a million more embedded features in Slack than there are in IRC. Sure someone could spend a year trying to implement all of those plugins in their private IRC server and it be less functional and user friendly, but why would someone want to waste their time and money doing that?

IRC as a service. Allows users to pay a static amount each month and have a solid chat solution.