Crypto Community Apps: Discord vs Slack
Community-building has proven itself to be quite pivotal in the adoption and success rate of cryptocurrencies, ICO’s and crypto assets. But where are these communities congregating?
The stronger the community backing a coin, the more resilient it seems to become during price fluctuations or market downturns.
Although there are no “formal” or dedicated community applications for crypto enthusiasts, there are messenger apps that are being used to kindle communities — Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, etc.
A lot of these messenger apps are great for getting started, but they quickly become noisy and unmanageable after growing to ~100–150 users. It becomes hard to keep up with all the chatter.
Since successful CC’s can amass more than 150 users in a very short period of time (just take a look at this Telegram Tracker for ICOs and tokens), if you’re looking to build community (not just a following), communication needs to be more organized and strategic as you grow. Otherwise, the community just becomes “noise” and users leave.
Slack has been able to separate itself from the pack when it comes to moving beyond normal messenger-style conversations.
However, since Slack’s current business model focuses more on enterprise teams, and not necessarily communities, the lack of features and accessibility on their free tier has hindered growth for a lot of CC’s.
“That’s why Slack didn’t work for us, we were losing chat history due to the 10k message history paywall. Losing 3-month old discussions was not good.” ~Member of btcchat.slack.com
This is where Discord comes in. Discord is (currently) a free communication tool designed for gamers, but is quickly becoming popular among CC’s.
I first discovered Discord from a group called Crypto Traders Group. Once I got in, and saw how they had organized everything, I was intrigued.
The reason Discord has potential is because it provides the following features for free: external link warning, the ability to group channels into categories with granular permissions, simple role creation & assignment, separation of users based on engagement, unlimited bot integrations, and more.
NOTE: Discord is built for gamers, so the sense of speed and audio/video quality is incredibly smooth. No gamer enjoys audio delays, but no average user does either.
Some of the other features I enjoy also include: audio channels, single account access to all servers, and easier bot integrations via Zapier (the native bot marketplace could benefit from more business/productivity apps).
For these reasons, Discord has a lot of potential to disrupt Slack if they ever decide to release an enterprise plan. Unfortunately, they’re not quite “enterprise ready” just yet, but any community builder should keep any eye out for this application as gaming elements (e.g. gamification) lend themselves well to building highly engaged communities.
*The above article was inspired by this tweet on Twitter
Are you a crypto user on Discord or Slack? What has your experience been like? Would you like us to review other apps? Let us know in the comments below!
