I really agree Discord is amazing and wish I could use it for work instead of Slack.
I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model (even though I hate it when people use threads in Slack) and the whole everyone in every channel except for role-based privacy settings. The second one especially is a big deal because you can't do things like team-only channels without a prohibitive amount of overhead.
That said (with zero knowledge of their architecture) I have to feel like both of those missing features aren't too terribly hard to build. Its very likely Discord is growing as a business fast enough on the gaming and community spaces they don't feel the added overhead of expanding into enterprise (read: support, SLAs, SOC, etc) makes sense and are waiting until they need a boost to play that card.
> I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model
They do have a threading model now (if you are talking about replying to a message in a channel and having your reply clearly show what you are responding to). If you are talking about 1-on-1 chats with other people in your same server then yes, that is still lacking IMHO in discord. The whole "you have to be friends" to start a chat (or maybe that's just for a on-the-fly group) is annoying.
Discord gives every user an identity that is persistent beyond the server; you have a Discord account, not a server account. Slack does the opposite. Enterprises would hate Discord's model, as they prefer to control the entire identity of every user in their systems, such that when they leave the company they can destroy any notion of that identity ever existing.
Absolutely agree. I like the 1 main discord account but I wish I could have 1 "identity" per-server as well. I don't love that I am in some discords that I don't want tied to my real name and others where I've known these people for over a decade and would see in person multiple times a week (before the pandemic). I know you can set your name per-server but you can't hide your discord username (or make it per-server) which sucks.
Agreed completely. Discord has always been much smoother for me than Slack, and the voice/video chat quality is literally the best I've ever seen anywhere.
If they made their branding a bit more professional and changed the permission model from the (accurate) garbage you described to something closer to Slack then I think Slack would be doomed.
I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model (even though I hate it when people use threads in Slack) and the whole everyone in every channel except for role-based privacy settings. The second one especially is a big deal because you can't do things like team-only channels without a prohibitive amount of overhead.
That said (with zero knowledge of their architecture) I have to feel like both of those missing features aren't too terribly hard to build. Its very likely Discord is growing as a business fast enough on the gaming and community spaces they don't feel the added overhead of expanding into enterprise (read: support, SLAs, SOC, etc) makes sense and are waiting until they need a boost to play that card.