Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are

Discord is starting to be a really interesting merger of non-work and work spaces, and their continued independence will allow them to lean into that. There are very few other platforms that encourage you to use a single account to join servers for work and gaming and anime and music? And users trust that Discord will allow them to keep their membership in spaces a secret unless someone is already a member of both spaces. That's a feat that's almost impossible to fathom. The interest graph alone is staggeringly valuable, and it's no doubt monetizable in subtle and trust-maintaining ways. And... some of it may be toxic to a company like Microsoft. The moment Discord needs to start censoring across platforms (not just blocking iOS access to certain content as they've needed to do to play in Apple's garden) is the moment it starts to feel unsafe for content creation. I'm not surprised they walked away. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the implementation of this is imperfect, and possibly endangering people in real life. If anyone from Discord is reading this: - not letting people opt-in to be prompted to set a username before entering a server and having a bot announce our membership, and - not letting people set unique profile pictures for each server creates situations where one could either leak a real-world identity to a server on which they desire anonymity, or leak a pseudonymous online identity to coworkers. And this gets REALLY bad for people using Discord to explore their gender identity, where this could cause a profile picture or name that indicates identity to leak between spaces when that's not desired. I've met people who need to be incredibly careful to create multiple Discord accounts to avoid being outed, and Discord makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to do this, with its deep browser integrations that forward to the native app. It is no joke that Discord's UX choices could hurt people, here. But it speaks to the strength of the platform that Discord is still an incredibly vibrant place for communities like gender-questioning communities that rely on pseudonymous identities. Because it puts natural conversations at people's fingertips. It was Clubhouse before Clubhouse, just divided into communities of like-minded people. In certain ways it's the superposition of Clubhouse and Slack. And the UX problems are solvable problems. I think Discord is really going places.