in a previous video we talked about slack and teams for workplace communication but there's
one tool that we didn't talk about and that's discord. Discord's the new kid on the block
it came around in 2015 and it's making the waves in terms of building community as a new
chat tool. We're going to take a deep dive into Discord, show you what makes it different,
what makes it exciting, and how you can use it for communication.
Discord first made the rounds in 2015 and it really started off with a focus on games and chat
but it quickly picked up steam with communities and has grown ever since. Let's take a one minute
deep dive into Discord and some of its features. So on the left hand side you can see the different
communities that i'm a part of and each community has its own list of channels i have a startup
community, a youtube community, a community that talks about tesla, and i actually have a number
of other communities that can be organized into subfolders as well. So it makes it really easy
to organize all your different communities up here you can also have a home area where you can have
direct messages and one-to-one communication with folks who you come in contact with.
Each community has its own list of channels and so you can see different channels and the channels
can actually be organized here i have a number of general channels you can also have voice channels
and voice channels is one of the unique things about discord it makes it easy to have voice,
video, or screen sharing conversations. Again the origins of discord around gaming and a lot
of these features are oriented in that way but it really has a lot of applications for general use
as well. Each community can have its own sections, its own moderation, its own discussions and you
can see in any community you have posts, images, conversations, emoji, and things of that nature.
Discord also makes it really easy to add your own server so simply by clicking the plus button
you can create your own server and there's lots of options in terms of servers that you can go
and create whether it's a gaming oriented server a server for your friends to chat with a study
group artists clubs or other community functions that you want to host makes it really easy to set
up a new server, get people on board and then have those conversations. Discord has a lot of
public communities, a lot of these communities are really active great place to meet new people
and have conversations. You can obviously type your messages in the input box here, you can also
add gifs, images, emojis things of that nature as you can in most chat applications. It doesn't
have all the tools that you may see in Slack or Teams, but for communication chat and community
it's really powerful. The interesting appeal of discord is that it's really suited for communities
because of the way it's structured. It's much more open, it's much easier to invite people to join a
community just by placing a link on a website, and that's exactly how lots of communities have grown.
You can find lots of very large communities across a wide range of topics and that's really one of
the things that sets it apart from Slack and Teams. While slack and Teams are fantastic tools
for internal communication within a company; Discord's real strength is that it's able to
be opened up for much broader community use. The other differentiation is on how these products are
priced. Where Slack and Teams is really priced on per person economics where you're paying per
person, per month. Discord is really oriented on individual usage so you can actually use discord
for free for hundreds or even thousands of users and then individual users can choose whether they
want to upgrade their own personal account. This makes it much more appropriate for large
communities that don't necessarily have a budget to pay for thousands of users on a per user model
this really sets discord apart and makes it really appealing for those larger communities some of
the user interface in Discord is really oriented toward gaming, it doesn't necessarily have that
enterprise feel. A lot of the ui is dark and black and very appealing to gamers and so it may not be
the right fit for every enterprise and there are certain features that are not necessarily
as refined as you'll see in Slack or Teams, but in terms of chat communication it's a really
powerful tool and the fact that it's free for very large numbers of users makes it really unique.
The voice integration and voice channels on discord are also unique and make it easy to have
a live chat room kind of like popping into a conversation or into a room and having real-time
voice so it's not necessarily going to replace your Zoom calls and your Zoom conversations
but it's a really nice lightweight alternative. While the roots of discord are in gaming, I
definitely see this product starting to move into the enterprise and starting to be a useful tool
for enterprises and workplaces. It's definitely nipping at the heels of Slack and Teams and i do
think it'll be a formidable product in that space if it chooses to go in that direction further away
from games. In the meantime, it is definitely a great product and I do see it starting to replace
communities within tools like Facebook groups where you can really have that open based
community without having a platform like Facebook underneath. One of the other things about discord
is it's so easy to create a community it's really unique from that perspective. I've created my
own community to talk about entrepreneurship technology and design if you want to check out
that community I've left a link in the description below I'm Greg Raiz, until the next one.