Online Learning Communities— Slack v/s Discord 🤔
Learn about tech tools for running engaging communities.
“Are you a part of Feynman’s Discord?”
The internet’s lowered the entry barriers to gaining knowledge — location & wealth don’t cause as much friction as they used to. As we step into the '20s, we do so knowing that content consumption has largely been solved for. But that’s not all there is to learning!
Information is just a stepping stone to gaining knowledge and wisdom. Tuning into the right set of people is key when it comes to accelerating one’s learning.
Learning = content + community
A managed Online Learning Community (OLC) strives to generate the following set of activities to drive up the exchange of value —
Orchestrated : Webinars, AMAs, Question of the Day
Organic : Chats, Link Sharing, Request for Help / Introductions
Automation Based : Points, Badges, Leaderboards, interest based feeds
Communities can be built around academic topics (physics), industry verticals (SaaS), fields of expertise (marketing), hobbies (guitar) or around people with intersecting interests / affiliations.
Seeding your community, modulating the inflow of members while retaining the attention of existing users are all challenging activities. Picking the right platform to organise your community decreases the fires you have to fight.
Hosting your OLC
Since the nerds set up their homes on the internet early on, online communities have always existed in the form of mailing groups, IRC channels, forums and subreddits. Despite their unwelcoming UX, they served us well.
Fast forward to now, sparks fly in interest based WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp has mass adoption but lacks flexibility and organisation. The nerds are now flocking towards two rather flexible, chat centric upstarts in the neighbouring spaces of work and play. With API access, bots running wild and the ability to structure conversations, you should seriously consider running
Slack : World of Work
Spun off from an internal communication tool, Slack has quickly gone on to take over the modern workplace. It serves as a replacement to emails, an online water cooler and a hub for data.
The formal feel shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.
Discord : World of Play
Online gaming is a big industry, and Discord serves as a voice + chat communication platform for gamers. Their motivation was to make it easy for strangers to jam up.
With an edgy vibe, Discord has made it to the scene.
Note that although slower moving protocols such as forums and (to a certain extent) Twitter do exist, we’re going to focus on chat styled software due to their malleability.
Although we use Discord for our learning community ops for the Nova Semita fellowship, we end up using Slack as the communication tool for the team. We believe that both the products serve very distinct audiences and use-cases. While pouring over our breakdown of features specific to OLCs, bear in mind that you should pick up a platform to deliver an UX that’s more suited to the mission and audience that you are catering to.
Feature Breakdown
Multiple Hubs
A single user can live in multiple Workspaces (Slack) & Servers (Discord).
Both your DPs and name can be modified per the workspace in Slack. On Discord, your DP is global across servers in Discord while your nickname can be customised for the server.
Expect people walking in to your community to be a part of multiple hubs.
Channel Based Organisation
Both Discord and Slack allow you to conduct discussions across multiple channels. Take care to build up channels only as and when demand for them crops up.
Channel level notification settings helps one cut out on the noise and tune into relevant discussions. Channels can be both private and public, allowing for hierarchies and closed room discussions to peacefully coexist.
Discord allows you the flexibility to arrange channels and assign them to categories which are collapsible. This helps us organise channels under suitable headers, unlike Slack which forces an alphabetical arrangement.
Threading
Since Slack is out to try and replace e-mail, they have a neat threading feature implementation. Expect a smooth experience only once everyone sticks to using it as intended.
Discord is built for gaming, hence misses out on threading completely. That’s a bummer!
DMs & Group DMs
The ability to have 1:1 or private group conversations is critical for an active learning community. By default, both the platforms allow you to directly message (DMs) members of the hub.
The difference lies in the fact that DMs on Slack live inside workspaces — you’ll end up having different conversations with the same person in different workspaces. Note that you won’t be able to message people who you don’t share a workspace with.
On Discord, DMs live independent of servers. Users have a UID which you can use to DM them. Users do have a choice to block DMs from users who they aren’t friends with.
Bots & Integrations
Bots, integrations and automation can help post updates, conduct polls, connect individuals and services with the workplace. Slack and Discord allow API access and have their respective bot platforms.
Slack’s bot and automation ecosystem is rich. The ability for bots to inject custom buttons and logic flows right within the workspace gives it an edge over Discord’s ecosystem.
We’d recommend Slack based communities to sparingly use bots meant for team building and culture to drive up engagement in their community. Take care to not introduce tools just because they exist — do it to solve problems that your communities faces, or flows that they want to make happen.
As for Discord, the bots are restricted to using Discord’s markup language which is akin to Markdown. To overcome the lack of interactivity, developers usually often hook up actions to custom emoji reactions to a message — like assigning a role, giving access to specific channels. Note that even though Discord bots can create Group DMs, they can’t be added to them (unlike Slack bots).
Voice & Video
Both Slack and Discord have inbuilt video chat and voice calling features. Don’t be surprised to see these features being underutilized. Discord has a limit of 10 people on a video call, whereas Slack only allows 1:1 calls on the free tier.
A dedicated video conferencing platform such as Zoom.us would come handy if you are serious about non-chat based engagement for your community.
Discord also has voice channels, which are akin to text channels — you can tune in to a voice channel and chatter.
Invitations
You can natively invite people to your slack workspace using their E-Mail ID. If you are adventurous, you can use slackin to allow people to invite themselves to public Slacks.
In Discord, you can add new members by passing around an invite link (whose expiry you control). For public discord servers, this makes onboarding a breeze. For private Discords, this is less secure method than Slack’s mail ID tied invites.
Pricing
For online communities which seek to run at scale or are bootstrapped, the question of cost is rather critical. And this is where Discord steals the show over Slack.
Although the free tier is rather liberal, Slack charges $8 per active user per month in order to give you access to chats beyond the latest 10k chats, have 10+ bots on the workspace and have shared channels.
Discord is completely free! You have access to all the messages on your server, no question asked. The paid tier does give your server a few cosmetic and feature boosts, though these might not be relevant to running a learning community.
Our Recommendation
Most independent learning communities are either free or low fee services.
We would recommend free / public servers to be run on Discord since it is meant to handle scale at no cost to you. For smaller paid communities, Slack is worth considering because of the good support for bots and integrations.
Check out the following Slack for inspiration on running communities👇🏽
Talk to us!
We at Nova Semita are pioneering work on setting up active online learning communities. Hit us up on Twitter if you want to talk about setting up an online learning community.
We work in tandem with the folks over at Transcend Network in pioneering work on OLCs. Check out their thoughts on the future of work and learning.
Commsor has interesting material on managing online communities.
