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I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are p

I just don’t see what Discord’s path towards profitability is. Are they going to try to start an online store again? Sell enough Nitro subs? I think they are playing hard ball for a better acquisition deal, but they risk being irrelevant before ever getting a better deal.

xyhopguy 6y ago
'discord professional' seems like pretty low hanging fruit and an obvious upgrade over slack + zoom
- brundolf 6y ago
  It would risk chasing off their core market, even if it were just a branding pivot
  - poidos 6y ago
    It would probably have to be a separate application with the same features and internals to really work.
    - all2 6y ago
      Accord Communications: Enterprise Edition
  - novok 6y ago
    I think discord biz edition was obvious for a long time, and they've steadfastly refused to do it for that amount of time too.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    The removed the Gamer branding by default a long time ago now.
- stdgy 6y ago
  Absolutely. I'd kill to be able to use Discord for work. It's just silly how much better it is than Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc.
hguant 6y ago
Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware). Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it
- aclelland 6y ago
  Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies. Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse
  - hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. Fuck this spyware trend.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    This is the reason that I much prefer to keep apps in my web browser. Sandboxing is a valuable feature. (And the desktop client is just a web browser anyways)
    - aloisdg 6y ago
      Your settings are limited in the browser. I dont know why..
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    A lot of that information is public already: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
    - f1refly 6y ago
remir 6y ago
Pretty sure a "Business" edition is in the plan.
kevincox 6y ago
Discord has started giving me popups and adding sparkles around UI elements that I need to pay for. I thought the premium "Nitro" was a nice option but I guess it isn't popular enough? Either way it seems that now they are nagging hard to get you to pay.
RobLach 6y ago
Note: Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack. The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.
- samstave 6y ago
  Precisely. If they can parley this into solid trust over the coming mid-term, without any major security breaches, then they are set. (plus the other feature options that were mentioned E2E, stickers etc... they have room to grow. There is already some payment duct-tape setup. I am sure that, barring a complete fuckup, discord is going to do very well.)
- __turbobrew__ 6y ago
  Discord needs threads before I would even consider using it as a slack replacement.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
    Threads and the also send to channel are such a hack. It's much better to let conversations flow naturally.
    - Mehdi2277 6y ago
      There are many work conversations I have that rely heavily on threads and make the channel useless to scroll if sent directly. I think most of the discussions I read are in threads as often one engineer will encounter a bug, ask for help, and then there will be a back and forth discussion over a thread figuring the issue out. Keeping that in the channel makes reading the channel later fairly useless as most of that detailed discussion is too specific to care about. But being able to skim the main messages and see if anyone had similar issues and then enter that thread is great. On call alerts have a channel and then resolving the alert is often a thread discussion.
    - lanstin 6y ago
      It makes a hard ceiling as to how much volume one channel can tolerate. It also forces the conversations to be more sync instead of async, which has a high cost in terms of being able to ignore it for a while.
dyeje 6y ago
People build communities on Discord. They should monetize that.
- shadowofneptune 6y ago
  Absolutely, I have considered when moderating servers that if they placed more advanced moderation features, the kind you'd see in forum software, behind a paywall, it'd be the only thing I'd consider paying for.
beams_of_light 6y ago
I wish my workplace could use Discord instead of Teams. The drop-in voice channels would be so handy.
- chrononaut 6y ago
  I am not a heavy Discord user (so there might be options around this?), but when I have used it, it seems like every person on the server is in every channel. I feel like that would be absolute chaos at a workplace. Not to mention the unless notification customization that would have to take place.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    That's the default - if you can see a channel you can read it and be pinged by it. Roles can restrict this, and you can configurably ping roles and remove the ability of regular users to do things like @here and @everyone. Discord's permission system is one of its killer features, IMO.
    - herbst 6y ago
      Thats only partially helpful. What if you get mentioned in channels you have no role for? What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles? Discords roles are really well done and make totally sense in a hirarchical chat system. However i don't see this being sensical in a professional (flatter) environment.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        > What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? There are certainly bots that automate that on Discord. A bot can open the private channel, add the temporary role, assign the temporary role, then close all that stuff when the chat is done. If it's a voice chat you don't even need a temporary role, the bot can "drag" users to/from other voice chats, so you can have a "public" lobby for the private voice rooms that only the bot can fill. (I've been in game servers built that way.) > What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles? Discord just released a much more comprehensive slash-command system. It will be a while before more bots migrate to it (and away from Reaction "buttons" and weird individual choices for command prefixes), but it supports now some powerful auto-complete/help prompts and argument schema validation.
Lorin 6y ago
They'd make a fortune by providing Discord as an in-game communications solution/integration for commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard. Make it free up to 1000 concurrent users, then $x/MAU at plateaus /w reduced rates + $ for extras such as white labeling. The current in-game Discord overlay is an end-user 'hack' by comparison. Games/applications are notorious for limited/locked-in communication systems and are non-trivial to implement internally. See Star Citizen's 'Spectrum' developed by Turbulent as an example of complex in-house solution. Heck, Epic provides grants for this exact sort of development. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants If anyone from Discord is reading this feel free to contact me for bizdev/implementation advice :D
- Laremere 6y ago
  > commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard This is just such a bizarre statement. To exclude Unity while including Lumberyard in the condition of "commonly used game engines" makes zero sense. Unity is well known to be one of the most used game engines. Lumberyard in contrast has (according to wikipedia) has a single released game.
  - Lorin 6y ago
    Honestly forgot about Unity - it wasn't a jab, been a long day!
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      Seeing as Unity has a competing product with enormous resources devoted to it for some pretty major titles... I could see why Unity wouldn't be the biggest champion of it anyways
- gsich 6y ago
  Teamspeak does that.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Eh, maybe they do have some existing integration with a big customer, but they already tried this with https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/discord-voice https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/discord-voice and it doesn't seem to get any new features or updates, plus you can't submit new games to the store to use it.
danr4 6y ago
Nobody mentioned the fact that their main audience (Gamers) love spending money on vanity stuff (hence Twitch).
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  I think that's a massive overstatement. A small minority of gamers spend money on that kind of stuff.
mesh 6y ago
More and more games are providing cross platform play. I suspect this is one reason Microsoft was interested so PC / Xbox players could play with each other and communication. Maybe Discord could monetize in game integration for its voice network, especially on console games.
antpls 6y ago
In addition to other comments : advertising. Imagine having to watch, or listen to an ad before you can join a channel. Imagine contextual ads in-between text messages.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Discord has zero ads.
  - antpls 6y ago
    I was precisely replying to the parent who is wondering about a path to profitability for Discord.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

