It remains to be seen if Discord has a long term viable business model or whether it will get dumped like Skype, AIM, etc. when they need to monetise it and users get put off by the attempts.
That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.
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.
Discord might have a lot of Nitro sales, but that's probably dwarfed by their CDN and bandwidth costs of all the streaming that goes on with it. The infrastructure to relay massive scale of streams (even without transcoding) is not cheap. There's only so many streaming minutes at 720p that a single $9.99 nitro sub can support.
They also do gif transcoding and a bunch of other things that do take actual compute resources that cost money.
Does anyone know how efficient / cheaply they can use their servers? I'm guessing the chat part of the service save for file / image hosting is probably pretty cheap, but the low latency voice chats might be pretty costly, even if they can efficiently host them on virtual servers.
Discord's voice chats have no apparent upper limit in how many concurrent users they support - they basically say "the upper limit is how many your client device is able to support without crapping out".
I haven't read into this but it seems like they're doing peer-to-peer for audio or the server load is INCREDIBLY efficient, given this.
This is observable to still be the case as an end user. When the discord servers are having issues, people's voices become inaudible. This can be resolved by moving the server to a different, less loaded region, even if that region should have worse connectivity to the users in the voice chat. For example, my raid group often have to bounce our server from Europe to the US to workaround reliability issues on the EU servers.
edit: found it. they use a SFU forwarder. That's the cheap version of going full centralization (MCU) benefits. they probably have a better deal on bandwidth than CPU to justify that, or all their use cases work fine with only one person transmitting at once, which gives you the same benefit of a MCU with less cpu usage...
I highly doubt it - what are you basing this on? I personally don't know a single person who actually pays for discord. Most people I know who use Teamspeak pay for it. That being said, Discord is way more popular than Teamspeak, it does remain to be seen if they can heavily monetize.
I don't know a single person who uses Teamspeak, and every discord server I'm on has at least one person boosting it. I was paying for discord for a while until I did a trim of my budget - but it gets you a shiny icon, you get to use more emojis, and other little things. You may call me a chump, but Discord is a product I value (like public radio ;) ) and so I tossed a coin to them.
Go to any public discord server with hundreds of users and you'll see them. I got my friends to pitch in to boost the server so that we can stream to each other in 60 fps but turns out our internet connections cannot handle it
That said, the move will likely be to the next highly funded product in that case, not back to TS/Mumble.