Why choose Discord?
Communication within a team is often done with email or, in more modern and tech environments, with Slack. While email is a great tool when communicating with people external to a team (or organization), there are numerous reasons why it is a poor communication tool within teams (and potentially across organizations). Without making this post about why to not use email, a few reasons include:
- It is asynchronous communication, so you can’t chat in real-time, which makes it not suited for team communication.
- Slow to write and send emails within a team (steps are: create new email, type out all team members, write a subject, write an email body, click send).
- Lack of history (without having to use the Search functionality all the time, if emails are kept) of all dialogue within a team.
- New team members don’t have access to history of dialogue within a team.
- Organization of emails is dependent on the team member and not in control of the team. You can’t control how the information is stored (related to the history).
Email is a useful tool for certain types of communication, but it isn’t really the best option for team communication. Other tools like instant messaging, project management software, or video conferencing are more suitable for team collaboration and communication.
Slack is a better option, since it has synchronous communication, and you can control how information is distributed and organized (in “Channels”). Their features are targeted to teams in corporate environments, so the focus is more around productivity and work. However, Slack’s main focus is also, for us, its biggest weakness: It isn’t designed around being inclusive since corporate teams are by default exclusive. Slack has also recently changed its pricing model, so messages are not accessible after 90 days unless you pay (a high fee).
An alternative to Slack is Discord, which has become a popular communication platform, particularly for online communities. It was originally built for use by people playing video games together in a group, so they can chat while plying. However, because of this informal and easy way of joining voice channels and the text channels, as well as other features, non-gaming communities have been increasingly making use of Discord because of its focus on community engagement. Here are reasons why we are deciding to use it:
Its free plan is more suitable to our purposes.
Its overall focus and values (community based) align with our goals and values, since we want to encourage and build an online (and in person) community around Seedcase and related projects.
Text chat history is available in the free version. So onboarding a new member is easier for them to see what’s been happening.
Joining the voice/video channels are very easy, which is perfect in remote working settings and when co-working together.
There are few other reasons, but these are the biggest ones why we decided on using Discord.