Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Since I haven't seen this yet in the comments, a startup I worked at in a previous company set up Discord channels for small teams, and it by far replicated the closest to "folks are sitting next to each other in the same room" experience that I've seen before.

I see lots of advice here about documenting everything, discouraging 1-1 conversations, etc., and while I agree with that up to a point, this advice can also drastically slow you down if you require a level of formality for everything. The thing that was nice about having Discord channels is that if I needed to get a quick explanation about something, I could ask quickly without needing to schedule a meeting, etc., and everyone else in the channel can listen in (if desired). Discord also has good "deafen" features, so if you're heads down and don't want to be bothered it lets people know.

Again, I think this only works well with about ~8-10 people max per channel, but that's about the optimal max size for project teams anyway in my opinion. I highly suggest you try it if you haven't - when I first tried it I thought "How is this any different from Slack Hurdles?", but the small usability improvements in Discord made it feel to me like it approximated the in-person work experience much better than Slack (note we didn't use Discord as a complete replacement for Slack, just for small "working group" teams).