Offensively, giving users a stake in Discord’s upside would encourage more communities to set up shop on Discord, and would serve as a retention tool against the notoriously fickle whims of the masses. It would enable and incentivize a thriving in-app economy. It would allow users to reward each other with a simple !thanks, and might even provide t... See more

That’s another key difference with Slack, based on the same architectural divergence. In Slack, employees can DM each other within their company’s workspace; in Discord, users can DM anyone as long as they know their handle (and as long as that user accepts DMs).

Discord confronted the challenge head-on. The team paid for Reddit ads (another “no-no” for early consumer companies) that directly called out incumbents TeamSpeak and Skype. Risky? Maybe. But it got gamers’ attention, generating spirited arguments about the pros and cons of each product.