xyhopguy 6y ago

'discord professional' seems like pretty low hanging fruit and an obvious upgrade over slack + zoom

brundolf 6y ago
It would risk chasing off their core market, even if it were just a branding pivot
- poidos 6y ago
  It would probably have to be a separate application with the same features and internals to really work.
  - all2 6y ago
    Accord Communications: Enterprise Edition
- novok 6y ago
  I think discord biz edition was obvious for a long time, and they've steadfastly refused to do it for that amount of time too.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  The removed the Gamer branding by default a long time ago now.
stdgy 6y ago
Absolutely. I'd kill to be able to use Discord for work. It's just silly how much better it is than Teams, Zoom, WebEx, etc.

hguant 6y ago

Data mining. They've got a huge corpus of information available to them that they haven't monetized yet (as far as I'm aware). Also, and I don't mean this flippantly - stickers and shit. People want to look different, and selling a sticker or custom emoji pack would bring in money. You see this with Nitro a little, I believe they're experimenting with it

aclelland 6y ago
Yeah, as long as you run the desktop app they'll keep track of what games and apps you have running (even if you disable the app sharing to your friends) which seems like it would be _very_ valuable to most gaming related companies. Edit: If you want to confirm this you can use their data export feature and check it. One good thing about that tool is that the data is well formatted and easy to parse
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. Fuck this spyware trend.
- kevincox 6y ago
  This is the reason that I much prefer to keep apps in my web browser. Sandboxing is a valuable feature. (And the desktop client is just a web browser anyways)
  - aloisdg 6y ago
    Your settings are limited in the browser. I dont know why..
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  A lot of that information is public already: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ https://store.steampowered.com/stats/
  - f1refly 6y ago

remir 6y ago

Pretty sure a "Business" edition is in the plan.

kevincox 6y ago

Discord has started giving me popups and adding sparkles around UI elements that I need to pay for. I thought the premium "Nitro" was a nice option but I guess it isn't popular enough? Either way it seems that now they are nagging hard to get you to pay.

RobLach 6y ago

Note: Discord has 14x more active users than Slack. Discord has a technology and feature superset over Slack. The Discord audience is becoming the professional audience just about right now.

