6 ms·

Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing

54 points by mraniki 2y ago

mraniki 2y ago
https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/cont...
ziml77 2y ago
So much for my hopes that having paid features would make them enough money to keep them from doing something like this.
- xrisk 2y ago
  From going public? What do you have against that?
  - cjonas 2y ago
    Guaranteed eventual enshitification?
    - nomilk 2y ago
      Privately owned: probable eventual enshitification. Publicly owned: guaranteed eventual enshitification.
  - rf15 2y ago
    Shareholders optimize for money, users don't like themselves and the things they use to be optimized for money. They rather have good service. Since the perfect product earns you max money with min features, these two priorities are opposed.
    - xrisk 2y ago
      I get what you're saying, but I’m not sure it’s fully true. If it were true, then all public companies would be bad (using bad in a loose sense here). I think Apple, for example, has a good balance between optimizing money and product.
      - rf15 2y ago
        Well, maybe only in the sense that you still seem to be willing to buy. But the amount of people willing to pay the apple tax seems to be shrinking lately, considering recent reports of low sw quality and let's also throw in the 4-digit monitor stand stunt.
      - thefz 2y ago
        The quality of Apple's own software is terrible nowadays, they are a prime example of this erosion of end user value.
      - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
        >then all public companies would be bad That would be correct
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Shareholders are the prime driver behind enshittification of platforms. Because they hold earnings calls every quarter and make the team extract more and more rents from their ecosystem, to make number go up. But hey, the shareholder game already started when VCs bought in. I support every company developing a way for utility tokenholders to buy out shareholders. That way we fairly buy out the parasitic shareholder class so we eliminate the main incentives for enshittification!
  - jachee 2y ago
    No service has ever, ever, ever actually improved after its company went public.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      Google search continued improving for a while after a Google went public.
      - panja 2y ago
        And yet here we are...
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        And then what happened?
    - Velorivox 2y ago
      Since you put three evers - Amazon went public on May 15, 1997. If you can say it hasn’t improved since 1997, with a straight face, I’d be convinced you’re a few bats shy of a belfry.
      - jachee 2y ago
        Amazon wasn’t a service. It was a retailer. And I can’t 100.0% guarantee that I won’t get a counterfeit if I order today, so I don’t consider that an improvement, overall.
        Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
        Shipping got way faster though
        pavel_lishin 2y ago
        If we're using the metric "garbage I was tricked into purchasing arrives faster", then yes, Amazon is a tremendous success story.
  - Mrdarknezz 2y ago
    It will turn discord into shit
  - Azure88 2y ago
    Once shareholders are involved it's no longer enough for the company to make enough profit to sustain itself, it now needs to make more profit each year. There might be a period of growth in the beginning when investment leads to development of new features and refining the platform, and more users join. But eventually it hits a point of maximum market saturation. The product is as feature rich as it can be, the user numbers have reached their limit. It's at that point that enshittification begins. More ads, the minimum amount of money spent to maintain the system, locking features behind premium subscriptions, prices go up. Just look at youtube, netflix etc. At this point youtube in particular has become unusable, and the content is nothing like the stuff you used to watch on there, it's all long video essays full of sponsors as that's what the company promotes and encourages, but not what people really want to see.
  - thefz 2y ago
    It is the first step towards enshittification. Shareholders expect constant growth which will lead to reality-disconnected PMs forcing dumb feature after dumb feature down the users throat until the very codebase of discord will rot and bloat.
- bawolff 2y ago
  That's not really how that works. Having good revenue prospects is traditionally a pre-req for going public (notwithstanding some tech exceptions)
  - tdb7893 2y ago
    Having a good revenue stream is also a pre-req for staying private long term. I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do (not that private companies don't do this, it just doesn't seem like they generally do it as consistently and to the same extent as public companies). Subjectively I've found acquisitions or IPOs are often a bad sign for product quality.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      > I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do I think that is largely because we remember the ones that do and not the ones that don't. As an example, companies like microsoft & amazon, while ruthless, don't really fit that mold.
    - ziml77 2y ago
      Exactly this. If a company isn't bringing in enough money to support their service, they are going to look to other sources. Those sources aren't just free money though, but the company can take that influx of cash and spend it on implementing things that do make money. And these money-making strategies have to be far more aggressive because not only does the company now need to make enough to keep everything running and their employees paid, but it also needs to make extra on top of that so that investors can see a return.
shmerl 2y ago
Enshittification to follow?
- ghfhghg 2y ago
  It's been going that way for at least 2 years now. Maybe it will accelerate though.
  - Agentlien 2y ago
    In what way has it been getting worse? As a casual user I've noticed very little change in the last few years.
    - oynqr 2y ago
      Didn't get the new desktop "design" yet huh
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I'm a casual user (I feel like "casual" overstates it, even), and I don't think I've noticed much either. But I think that's the point; most casual users of something will miss a lot of the changes, both good and bad, that come down.
    - ghfhghg 2y ago
      Years ago I didn't have to manually kill the app 2-3 times a day to get messages synced (frequently on Android, occasionally on Windows)
    - pohuing 2y ago
      Even as a discord user I get annoying ads for game events called quests. So far I haven't had a quest for a game I actually play or want to play
    - Ancapistani 2y ago
      Did you know Discord has a "store" that sells games? I didn't, until my Discord account was compromised and the attacker was able to make $35 in purchases in the <60s it took me to realize it had happened and revoke all login sessions. I'd say that's getting worse. Why does a communications app have a store at all? Why is it set up to pull from the credit card I use for Nitro without additional confirmation?
