Switching to Discord

Months ago, I started to consider using Discord as a platform for Streetmix conversations, as an alternative to Slack. Right on cue, this question appeared in my Twitter feed:

A few other organizations were already using Discord, or were contemplating the same move. This past fall, we made the switch. (Here’s the invite link our chatroom if you’d like to join us.)

And now I’d like to share why we switched.

If you’re like me, you have used Slack. In any technology-adjacent industry, Slack hardly needs an introduction. In the last five years, every company that I’ve worked for, plus many organizations I’m affiliated with, and even a handful of social groups, uses Slack as a primary method of real-time communication.

And if you’re even more like me, you’ve somehow become a member of somewhere between 10 and 100 Slack teams.

On the other hand, if you’re a fan of video games, then you’re probably also a member of at least one server on Discord.

Discord, unlike Slack, is not as well-known in the corporate world. Although marketed to gamers as a voice chat alternative, its core service (much like Slack’s) is the chatroom.

Discord also happens to be a better fit for Streetmix.

But first, a bit of context. Streetmix isn’t your conventional corporate entity. We’re structured as an LLC, but we’re entirely bootstrapped. Our product is an open-source civic engagement tool used by tens of thousands of urban planners and civic enthusiasts around the world to redesign and reimagine streets. Our team is mostly made up of contractors and volunteers. Our vision is to develop Streetmix as an open source ecosystem, for the benefit of communities — the same way we want our cities to be built.

In other words, we’re not a large team with ample resources and a centralized HR department. We’re a community of loosely-affiliated people, some of whom are longtime Streetmix contributors; others may only be involved for a shorter term and or just want to drop in once or twice for a brief conversation. Compared to Slack, Discord is better suited to handle this type of casual but meaningful discourse.

So with that, let’s take a closer look at the benefits.

1. Discord handles multi-organization membership better. In Slack, every “workspace” you join requires a separate login. In Discord, you can join various “servers” with the same login information. The weaknesses of Slack’s design have been discussed ad nauseam elsewhere, but because there’s an additional barrier to joining multiple workspaces, you’ll have to prioritize how you want to spend your time. The workspace for your actual job, as well as the workspaces for bigger, more active networks, will most likely be at the top of your list. All other workspaces will fall by the wayside. (Raise your hand if you’ve been invited to a Slack workspace that you’ve only logged on to once.)
2. It’s easier to drop in and out of a Discord server. Because you only need one username, it’s much easier to join a Discord server, and then leave it when you’re done. As I mentioned above, we have a large community of external contributors and users, so our platform needs to work for people who can drop in and out with as little friction as possible.
3. Joining a server yourself is a feature, not a workaround. Like an open Facebook group, you can invite yourself to any public Discord server, such as ours. It’s very easy to create a permanent invite page for new users to join instantly. Slack, on the other hand, assumes that membership is tightly regulated, so administrators must manually invite prospective users. In order to provide an easier way for outsiders to join their Slack workspaces, community-based organizations often had to deploy a third-party service to automate the process. But this additional piece of digital infrastructure is brittle: if Slack ever changed its membership protocols, or the third-party service became unsupported, we’d be in trouble.
4. It’s easier to deal with bad apples yourself. As an open-source codebase, we have a Code of Conduct. Because people can self-invite to a Discord server, and communities are loosely organized, there is always a potential for verbal abuse and harassment among users. To address this, Discord allows its users to block or just mute other users. Slack has steadfastly refused to implement this feature, because their target users are enterprise organizations, and problematic behavior is assumed to be handled by HR departments. Of course, we’d still need to track and remove users who harass other users on Discord — but if an administrator isn’t immediately available, this places a much-needed level of control in users’ hands.
5. Voice-over-IP (VOIP) tech is rock solid. Gamers have very little patience for voice communications that lag, stutter, or drop out altogether. So Discord has invested a lot of time and effort into making its platform work as advertised. (It’s surprising how often voice and video conferencing features of enterprise software are buggy and unreliable, as if that technology hadn’t been attempted for decades.) We’re think there’s a better experience with Discord than with Slack or Google Hangouts.
6. Better administrative tools and features. Unlike Slack, Discord provides unlimited message logging for free. In addition, Discord allows you to define your own user roles and permissions. (Slack defines them for you.) These features better suit the needs of Streetmix, an evolving digital community that lacks the structure of a traditional, corporate hierarchy.
7. Faster loading times. Whether you’re on your phone or computer, Discord has seems to load much faster than Slack. In addition, Discord’s web app allows for rapid switching between multiple servers. By comparison, you can’t switch between Slack teams instantaneously in the web interface. It’s only possible with its desktop app, which is often a power-hog — it’s one of the first apps to go if my laptop is low-battery.
8. Cheaper. Unlike Slack, Discord’s pricing model is such that it charges individual users rather than organizations. Users that subscribe to Discord get additional perks that work across every server they’ve joined; meanwhile, Slack’s bonus features are unlocked only when the organizations have paid for them. Slack also charges organizations based on the number of active users that they have. This makes sense for corporations, but it’s harder to swallow for organizations with fewer resources.
9. More communities are using Discord. While Discord’s target users were traditionally, gamers, many other loosely-organized communities or even small teams of freelancers are now using Discord. For instance, the communities that use front-end web frameworks like React, Vue and Ember are also on Discord. But it’s not just programmers; many other creatives use it as well. There are groups for artists, writers, Internet celebrities, and even the New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs for short, which, if you’re a city planner, you should totally know about), as well as the open-source hardware kit-seller Adafruit. Streetmix was founded by designers and influenced by games, and the people in our network are largely creatives, so there’s a cultural fit, too.
10. Cute mascots. I dare you to tell me you don’t love Nelly! Or Wumpus!

