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Ask HN: Should company use Discord instead of Slack/Zoom?

9 points by chaoz_ ↗ HN
Many companies and schools in Russia started to use Discord as a free replacement for Slack/Zoom.

I've heard P2P is not the best choice for some domains and Discord might sell your data to their partners.

Is it really a good idea? If not, how to minimize possible negative consequences (like role management)?

4 comments

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syini666
You get what you pay (or don't) for, if the business is going to rely on it then pay for something that will meet your needs and come with some degree of actual support
qnsi
Discord for a company is a bad idea. The best part of slack is slack integrations. Sooner or later you are going to miss the option of your CRM talking to Slack
MelioRatio
I get that Discord has some appeal considering the current situation. Aside from the price, there are some clear advantages over Zoom, Slack and others, though I would very much discourage the use of Discord for companies or public institutions.

Firstly, Discord's privacy policy makes it unsuitable for most corporate settings: https://discordapp.com/privacy

It also lacks any first-party support for E2E and does not offer any extended support you might require if you want to roll out a solution at this point in time.

Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers, and while some of it may be easily ignored, the rather prominent dedicated "Games" Tab and in jokey quotes (Do a barrel roll, the cake is a lie, etc.) may not be received positively by ones superiors.

tropdrop
Piggybacking onto

> Lastly, Discord's UI is very much tailored to their target audience, gamers

We've been using Discord to talk to each other while playing board games with a group of 4. I've noticed I have a harder time hearing female voices through it - the sound seems to cut out quite randomly, so that the women in the group tend to have repeat themselves.. I'm not sure if this is anecdotal, but after this experience, and knowing how dependent voice recognition is on extant training datasets, I would think twice before trying to use it for business.