muddi900 2y ago
Maybe the eventual enshittification would see the return of forums.
OuterVale 2y ago
I work on Revolt[1], which is an open-source chat platform very similar to Discord. I wonder if we should expect another huge influx soon... [1]: https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat
- panja 2y ago
  Has this improved at all in the last 2 years?
  - OuterVale 2y ago
    Yeah, it has. Not as quickly as one would like, but we're all working on it with the time we have available. A few assorted features have already rolled out, but the main focus has been on the new clients. A native Android app just got released in early access, there is a native iOS app on TestFlight in heavy development, and there is a new web front-end in beta. The ecosystem has also matured a lot, and much of our behind the scenes tooling and processes have improved. You can have a look at the blog on the website to see more.
  - Jyaif 2y ago
    You could ask the same about Discord (and you'd get the answer "it's getting worse") Revolt is extremely well done, and yes this IPO means folks will flock to it when Discord dials up the revenue streams. It's an easy prediction because it's always how things goes...
    - Garlef 2y ago
      Some UX-Changes made by Discord are baffling: It used to be possible to swipe through images attached to a post. Not possible anymore... Why on earth would you remove such a feature?
      - registeredcorn 2y ago
        Speaking of baffling features missing: The only thing I genuinely care about is some kind of a "raise hand" button in VoIP to indicate you have something to say while someone is talking. (emotes don't show user name if you are doing screenshare, and they disappear after a second anyway.) I've been switching between discord and Teams for work chats for years now, and it's literally the only thing I find superior in Teams. I can't imagine what Discords reasoning is, but it continues to surprise me to see raise hand missing in every single increasingly annoying update. Just give me a stupid little yellow hand! Have it show my username! Keep it on the screen until I turn it off! That's all I need! I don't care about the shop! I don't want nitro! I don't care about party games or holiday integration or anything else. Just give me the stupid yellow hand!
unethical_ban 2y ago
Discord is an IdP and a hosting provider for voice/video/stream sharing. Jitsi meet and mumble can do some of the services, but not for free and not as an IdP. Also discord isn't encrypted E2E so I have to be honest, with AI analysis being what it will be soon, talking politics is honestly scary. No way the feds don't have hooks into it by now, esp. after that air force guy leaked secret data.
7thpower 2y ago
I hope the funds will enable them to finally invest in making users aware of what a great deal nitro is. I get why Meta never acquired them (couldn’t) but I’m surprised Amazon and especially Valve never did.
- Jyaif 2y ago
  I'll bite: Why is nitro a great deal?
  - Garlef 2y ago
    I think OP forgot the /s (The ads for nitro are already very visible)
    - 7thpower 2y ago
      I can’t go back and edit it either :(
    - wink 2y ago
      thanks, you had me wondering...
- xmprt 2y ago
  As a somewhat casual discord user, what am I missing out on by not using Nitro? The only feature that's in my face is all the emojis I can't use but I also don't really use emojis that much to begin with.
  - pohuing 2y ago
    An animated profile, much larger file uploads and high resolution streaming.
  - 7thpower 2y ago
    The only reason I would pay for nitro at this point is to not see the ads.
yesbut 2y ago
Cory Doctorow wrote a book about this.
aabhay 2y ago
We use discord as a workplace chat platform that has allowed us to make great use of its converged “internal + external” structure. Basically, its works as both a team commons as well as a customer support and customer champion platform. With everything it has provided for us there, I’m somewhere between shocked and flippant that discord hasn’t served our user category well or really at all. For example i’d love to have better tools to track customer support, measure user sentiment, promote the product to discord users, tie our premium features to discord statuses without using random bots and third parties, and so forth. And none of this needs to come at the expense of its free and open nature. I still love discord, and I buy nitro for myself simply because we get so much value from the product that buying nitro for myself was “the least I could do”. But still. Huge missed opportunity.
- hhh 2y ago
  well they aren’t targeting you as a customer at all, it has never been ‘intended’ to use discord for business, let alone for support
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Whether it's intended or not, it's >100% feature complete free(beer) alternative to Slack.
  - xmprt 2y ago
    I think that's what the commenter is confused about. I am too. Discord is more usable than Slack in a lot of ways so their pure focus on gamers who are notoriously price sensitive and won't pay for a messaging platform instead of trying to court businesses is strange. It's especially confusing when they go through extreme measures to make money from gamers when there's a cash cow in B2B sales. I know a lot of large organizations who use discord in spite of this simply because it's better than Slack for their scale.
- epaga 2y ago
  Yes! We, too, happily used Discord for years in our small company - it was absolutely amazing and I also wonder why they don't have a version for companies - in my mind it easily beats Teams in nearly any factor that's important to us - though admittedly we're not a typical Microsoft-using enterprise. (BTW we ended up writing our own tool instead and use that now => https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/cowork https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/cowork)
bdavbdav 2y ago
I suspect this is well timed with the Skype news
Semaphor 2y ago
I always find it interesting when Discord is always called a gaming chat platform (or sometimes video chat), when all but 3 servers, which I rarely use, are not about gaming, and only one ever uses video chat (our TTRPG group). Makes me wonder how vastly different the average Discord experience is from mine. And as a tangent: I really wonder what I did to FT to get "Sorry, you have been blocked" for quite some time now.
_mitterpach 2y ago
I have to say that their monetisation so far has been excellent, at least from my point of view. I don't believe they have paywalled any core features, only paywalled a few new features that are cosmetic only. If you don't pay for Discord Nitro or anything, you can still chat, call, join and use servers. The biggest advantage of Nitro is actually shared with everyone on your favorite server, and by 'boosting' the server you give features to everyone on it. I like that. Is there any way that they could have monetised it better? I see it as pretty creative and user-friendly, given there's not many avenues to monetise a free service such as a chat.
hampus 2y ago
If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [1]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to. [1]: https://discorch.org https://discorch.org