Here’s the million dollar question, though: has switching to Discord actually improved Streetmix’s engagement with communities or its users?

To be honest, I wouldn’t say we’ve truly achieved that. The reality is that digital communities take time, energy, and empathy to cultivate. A strong online community won’t naturally result from merely changing the underlying technology platform — it requires ongoing human investment. To ensure meaningful improvements to our online community in the long term, we have more work to do.

That said, given Slack’s barriers to participation, switching to a platform with a lower barrier is worthwhile for us.

Now that I’ve gone over the benefits of switching to Discord, I’d be remiss not to mention some of the drawbacks we’ve encountered.

1. Switching costs. Nothing in this world is free. Switching platforms means that we need to update digital infrastructure and documentation, as well as consider the cognitive load that comes with modifying existing members’ habits. If you’re already familiar with Slack but have never tried Discord, you’ll naturally feel resistant to change. We’ve already seen some Streetmix members drop out of chat altogether because they’d rather not download or use another application. After all, there’s always a learning curve.
2. Lack of familiarity. At the same time, our anecdotal experience is that, for those working in traditional urban planning, transportation, and environmental design firms, Slack had never been adopted in the first place. These firms don’t keep apace with the adoption of modern services the way technology startups do. For a significant portion of our audience, there’s no “Slack vs. Discord” debate, but rather, a question of whether to use any modern chat app at all. In many cases, their firms may instead consider an enterprise solution that many of us have probably never heard of. So whether we use Slack or Discord, we’re introducing many of our users to something new.
3. No threads. One of Slack’s biggest benefits is its threading feature to keep side conversations where they should be — out of mind and out of sight. Since Discord doesn’t offer threading, conversations can become much more chaotic. At the same time, this is not as much of a problem for us; we haven’t yet seen levels of communication and engagement that would make threading a necessity.
4. Limited custom emoji. As an emoji-loving netizen, this one is probably my biggest pain point. Slack allows the use of unlimited custom emojis, whereas Discord tops out at 50. We haven’t used up all of our slots yet, but it does feel like an arbitrarily low limit, especially since some active Slack workspaces have hundreds of useful or silly reactions.
5. “Isn’t Discord that place where racists organize hate rallies?” Discord was unwillingly thrust into the public spotlight when it was revealed that white nationalists used it to organize the violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville that killed counter-protestor Heather Heyer. Discord took action to remove the white nationalist users from its server and published a response — and an exemplary one in comparison to, you know, that other platform that many of us can’t seem to quit. At the same time, any public server is still at risk of being infiltrated by fringe groups. And this isn’t necessarily a problem that’s unique to Discord — every platform has the capacity for spreading hate, if not properly addressed.
6. Single identity. In the same way that the multiple identity issue (with separate logins required) becomes a hurdle to joining many Slack workspaces, having a single identity across all Discord servers also poses problems. You might want to appear as being online to one group (for example, to friends), but offline to another (like your co-workers). Or you might want to use different profile pictures in different places. You can’t really control your presence on a granular level in Discord’s single-identity model.

We’ve made the switch, but should your organization do it too? As much as I’d love to see more groups take the plunge, I think it’s fair to say the answer is “not necessarily.” Every community has different needs and objectives, so you’ll have to think about what yours are, and write your own list of pros and cons.

But many organizations have assumed that Slack is the de facto standard, and that troubles me. While there is certainly something to be said for go-to online platforms that everyone is familiar with — we’re clearly not better off with a hundred chat clients to choose from—having options in our platform ecosystem is healthy.

So far, I think we made the right choice, and I’m excited to see how our community continues to grow in the years to come. Please join us!

Many thanks to Aline Reynolds for editing and reviewing drafts of this post.

Streetmix is a civic engagement platform for designing public spaces. Remix and share your neighborhood street at streetmix.net.