samstave 6y ago
Precisely. If they can parley this into solid trust over the coming mid-term, without any major security breaches, then they are set. (plus the other feature options that were mentioned E2E, stickers etc... they have room to grow. There is already some payment duct-tape setup. I am sure that, barring a complete fuckup, discord is going to do very well.)
__turbobrew__ 6y ago
Discord needs threads before I would even consider using it as a slack replacement.
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  Threads and the also send to channel are such a hack. It's much better to let conversations flow naturally.
  - Mehdi2277 6y ago
    There are many work conversations I have that rely heavily on threads and make the channel useless to scroll if sent directly. I think most of the discussions I read are in threads as often one engineer will encounter a bug, ask for help, and then there will be a back and forth discussion over a thread figuring the issue out. Keeping that in the channel makes reading the channel later fairly useless as most of that detailed discussion is too specific to care about. But being able to skim the main messages and see if anyone had similar issues and then enter that thread is great. On call alerts have a channel and then resolving the alert is often a thread discussion.
  - lanstin 6y ago
    It makes a hard ceiling as to how much volume one channel can tolerate. It also forces the conversations to be more sync instead of async, which has a high cost in terms of being able to ignore it for a while.

dyeje 6y ago

People build communities on Discord. They should monetize that.

shadowofneptune 6y ago
Absolutely, I have considered when moderating servers that if they placed more advanced moderation features, the kind you'd see in forum software, behind a paywall, it'd be the only thing I'd consider paying for.

beams_of_light 6y ago

I wish my workplace could use Discord instead of Teams. The drop-in voice channels would be so handy.

chrononaut 6y ago
I am not a heavy Discord user (so there might be options around this?), but when I have used it, it seems like every person on the server is in every channel. I feel like that would be absolute chaos at a workplace. Not to mention the unless notification customization that would have to take place.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  That's the default - if you can see a channel you can read it and be pinged by it. Roles can restrict this, and you can configurably ping roles and remove the ability of regular users to do things like @here and @everyone. Discord's permission system is one of its killer features, IMO.
  - herbst 6y ago
    Thats only partially helpful. What if you get mentioned in channels you have no role for? What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles? Discords roles are really well done and make totally sense in a hirarchical chat system. However i don't see this being sensical in a professional (flatter) environment.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      > What if a team needs a way to spin up private channels, so they need access to setting roles, wouldnt that open up the whole "role" system to anyone? There are certainly bots that automate that on Discord. A bot can open the private channel, add the temporary role, assign the temporary role, then close all that stuff when the chat is done. If it's a voice chat you don't even need a temporary role, the bot can "drag" users to/from other voice chats, so you can have a "public" lobby for the private voice rooms that only the bot can fill. (I've been in game servers built that way.) > What if you just want to join a channel to drop one line and leave, where did they put that role bot button thingy again to automatically assign roles? Discord just released a much more comprehensive slash-command system. It will be a while before more bots migrate to it (and away from Reaction "buttons" and weird individual choices for command prefixes), but it supports now some powerful auto-complete/help prompts and argument schema validation.

Lorin 6y ago

They'd make a fortune by providing Discord as an in-game communications solution/integration for commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard. Make it free up to 1000 concurrent users, then $x/MAU at plateaus /w reduced rates + $ for extras such as white labeling. The current in-game Discord overlay is an end-user 'hack' by comparison. Games/applications are notorious for limited/locked-in communication systems and are non-trivial to implement internally. See Star Citizen's 'Spectrum' developed by Turbulent as an example of complex in-house solution. Heck, Epic provides grants for this exact sort of development. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants If anyone from Discord is reading this feel free to contact me for bizdev/implementation advice :D

Laremere 6y ago
> commonly used game engines such as Unreal/Lumberyard This is just such a bizarre statement. To exclude Unity while including Lumberyard in the condition of "commonly used game engines" makes zero sense. Unity is well known to be one of the most used game engines. Lumberyard in contrast has (according to wikipedia) has a single released game.
- Lorin 6y ago
  Honestly forgot about Unity - it wasn't a jab, been a long day!
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    Seeing as Unity has a competing product with enormous resources devoted to it for some pretty major titles... I could see why Unity wouldn't be the biggest champion of it anyways
gsich 6y ago
Teamspeak does that.
judge2020 6y ago
Eh, maybe they do have some existing integration with a big customer, but they already tried this with https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/discord-voice https://discord.com/developers/docs/game-sdk/discord-voice and it doesn't seem to get any new features or updates, plus you can't submit new games to the store to use it.

danr4 6y ago

Nobody mentioned the fact that their main audience (Gamers) love spending money on vanity stuff (hence Twitch).

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I think that's a massive overstatement. A small minority of gamers spend money on that kind of stuff.

mesh 6y ago

More and more games are providing cross platform play. I suspect this is one reason Microsoft was interested so PC / Xbox players could play with each other and communication. Maybe Discord could monetize in game integration for its voice network, especially on console games.

antpls 6y ago

In addition to other comments : advertising. Imagine having to watch, or listen to an ad before you can join a channel. Imagine contextual ads in-between text messages.

anticensor 6y ago
Discord has zero ads.
- antpls 6y ago
  I was precisely replying to the parent who is wondering about a path to profitability for Discord.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]