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Comment by dekken_ | Hacker News Reader

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dekken_

> Their dev support on discord

This is also a red flag

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Stripe is developer centric. Discord has a lot of developers in their community.

I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart choice.

Right, but what if my mother wants to start a business? She's not a developer. Should she avoid Stripe?

What kind of company builds itself as only being a product usable by developers? We're a small niche market at best.

I would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work for her.

> Stripe is developer centric.

What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.

A normal forum would be better in most ways.

>it is a smart choice

For the customer?

It could be worse. Sorbet is on free Slack, which means any discussions older than a month or two are deleted.

Incredibly amateur hour if true.

Serious question: what's the alternative?

Paying for Slack so messages don't get lost?

Zulip is pretty good for this.

By default, you have a linear, IM-like UX, but it is trivial to fork conversations on specific topics.

There's these things called "forums" that we used to use...

I’ve seen Discourse work pretty well for public-facing support.

Using Discord for support is a major red flag.

As opposed to IRC? Slack?

Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.

Discord is not a public space. It's not indexed by search engines.

No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search feature to find your question among a billion chat messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel. Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of messages we receive per day.

Discord support is hell on Earth.

What’s wrong with using email or Intercom?

Nothing. It would be preferable to Discord, in fact.

What about good ol' forums? Indexable by search engines and proper moderation tools that have stood the test of time.

Like a GitHub issue tracker? The concept of forums is not lost on me, but I think the point of a chat service solves different problems.

My history might be a bit fuzzy, but that exists in lineage from when Stripe had an IRC channel for dev support.

This is Stripe opting to go to where a core customer segment (developers) live. Discord sucks but from a business perspective it’s smart. You wouldn’t use their Discord chat for just any issue.

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