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Can anyone provide any insight into why Discord can afford to host these large communities and Slack can't? From my understanding, the free Slack version doesn

by iooi 9y ago

Can anyone provide any insight into why Discord can afford to host these large communities and Slack can't? From my understanding, the free Slack version doesn't offer unlimited history, so I'm wondering how Discord can offer these features.

shados 9y ago
Back then they had mentioned how their architecture was fairly low cost (they use a much more modern stack than Slack does, for one). That was before search though. With search, I'm really not sure how they pull it off.
- jhgg 9y ago
  I'm the engineer who worked on the Search backend. Read our blog here: https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-indexes-billions-of-messages-e3d5e9be866f https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-indexes-billions-of-... Cost isn't actually too bad, given how we've designed our search schema - and how we lazily index.
  - shados 9y ago
    Makes sense. I did read that blog before, but I just can't keep thinking about just the cost of storing that much text on disc, even if it was compressed, would quickly add up. Maybe my mental math is failing me (or I'm overestimating how many messages there are), but that still seemed expensive. In the end, as long as you don't go out of business, because I'd be very very sad :)
    - jhgg 9y ago
      Storage is actually really cheap for this, we don't store the message data in ES, it just builds the inverted indices. I explain this more in-depth on the blog post. On GCP, 50TB of Persistent SSD is roughly $9000/month before any discounts.
savanaly 9y ago
Not sure if this answers you question about how Discord can afford it while Slack can't, but the topic of how they store all those messages was addressed very well in this article. https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m... Based on the description given in that article it's a technical hassle to store that many messages, and it could be Slack just thought it didn't want to deal with that.
21 9y ago
Maybe Slack was so sure of it's moat that it could afford to demand payment. Discord might forgo some profits right now for a better future. But now I'm pretty sure Slack is in panic mode internally. Discord had unbelievable growth in the last months.

by iooi 9y ago

shados 9y ago

Back then they had mentioned how their architecture was fairly low cost (they use a much more modern stack than Slack does, for one). That was before search though. With search, I'm really not sure how they pull it off.

jhgg 9y ago
I'm the engineer who worked on the Search backend. Read our blog here: https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-indexes-billions-of-messages-e3d5e9be866f https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-indexes-billions-of-... Cost isn't actually too bad, given how we've designed our search schema - and how we lazily index.
- shados 9y ago
  Makes sense. I did read that blog before, but I just can't keep thinking about just the cost of storing that much text on disc, even if it was compressed, would quickly add up. Maybe my mental math is failing me (or I'm overestimating how many messages there are), but that still seemed expensive. In the end, as long as you don't go out of business, because I'd be very very sad :)
  - jhgg 9y ago
    Storage is actually really cheap for this, we don't store the message data in ES, it just builds the inverted indices. I explain this more in-depth on the blog post. On GCP, 50TB of Persistent SSD is roughly $9000/month before any discounts.

savanaly 9y ago

Not sure if this answers you question about how Discord can afford it while Slack can't, but the topic of how they store all those messages was addressed very well in this article. https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7 https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m... Based on the description given in that article it's a technical hassle to store that many messages, and it could be Slack just thought it didn't want to deal with that.

21 9y ago

Maybe Slack was so sure of it's moat that it could afford to demand payment. Discord might forgo some profits right now for a better future. But now I'm pretty sure Slack is in panic mode internally. Discord had unbelievable growth in the last months.