We use Discord in a professional context as a kind of virtual office, with voice channels set up for team offices and meeting rooms. The persistent voice channel is the absolutely crucial benefit above and beyond the "click-to-start-a-call" UX on other platforms.
We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.
I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.
I am similarly astounded that Discord hasn't tried to reach for the enterprise market — if they had good multi-account support, and the ability to have audit logging on corp accounts, I think it would be hands down better than Slack for that use case. It's already better than Slack for personal use cases IMO.
I hope they monetize in that direction rather than ads (Discord seems to still be pretty reliant on VC funding, which makes sense to me since Nitro is pretty cheap and not particularly necessary to use the product) — it seems less soul-eating. They've been dialing back the gamer branding at least, which could help reach a broader audience.
Less so than with Slack.
a) If you're willing to accept using a SaaS for corporate communications, then Discord is no different than Slack. You run the risk that the vendor is recording what you do on the other end of that connection. For what it's worth, such a security stance also requires you to run your own email servers. The IT workload to run all of the above is extremely high, prohibitively so for startups and small companies. Even if, from a security perspective, it would be ideal to host it yourself - for most companies it's simply economically impractical.
b) Granted that you accept the risk of your vendor recording your communications, the odds of those communications being recorded are much, much lower for voice communications than they are for text communications, for the sheer cost of storing voice and video data. Running the audio through speech-to-text before discarding the audio may be a threat, but not for users whose office lingua franca is in a language not supported by contemporary speech-to-text tools, let alone automatically deciphering which language the users in a given voice channel are speaking without it being defined ahead of time.
In short, as long as you're not buying communication services from a competitor, you're probably fine.
By recorded I mean keeping a separate copy, i.e if somebody deletes a message or file in the UI then the malicious vendor doesn't delete their copy of the message or file. That's eminently more feasible for text communications as the costs of storage are so much smaller.
We only pay $75/month, for two levels of server boosting. It's so underpriced for the corporate usecase, it's practically criminal. We'd probably be willing to pay four or five times as much, especially if it would allow us to host video/screen-shares with more people.
I appreciate that Discord is gamer-focused branding, but their inability to launch more or less the same product under a professional brand is astounding. They're leaving huge sums of money on the table. For example, being able to run a public Discord instance for customer support, with individual rooms per customer, and customer screen sharing and get anybody in the company to leave their team office on the private instance and join the support call in two clicks is mind-blowing.