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Comment by fb03 | Hacker News Reader

I have tried slack for some months and found it super laggy, both on the desktop and on android.

Then someone invited me to try Discord for company comms and I said "that's a gaming-oriented app, cmon it won't work well".... my mind was blown by how smooth Discord is.

We are a small shop but since we migrated from Slack to Discord we haven't been focusing much on 'how to communicate' but more on actually just chatting.

I advise everyone that talks about Slack to try Discord as a good alternative, even if your use case is synchronizing a loosely-knit team over the internet.

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Hmm, looks like Discord backend is built on C++/Elixir/Erlang[1], and Slack is built on a scripting language. I think people underestimate the difference in scalability and UX with something like this that handles lots of small packets.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/3q62hw/on_what_...

Many of the complaints regarding slack are about the interface, not the backend architecture.

I am sorry, I was actually talking about the Front UI, and both use JS (and Electron on the desktop) iirc.

Slack gets choppy (almost down to typing lag!) pretty quickly on a middle-tier Android phone and with Discord, it keeps snappy no matter what.

I'd say that Discord is the actual Slack killer today.

Discord is bigger than Slack, so I’d say that may already be true.

The secret to their app’s speed is using native components inside their React Native app. The chat UI (messages and input) for instance (IIRC) is native.

""" Now, local news:

In what's being hailed as "the Xzibit pattern", SV app devs seeking to lower UI latency towards the level of a late-90's IRC client have made a discovery that has the Valley buzzing. As one dev we talked to explained, "we started putting native in your native, bro, and it's awesome! I can type on my phone smooth, it's like the app's running on my 16-core workstation!" Other devs have been overheard in coffee shops explaining software written in C++ as "native all the way down".

More on this developing story when we return, right after this commercial break.

"""

iirc the Android app is actually native (not React Native), which may explain it. See https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-sticking-with-rea...

On the desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux) they use Electron. For Android it's written in Java (Native), and for iOS it's written in React Native.

Slack's messaging backend is Java (at least it was in 2014): https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217

The pubsub for live connections and socket events is Java but everything else is PHP. The Java mostly tries to federate stuff from PHP to clients and doesn't write or read directly to the primary store. I used to work at slack.

Discord's role/permission management is incredibly powerful. There's a couple things I'd love to see to make it a bit easier to use (duplicating/copying permissions between roles would be great), but I'm comfortably using it for a public Discord channel with 300+ members and growing[1] and I can actually visualize how to keep the chat functional if the member count grows by 10x.

I strongly recommend Discord over Slack for public chat groups; I'd happily use it over Slack for company chat as well, with the caveat that the integration/app story isn't quite as far along as Slack is.

[1]: https://byteconf.com/discord

My main complaint with Discord is that I don't have any of those integrations. But the thing is so snappy I might write a few of those myself ;-)

I was a diehard irc fan just because of the snappiness of using whatever app (native) I wanted, and at some point I vouched to never switch to those 'fancy newfangled chat apps' because while they had all this bells and whistles (markdown, inline previews etc) they couldn't do the most basic thing properly : snappy chat. Discord fixed that, I get the same kick out of it as I got when I used to hang out on Freenode. So hooray \o/

It actually gets interesting. You can use any slack webhook on discord by creating a standard webhook on Discord and adding `/slack` at the end. It also works for GitHub with `/github`.

TMYK

I run a 3000+ person community on Discord. It's incredibly easy to get a simple access control list going which makes managing this many people a breeze. For public facing roles, users themselves can enter the Discord server and choose their own roles, which makes all my previously manual human tasks automated.

Plus I pay nothing.

I would like to see an on-prem version or appliance for Discord so that I can protect our messages, set global and channel data retention policies.

I'd love to give zulip a try

Clicking on a Discord message notification on the mobile app doesn't redirect you to the relevant chat, it just opens Discord at your last location. On the Linux desktop app there used to be many times it would get stuck on the loading spinner. It just feels less polished than Slack.

For me at least, clicking on discord message notifications on the mobile app directs you to the correct channel, and I haven't ever experienced discord hanging on the loading screen on my Linux machine, over the two years since I got discord. Outdated info perhaps?

Interesting. Can you have a company org, channels the way slack does, permissions, dm's etc?

Channels, permissions and DMs are more powerful in discord.

But there's no separation of workspaces like in slack. Rather, they have servers. You log into discord with one email, and all its associated servers are shown. So unlike slack, you can't have different servers each with different email ids to login to.

Discord does however let you very trivially change your 'nick' for each server you're in. I'll take this over having multiple emails for servers.

https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/219070107-S...

Although you can change your nick, you can't have a per-server profile picture, which may or may not be a problem for business use.

How does this work in light of how some people, including myself, use slacks:

Work slack

N Side-project-team slacks

Personal Slack

---

I cant have work-slack email address to login to my personal slack, which is just for me. Further, need no connections between various side-project/side-interests slacks.

I also participate in Discords, but not actively enough where I am as fluid in using discord...

Slack is snappy and works well in Firefox :) . With desktop notifications and whatnot.

Required reading regarding Discord: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html

TL;DR

Discord explicitly confirms in its privacy policy[1] that it collects the following information:

IP AddressDevice UUIDUser's e-mail addressAll text messagesAll imagesAll VOIP data (voice chat)Open rates for e-mail sent by Discord

If Slack were listed on that website it would have the same spyware rating if not worse.

How is it spyware if users are opting in and installing/registering?

And they issue a DELETE command to their cluster as soon as you delete your account or message, so it's gone as soon as you want it to? (GDPR strikes again!)

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