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Comment by hot_gril | Hacker News Reader

I've used Discord for work chat before. It's not designed for that, but it does a better job than Slack, MS Teams, or Google Chat.

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Well, if you have the opportunity to choose, it's a bad choice to surrender your communications to a commercial globally centralized black box both professionally and privately. Moving to Zulip, RocketChat, Matrix/Jitsi, etc. instead of Slack, Discord or even Signal/Whatsapp should be the long-term goal for everyone.

Adobe has already started to feed its customers' data to its AI. Who says, other providers won't take advantage of broad contracts and terms in order to avoid informing their clients.

One big hurdle to this is how there's no widely-used open standard. Many corps don't want to commit to something niche that might lose support, but if there were many interchangeable services for the same kind of chat, it'd be a different story. The standard used to be XMPP, but I used to work with that closely and can rant for an hour about every reason it failed, and maybe any new standard would have similar problems.

Part of my criteria for a work IM tool is something that non-techies can actually use. I wouldn’t wish Discord on my worst enemy, with all its weird gamer marketing language. And I certainly don’t want to work in a team where I’m that far removed from reality.

I'm looking at the Discord UI now and don't see any gamer lingo except for the "welcome" messages. I can see how the UI could be overwhelming with features, and my older family members couldn't figure out how to use it the one time they tried, but Slack is even worse in that way too. And MS Teams was so bad that I couldn't figure out how to even log in.

If it weren't for the security and reliance implications, I'd run a company chat over Facebook Messenger. Simple as.

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