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I really doubt it, discord's draw is that while it makes it much easier, you don't need a brain to log in.

They're riding on the network effect that they won with zero-friction user adoption, startup capital and a client that was okay at the beginning. Now the client is pretty darn good, they're basically AOL Instant Messenger now, except people actually want to pay.

As an aside: Hopefully their security team is phenominal, they are gonna need it. Personally, I'm extremely distrustful of Discord's future CIA (infosec term) of their service.

Why do I think Matrix isn't going to win after a client polish round or twelve? Well, its a little bit weird to say iPhone users who will have to wrap their head around one or two concepts about bridging and so forth, as opposed to Discord who has an API and a business unit dedicated to interoperating it with other services. Why would Facebook link to Matrix bridges when theres no money at all?

Why has slack not achieved this? the onboarding flow wasn't/isn't as easy and it is definitely targeted to business or institutional use would be my guess. Casual users like blinking tiny gifs of :kappa: and the gamers are already there.




In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.


Slack works better for finding information as bad as it is at that.


If you join an open source project's slack server, you really hope that the information you want is in the most recent 10,000 messages.


How? I look through my discord search settings and it’s pretty straightforward. I search for something a friend posted some months back and found it pretty easy. The only difficult part is knowing which server it’s on.


Discord uses default elasticsearch settings for search, so almost every word belongs to an equivalence class of synonyms and conjugations that are often not equivalent or mutually relevant in technical usage (for gaming-related use or for work-related use!), multi-word phrase search is impossible, searches including words in the stopword list are impossible, searches including programming language syntax are impossible, etc. "ide" is a fish or an Integrated Development Environment but belongs to the same equivalence class as "i'd" (contraction of "I had" or "I would", mysteriously NOT on the stopword list!) or "id" (part of the mind in Freudian psychoanalytic theory). If you go to a server concerned with programming, psychoanalysis, or fishing, and you search for "ide" or "id" you probably weren't looking for every single time anyone ever said "i'd."


So you use something designed for gaming to run a technical community, and when the search wasn’t built to handle highly complex or technical queries you complain?

Why not use Slack?


It doesn't work for gaming either. I mentioned this in my comment.

Slack is a worse product in almost every way, but it does have better search than Discord if you pay 850 yen per person per month. Do you think that e.g. the Sorbet slack or the Zig community discord should pay 850 yen per person per month for any random person who wants to discuss their open source project?




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