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Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior

Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert have already been converted. I expect CAC to go up and payer conversion to stagnate at best. I don't see how they can 2-3x their revenue this year (unless there are drastic, risky changes). In addition, the slow iterations on the mobile and desktop clients, and the meteoric rise of Discord are enough cause for concern. I don't see how this investment would have legs.

fpvracing 7y ago
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
- dleslie 7y ago
  Discord has far superior voice chat with groups. Discord has better options for channel control. Slack has better integrations with software development tools
  - fpvracing 7y ago
    For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
- alaties 7y ago
  Discord attempts to monetize by offering a sales platform for game developers integrated into their chat server. https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game
  - nexuist 7y ago
    This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers: "Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature." "Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord." "If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance." From the Discorc Privacy Policy: https://discordapp.com/privacy https://discordapp.com/privacy I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
- jMyles 7y ago
  > How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack. It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business. The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher. Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity. > I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean? Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
  - fpvracing 7y ago
    > Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity. Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
    - mffnbs 7y ago
      It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone. The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration. It's not a problem.
      - markmark 7y ago
        And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
- lewisl9029 7y ago
  Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels. But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples: - Can't change avatar based on server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360029341852 https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600... - Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S... I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows. FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
  - fpvracing 7y ago
    For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable. Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
    - lewisl9029 7y ago
      It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room. Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-... TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines. Wish you the best on your launch!
- Lucadg 7y ago
  We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
  - johnmaguire2013 7y ago
    Tapatalk is pretty solid for forums on mobile.
    - Lucadg 7y ago
      Thanks I'll check it out!
vhiremath4 7y ago
I'm guessing the answer is "yes", but have you taken a look at their S-1 filing? There is tons of addressable market out there for them, and their paying cohorts (year-by-year) have been accelerating in next-expand ARR (page 68): https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.
davnicwil 7y ago
My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase. It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
- enjo 7y ago
  I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
  - davnicwil 7y ago
    No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
  - fpvracing 7y ago
    I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
    - astrodust 7y ago
      This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
They can buy discord
firecall 7y ago
Shout out to FlowDock, which has far superior threading! We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.

fpvracing 7y ago

How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on? I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.

dleslie 7y ago
Discord has far superior voice chat with groups. Discord has better options for channel control. Slack has better integrations with software development tools
- fpvracing 7y ago
  For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
alaties 7y ago
Discord attempts to monetize by offering a sales platform for game developers integrated into their chat server. https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game https://discordapp.com/sell-your-game
- nexuist 7y ago
  This isn't the whole story. Discord also mines user data and sells it to advertisers: "Information You Provide: We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature." "Data We Collect Automatically: When you interact with us through the Services, we receive and store certain information such as an IP address, device ID, and your activities within the Services. We may store such information or such information may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. The Services may use such information and pool it with other information to track, for example, the total number of visitors to our Site, the number of messages users have sent, as well as the sites which refer visitors to Discord." "If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance." From the Discorc Privacy Policy: https://discordapp.com/privacy https://discordapp.com/privacy I say this as an avid user of Discord, which I use on a daily - dare I say hourly - basis. I'm perfectly fine with them collecting data on my gaming habits and the harmless stuff I talk about with friends. I don't think I would be okay with running a business through them, especially one in a similar vertical.
jMyles 7y ago
> How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. At NuCypher switched to Discord from Slack. It's not particularly tailored, but certainly cultural influenced. There are maybe a feature or two that make more sense for gaming, but it's very useful for business. The Discord voice features are particularly useful and are in use every day at NuCypher. Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity. > I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. I don't even know if I know what that means in 2019. As far as appearance, Discord is much more fun. Is that what you mean? Slack doesn't seem particularly professional to me.
- fpvracing 7y ago
  > Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity. Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
  - mffnbs 7y ago
    It's not as disastrous as this person makes it seem. It's a rest call you can use to have slackbot do or say whatever you want for integration purposes. You can customize the name of the bot as well as its icon, which would allow you to "impersonate" someone. The slackbot has limitations in that it looks different from a regular user and will identify it as slackbot if you click on it, as well as tell you who created the webhook to allow the integration. It's not a problem.
    - markmark 7y ago
      And since we're talking about Slack's use in business, if someone does that you fire them. It might be a problem for people using the free version to host public communities, but that's not Slack's target market.
lewisl9029 7y ago
Discord has much better performance for large communities, and I've found it to be perfect for remote collaboration with its intuitive and super low friction voice channels. But the issue around professionalism that you bring up is certainly valid. I don't want to have to maintain separate accounts for work vs play (unless there's a seamless way to switch between them, like for Google, but currently there isn't), but currently there's no way to present different personas to different communities from the same account. Some examples: - Can't change avatar based on server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360029341852 https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600... - Real account name shows up on profile even if you provide a different nickname to the server: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-Server-Nicknames https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S... I think they're still super laser focused on their core demographic of gamers rather than trying to expand into professional use and compete with the likes of Slack. You can certainly still use it in a professional capacity and it generally works great, and is better than Slack in some areas, but the lack of effort put into catering to those use cases definitely shows. FWIW, I currently work around the issues around multi-account management using Firefox's excellent containers feature (using 1 work container to segregate all of my work accounts from personal ones without also having separate views of history).
- fpvracing 7y ago
  For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable. Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
  - lewisl9029 7y ago
    It's definitely not for everyone (or every kind of community), but I've had reasonable success with it in a mostly-remote workplace where voice channels can help emulate desk-to-desk interactions with your immediate team, but as a purely opt-in process compared to a real open-office where you open yourself up to disruptions by anyone at any given moment all the time, and have no opt-out mechanism outside of leaving your desk and camping in a conference room. Not sure what sort of community you're launching, but if it's for coding definitely check out Spectrum. The Apollo team made a great post about their search for a new community platform and landed on Spectrum due to a couple of reasons that might apply to you as well: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-... TL;DR: The product itself is open source, it has a mechanism for longer-form discourse like traditional forums as well as real-time chat, and is fully index-able by search engines. Wish you the best on your launch!
Lucadg 7y ago
We switched from Slack to Discord in our community and I prefer it. It feels faster to me, the Slack app on a Mac got really slow after a while. I wish Discord added Telegram style voice messages and it would be perfect. To be totally honest I still think forums like phpbb where much better but they didn't really transitioned to the mobile world. I miss them.
- johnmaguire2013 7y ago
  Tapatalk is pretty solid for forums on mobile.
  - Lucadg 7y ago
    Thanks I'll check it out!

vhiremath4 7y ago

I'm guessing the answer is "yes", but have you taken a look at their S-1 filing? There is tons of addressable market out there for them, and their paying cohorts (year-by-year) have been accelerating in next-expand ARR (page 68): https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ https://sec.report/Document/0001628280-19-004786/ I do agree that product iteration has been slow. That's been a big problem for Slack, and it's my biggest speculation on their valuation. As someone who has seen inside the company (don't work there), their engineering teams have a ton of technical debt they've been making their way through and trying to set right.

davnicwil 7y ago

My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase. It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.

enjo 7y ago
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
- fpvracing 7y ago
  I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
  - astrodust 7y ago
    This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
7y ago

buboard 7y ago

They can buy discord

firecall 7y ago

Shout out to FlowDock, which has far superior threading! We waited for ever for threading to come to slack... and when it landed we were so disappointed.