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Slack uses a language that is like markdown, but is not markdown, which is annoying for engineers.

Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.

Discord uses proper markdown and supports syntax highlighting.

These are two things that make me think Discord is better specifically for engineers, aside from it just being generally way better.



> Slack does not support syntax highlighting of code blocks.

It does, but only if you make your code block into its own post as a "text snippet." (I assume this is because Slack's internal markup doesn't allow regions to have parameterized metadata, but there is parameterized metadata at the chat-post-event level.)

You also get other benefits of doing this, e.g. being able to collapse the snippet, download it, etc. Code pasted into Slack should really always be pasted as a snippet. I just wish it auto-detected you were trying to do that and offered to make a snippet.


Yeah, I have done that. It’s really clunky. I’ve also done it to be able to use headings and other things that I’d prefer just worked in the main chat.


> Discord uses proper markdown

Not even remotely.

Discord supports:

* fenced code blocks (but not indentation)

* quoting, a single level (nested quotes don't work, properly replying to other comments is painful)

* inline decorations (italics, bold, underline, strikethrough, code)

* inline spoilers (an extension)

* disabling autolinking (an other extension)

It doesn't support: headings, paragraphs, lists (ordered or not), labelled links, tables, images, footnotes, images (you can only use the image upload feature which puts a single image below a comment).

It also has a limit to 2000 char (4000 with nitro), which can be rather low when posting code snippets.


I hadn't noticed some of those. I don't use Discord a ton, just enough to know it works better than Slack I guess, at least what they do support uses markdown syntax.

No bulleted lists... that's disappointing.

Maybe worth upvoting:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600400...


> Maybe worth upvoting:

My experience of the community forums is it’s only worth if you like venting or seeing people vent, the folks in charge of discord really don’t care.


The most frustrating thing is that somewhere on their website they mentioned that most people are not familiar with the Markdown syntax, so they chose not to use it. But instead they created their own syntax that even less people are familiar with...


That does seem bizarre. Was there some special reason for them introducing almost markdown but-not-quite as a feature?




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