54 points by mraniki 2y ago

https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/cont...

ziml77 2y ago

So much for my hopes that having paid features would make them enough money to keep them from doing something like this.

xrisk 2y ago
From going public? What do you have against that?
- cjonas 2y ago
  Guaranteed eventual enshitification?
  - nomilk 2y ago
    Privately owned: probable eventual enshitification. Publicly owned: guaranteed eventual enshitification.
- rf15 2y ago
  Shareholders optimize for money, users don't like themselves and the things they use to be optimized for money. They rather have good service. Since the perfect product earns you max money with min features, these two priorities are opposed.
  - xrisk 2y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I’m not sure it’s fully true. If it were true, then all public companies would be bad (using bad in a loose sense here). I think Apple, for example, has a good balance between optimizing money and product.
    - rf15 2y ago
      Well, maybe only in the sense that you still seem to be willing to buy. But the amount of people willing to pay the apple tax seems to be shrinking lately, considering recent reports of low sw quality and let's also throw in the 4-digit monitor stand stunt.
    - thefz 2y ago
      The quality of Apple's own software is terrible nowadays, they are a prime example of this erosion of end user value.
    - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
      >then all public companies would be bad That would be correct
- EGreg 2y ago
  Shareholders are the prime driver behind enshittification of platforms. Because they hold earnings calls every quarter and make the team extract more and more rents from their ecosystem, to make number go up. But hey, the shareholder game already started when VCs bought in. I support every company developing a way for utility tokenholders to buy out shareholders. That way we fairly buy out the parasitic shareholder class so we eliminate the main incentives for enshittification!
- jachee 2y ago
  No service has ever, ever, ever actually improved after its company went public.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    Google search continued improving for a while after a Google went public.
    - panja 2y ago
      And yet here we are...
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      And then what happened?
  - Velorivox 2y ago
    Since you put three evers - Amazon went public on May 15, 1997. If you can say it hasn’t improved since 1997, with a straight face, I’d be convinced you’re a few bats shy of a belfry.
    - jachee 2y ago
      Amazon wasn’t a service. It was a retailer. And I can’t 100.0% guarantee that I won’t get a counterfeit if I order today, so I don’t consider that an improvement, overall.
      - Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
        Shipping got way faster though
        pavel_lishin 2y ago
        If we're using the metric "garbage I was tricked into purchasing arrives faster", then yes, Amazon is a tremendous success story.
- Mrdarknezz 2y ago
  It will turn discord into shit
- Azure88 2y ago
  Once shareholders are involved it's no longer enough for the company to make enough profit to sustain itself, it now needs to make more profit each year. There might be a period of growth in the beginning when investment leads to development of new features and refining the platform, and more users join. But eventually it hits a point of maximum market saturation. The product is as feature rich as it can be, the user numbers have reached their limit. It's at that point that enshittification begins. More ads, the minimum amount of money spent to maintain the system, locking features behind premium subscriptions, prices go up. Just look at youtube, netflix etc. At this point youtube in particular has become unusable, and the content is nothing like the stuff you used to watch on there, it's all long video essays full of sponsors as that's what the company promotes and encourages, but not what people really want to see.
- thefz 2y ago
  It is the first step towards enshittification. Shareholders expect constant growth which will lead to reality-disconnected PMs forcing dumb feature after dumb feature down the users throat until the very codebase of discord will rot and bloat.
bawolff 2y ago
That's not really how that works. Having good revenue prospects is traditionally a pre-req for going public (notwithstanding some tech exceptions)
- tdb7893 2y ago
  Having a good revenue stream is also a pre-req for staying private long term. I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do (not that private companies don't do this, it just doesn't seem like they generally do it as consistently and to the same extent as public companies). Subjectively I've found acquisitions or IPOs are often a bad sign for product quality.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    > I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do I think that is largely because we remember the ones that do and not the ones that don't. As an example, companies like microsoft & amazon, while ruthless, don't really fit that mold.
  - ziml77 2y ago
    Exactly this. If a company isn't bringing in enough money to support their service, they are going to look to other sources. Those sources aren't just free money though, but the company can take that influx of cash and spend it on implementing things that do make money. And these money-making strategies have to be far more aggressive because not only does the company now need to make enough to keep everything running and their employees paid, but it also needs to make extra on top of that so that investors can see a return.

