product corner: slack v discord

I'm totally fascinated by how Salesforce's Slack and Discord have essentially built the same tool twice over

Is there anything like the Slack/Discord dichotomy? My work uses Slack, and I'm part of a few Discords, and I'm continually struck by their similarity. I think they've even poached features from each other – Slack's "Huddles" are a total lift of the core chat functionality from Discord. Obviously, the key difference lies in their respective audience – if Discord began arbitrarily targeting businesses I'm sure Salesforce would lose their minds, but there's obviously some sort of mutually-beneficial detente here.

I won't go in too hard on the Slack redesign – much ink has been spilled elsewhere – but lord, sidebars on sidebars on sidebars, as seen above. I get the instinct, but in practice it's extremely Microsoft Office in a way that befits their intended audience. In early days, Slack seemed so sort of fun – AOL chat rooms for the office – and Discord has totally grabbed that vibe and run with it, and Slack's ownership situation is so apparent with each passing update.