I've also noticed that in a lot of tech-related social circles people are increasingly choosing Discord over Slack. That's a trend I totally didn't expect: at least until a few years ago it was clear that Discord was for gamers and Slack was for work and everyone else. That changed quickly. Impressive indeed!
At my work we use Discord to have virtual "desks" (really just audio channels) so people can drop by and chat while you are at your desk. If you're busy or don't wish to be disturbed you can 'lock' your desk to prevent people from joining it (it limits the room size to 1, aka just you).
It really has helped the social factor of moving nearly everyone in the office to remote working. Every department that has adopted the "virtual office" Discord setup loves it over Slack and basically never uses Slack anymore. It's way less awkward to call people, it's easier to not incidentally disturb them when they're busy, during breaks/lunch you can go to the "breakroom" and hang out and chat with everyone else. And it was all very easy to setup and with the Discord server template stuff we can even clone it for each department with very minimal work (renaming channels to that departments' people).
Slack implemented something similar called Huddles, but I think is for paid plans only. I personally think Slack calls quality in general are much worse than other services or platforms like Discord or Meets/etc, so I don't know if it'll really help reaching people and companies that are using alternatives for voice.
Huddles uses Amazon's chime backend for audio, so it should perform much better then the current "audio calls" that slack had, though I haven't tried it yet.
> Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.
It does, but only if you make your code block into its own post as a "text snippet." (I assume this is because Slack's internal markup doesn't allow regions to have parameterized metadata, but there is parameterized metadata at the chat-post-event level.)
You also get other benefits of doing this, e.g. being able to collapse the snippet, download it, etc. Code pasted into Slack should really always be pasted as a snippet. I just wish it auto-detected you were trying to do that and offered to make a snippet.
Yeah, I have done that. It’s really clunky. I’ve also done it to be able to use headings and other things that I’d prefer just worked in the main chat.
It doesn't support: headings, paragraphs, lists (ordered or not), labelled links, tables, images, footnotes, images (you can only use the image upload feature which puts a single image below a comment).
It also has a limit to 2000 char (4000 with nitro), which can be rather low when posting code snippets.
I hadn't noticed some of those. I don't use Discord a ton, just enough to know it works better than Slack I guess, at least what they do support uses markdown syntax.
The most frustrating thing is that somewhere on their website they mentioned that most people are not familiar with the Markdown syntax, so they chose not to use it. But instead they created their own syntax that even less people are familiar with...
The free discord tier is better than the free slack tier. That’s honestly why 90% of ppl use discord over slack.
Also paid discord is 100x cheaper than paid slack, for non-corporate entities. You can get top tier discord for like $100/m while slack price goes up with each user. Not to mention that discord allows users to easily assist in upgrading your server while slack doesn’t have that functionality at all.
They also pivoted their marketing message away from being "for gamers" and towards anyone who wanted "a place to hang out," like developer groups or high schoolers.
Kinda makes perfect sense, Discord is very good addition to subreddit or Facebook group. And barrier of entry is low, just like those two. It fills a niche for audio and chat of large communities.
Discord hasn't gotten bloated yet the way Slack has, which makes it much more pleasant when all you actually want to do is chat and maybe hang out on voice and sometimes with a screen broadcast.
Once you're in an enterprise space, Slack's features become actually useful.