shmerl 2y ago

Enshittification to follow?

ghfhghg 2y ago
It's been going that way for at least 2 years now. Maybe it will accelerate though.
- Agentlien 2y ago
  In what way has it been getting worse? As a casual user I've noticed very little change in the last few years.
  - oynqr 2y ago
    Didn't get the new desktop "design" yet huh
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I'm a casual user (I feel like "casual" overstates it, even), and I don't think I've noticed much either. But I think that's the point; most casual users of something will miss a lot of the changes, both good and bad, that come down.
  - ghfhghg 2y ago
    Years ago I didn't have to manually kill the app 2-3 times a day to get messages synced (frequently on Android, occasionally on Windows)
  - pohuing 2y ago
    Even as a discord user I get annoying ads for game events called quests. So far I haven't had a quest for a game I actually play or want to play
  - Ancapistani 2y ago
    Did you know Discord has a "store" that sells games? I didn't, until my Discord account was compromised and the attacker was able to make $35 in purchases in the <60s it took me to realize it had happened and revoke all login sessions. I'd say that's getting worse. Why does a communications app have a store at all? Why is it set up to pull from the credit card I use for Nitro without additional confirmation?

muddi900 2y ago

Maybe the eventual enshittification would see the return of forums.

OuterVale 2y ago

I work on Revolt[1], which is an open-source chat platform very similar to Discord. I wonder if we should expect another huge influx soon... [1]: https://revolt.chat https://revolt.chat

panja 2y ago
Has this improved at all in the last 2 years?
- OuterVale 2y ago
  Yeah, it has. Not as quickly as one would like, but we're all working on it with the time we have available. A few assorted features have already rolled out, but the main focus has been on the new clients. A native Android app just got released in early access, there is a native iOS app on TestFlight in heavy development, and there is a new web front-end in beta. The ecosystem has also matured a lot, and much of our behind the scenes tooling and processes have improved. You can have a look at the blog on the website to see more.
- Jyaif 2y ago
  You could ask the same about Discord (and you'd get the answer "it's getting worse") Revolt is extremely well done, and yes this IPO means folks will flock to it when Discord dials up the revenue streams. It's an easy prediction because it's always how things goes...
  - Garlef 2y ago
    Some UX-Changes made by Discord are baffling: It used to be possible to swipe through images attached to a post. Not possible anymore... Why on earth would you remove such a feature?
    - registeredcorn 2y ago
      Speaking of baffling features missing: The only thing I genuinely care about is some kind of a "raise hand" button in VoIP to indicate you have something to say while someone is talking. (emotes don't show user name if you are doing screenshare, and they disappear after a second anyway.) I've been switching between discord and Teams for work chats for years now, and it's literally the only thing I find superior in Teams. I can't imagine what Discords reasoning is, but it continues to surprise me to see raise hand missing in every single increasingly annoying update. Just give me a stupid little yellow hand! Have it show my username! Keep it on the screen until I turn it off! That's all I need! I don't care about the shop! I don't want nitro! I don't care about party games or holiday integration or anything else. Just give me the stupid yellow hand!

