I think at this point discord is the new IRC, a generic chat platform for communities, organised by interest - nearly all the same benefits of IRC vs Messenger apps, with the additional benefit that somebody cares enough to make it user-friendly. A shame that it's closed-source and centralised though :(

Discord is slack for not-work with far better voice chat.

Discord has become a pretty standard messaging app for non-gaming communities for a while now. Its getting to the point where it can simply be thought of as big.

Discords for small niches and personal servers are increasingly popular. Many subreddits have an associated discord.

About six months ago I created a discord account to join a server for an open source project, and since then I've discovered that almost every hobby and professional interest I have is represented in discord. I keep it open all day and spend several hours per day chatting on it. I suspect it's going to become a giant, and I hope they can come up with a business model that isn't user hostile.

Some of the guys I work with who have remote colleagues just sit on a discord the whole day with stuff on low volume and talk like really rarely. It's not just for gamers. It's like simulating an office. Pretty cool.

She is, but she doesn't use discord for gaming chat. She uses it for chatting and voice calling her friends.

There are quite a few groups on discord that are non-gaming related. Laravel, the PHP framework, has a pretty active one. I prefer Discord over Slack. Slack and Discord are basically the same thing now in the majority of features.

> I prefer Discord over Slack

can you explain why? I use slack at work and discord at home (for games). I find them to be pretty similar products, except that discord seems more oriented towards voice command and slack seems more reliable and less buggy (on a regular basis discord takes a very long time to connect). I personally prefer slack mainly just because I find the UI more pleasing.

Being able to mute and outright block annoying people is the main thing for me. The channels I'm in on slack don't allow that. It could be the plan type, not sure. I'm not a heavy user of either and try to avoid them if possible.

I actually prefer the UI of Discord. I like having all people just listed on the right instead of typing `@` and having to scroll through a list that pops up and blocks the main active content.

I've just seen too many games on slack compared to Discord that I find really annoying, with people being banned and instantly rejoining and flooding crap. It reminds me of EFNET in the late 90s with bot floods and all of the crap that ended up ruining it. It's not nearly as bad as efnet was, but it's still annoying enough for me to not want to use it. That might not be the case for a private company's slack or something, but I'm not really in any of those - mostly public type channels.

UI is exactly why I prefer Slack over Discord as well. I run a Discord server for a game of mine with a few hundred people, and often have to force myself to use it. That said, I used to feel the same way about Reddit.