Discord is just way more polished. Everything works reliably every time.

The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people on shitty internet connections.

The client is always responsive and snappy.

Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more information on screen.

Their dark mode is much better.

Their code display/highlighting is better.

The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much better than others.

It's way easier to find where notifications come from.

I like that in Discord you can choose to spin off the conversation into a separate thread, or you can reply within the main chat and it quotes the comment you’re replying to (and the quote is clickable) in order to see context. You can’t do the latter in slack, and it’s easy to not realize that others have started a thread when it’s above the fold.

Isn't this like replying to a thread and clicking "Also post to channel" in Slack?

No, discord threads are siloed off into their own world. They're effectively more so temporary channels (and discord itself enforces the temporary nature - they get locked after disuse). Parent poster seems to like it, but for my use case I'd rather slack threads.

Auto-archiving != auto-locking

Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.

I wasn’t commenting about liking discord threads. My comment was focused on how you can “inline” reply in discord, while you can’t do that in slack (though someone mentioned that you can post your reply to the main channel in slack - a feature I’ve never noticed or seen used).

> they get locked after disuse

Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or something, because having to make a fake new thread just to comment on an existing locked thread would make me rage quit

Nope, it's after 24 hours of inactivity.

Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to everyone in your server.

Then that squares with my mental model of discord being for the gaming community, because imagine one's surprise about coming in to work on a Monday to have something to add to a thread made on Friday but unable to contribute to it. Or, what's this "vacation" stuff I keep hearing about?

Roles and channel permissions. I can't assign a role to someone and grant them granular permissions in slack like I can discord. I'm either a guest, user, admin or owner.

Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.

Example of granular permissions?

Think of it as "tagging" users. Instead of a user fitting a single pre-defined category, you can add tags to a user.

To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @developers and add only those seven, not bothering the other 3.

You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read #project but not post, while those that are neither @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same people in totally different groups and with different roles.

Way more customizable than by just having public/private channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.

You can do that in Slack as well. They call it user groups: https://slack.com/help/articles/212906697-Create-a-user-grou...

Slack user groups are much less powerful than Discord roles. Slack user groups are _only_ a way of bulk notifying users. Discord roles control effectively both views of your server, and permissions (though why "Pin Messages" and "Delete Other User's Messages" are still combined into a single "Manage Messages" checkbox is a glaring flaw in that granularity).

And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.

Tagging users is also possible in slack. I don't know if permissions by tag is possible, but the basic concept of "@ these 7 people" has been there for a while.

User X is admin of channel Y but guest of all the other channels or something like that I imagine.