unethical_ban 2y ago

Discord is an IdP and a hosting provider for voice/video/stream sharing. Jitsi meet and mumble can do some of the services, but not for free and not as an IdP. Also discord isn't encrypted E2E so I have to be honest, with AI analysis being what it will be soon, talking politics is honestly scary. No way the feds don't have hooks into it by now, esp. after that air force guy leaked secret data.

7thpower 2y ago

I hope the funds will enable them to finally invest in making users aware of what a great deal nitro is. I get why Meta never acquired them (couldn’t) but I’m surprised Amazon and especially Valve never did.

Jyaif 2y ago
I'll bite: Why is nitro a great deal?
- Garlef 2y ago
  I think OP forgot the /s (The ads for nitro are already very visible)
  - 7thpower 2y ago
    I can’t go back and edit it either :(
  - wink 2y ago
    thanks, you had me wondering...
xmprt 2y ago
As a somewhat casual discord user, what am I missing out on by not using Nitro? The only feature that's in my face is all the emojis I can't use but I also don't really use emojis that much to begin with.
- pohuing 2y ago
  An animated profile, much larger file uploads and high resolution streaming.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  The only reason I would pay for nitro at this point is to not see the ads.

yesbut 2y ago

Cory Doctorow wrote a book about this.

aabhay 2y ago

We use discord as a workplace chat platform that has allowed us to make great use of its converged “internal + external” structure. Basically, its works as both a team commons as well as a customer support and customer champion platform. With everything it has provided for us there, I’m somewhere between shocked and flippant that discord hasn’t served our user category well or really at all. For example i’d love to have better tools to track customer support, measure user sentiment, promote the product to discord users, tie our premium features to discord statuses without using random bots and third parties, and so forth. And none of this needs to come at the expense of its free and open nature. I still love discord, and I buy nitro for myself simply because we get so much value from the product that buying nitro for myself was “the least I could do”. But still. Huge missed opportunity.

hhh 2y ago
well they aren’t targeting you as a customer at all, it has never been ‘intended’ to use discord for business, let alone for support
- numpad0 2y ago
  Whether it's intended or not, it's >100% feature complete free(beer) alternative to Slack.
- xmprt 2y ago
  I think that's what the commenter is confused about. I am too. Discord is more usable than Slack in a lot of ways so their pure focus on gamers who are notoriously price sensitive and won't pay for a messaging platform instead of trying to court businesses is strange. It's especially confusing when they go through extreme measures to make money from gamers when there's a cash cow in B2B sales. I know a lot of large organizations who use discord in spite of this simply because it's better than Slack for their scale.
epaga 2y ago
Yes! We, too, happily used Discord for years in our small company - it was absolutely amazing and I also wonder why they don't have a version for companies - in my mind it easily beats Teams in nearly any factor that's important to us - though admittedly we're not a typical Microsoft-using enterprise. (BTW we ended up writing our own tool instead and use that now => https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/cowork https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/cowork)

bdavbdav 2y ago

I suspect this is well timed with the Skype news

Semaphor 2y ago

I always find it interesting when Discord is always called a gaming chat platform (or sometimes video chat), when all but 3 servers, which I rarely use, are not about gaming, and only one ever uses video chat (our TTRPG group). Makes me wonder how vastly different the average Discord experience is from mine. And as a tangent: I really wonder what I did to FT to get "Sorry, you have been blocked" for quite some time now.

_mitterpach 2y ago

I have to say that their monetisation so far has been excellent, at least from my point of view. I don't believe they have paywalled any core features, only paywalled a few new features that are cosmetic only. If you don't pay for Discord Nitro or anything, you can still chat, call, join and use servers. The biggest advantage of Nitro is actually shared with everyone on your favorite server, and by 'boosting' the server you give features to everyone on it. I like that. Is there any way that they could have monetised it better? I see it as pretty creative and user-friendly, given there's not many avenues to monetise a free service such as a chat.

hampus 2y ago

If you'd like to delete your Discord messages en masse, I made an open-source tool for that [1]. It leverages a fairly undocumented process using your Discord data package, providing a UI to explore it and choose what to export. The tool gives you step-by-step instructions and a CSV file that Discord expects when you contact their privacy team. It works across all channels in both servers and DMs, even those you no longer have access to. [1]: https://discorch.org https://discorch.org