https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a
Tap for article
Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
US group has sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience
Video game developer Jason Citron founded Discord in 2015 © Kimberly White/Getty Images/TechCrunch
Discord is in early talks with banks about a public listing, according to people familiar with the matter, in a sign of a possible revival in the sluggish US IPO market.
Founded in 2015 by video game developer Jason Citron, Discord offers multi-person voice, video and text-based spaces to its 200mn global monthly active users.
The San Francisco gaming chat platform was considering listing as early as 2021, according to people familiar with the matter. However, many technology companies and investors have put their IPO plans on hold due to political and market uncertainty.
That is expected to change this year as interest rates have fallen and US President Donald Trump has laid out a more tech-friendly regulatory agenda.
Discord was last valued at about $15bn in a 2021 fundraising, according to PitchBook. The company’s revived IPO plans remain subject to change, one of the people said.
“We understand there is a lot of interest around Discord’s future plans, but we do not comment on rumours or speculation,” the company said in a statement shared with the Financial Times. “Our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for our users and building a strong, sustainable business.”
CoreWeave, an artificial intelligence cloud computing provider, filed for a New York IPO this month that would raise about $4bn and value the group at more than $35bn, which could make it the largest tech flotation of the year.
A series of valuable start-ups, including fintech groups Stripe and Chime and data platform Databricks that had been forced to stay private far longer than planned are expected to reignite plans to list their shares.
Discord initially found popularity among gamers, as well as retail trading and cryptocurrency communities, but has since sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience.
The company has largely shunned advertising, in contrast to larger rivals such as Meta, X and Reddit, in favour of offering its users premium features for a fee.
In 2021, it attracted interest from multiple Big Tech groups, rebuffing a $12bn takeover bid from Microsoft. The recent IPO plans were first reported by The New York Times.
Enshittifcation imminent
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
Discord: Hold my beer
Discord is completely fine. It doesn’t break. Practically no bugs. The only annoying thing is that sometimes the shop gets a red badge but that’s it
I completely disagree with this and have been for years.
It has often had connectivity issues, big lags, higher latencies and lower bitrates than Mumble or even TeamSpeak.
It’s super bloated, they churn out useless “features” so fast that it keeps making it use more resources and makes everything slower.
Until recently, being in voice call with more than 3-4 people made all my 16 cores attempt self destruction.
It is a freemium piece of bloatware.
Disagree, it was fine when all it did was gaming parties but everything else from shitty UX, to rampant bots, to barely working functionalities. It’s so bloated it cant keep up. Also it’s proprietary, unencrypted and frankly just overall bad piece of software for anything but gaming.
I totally agree, except also for gaming.
Compared to alternatives, there are often lags and complete disruptions, latency is horrible, bitrate is a paid feature, and for large groups of voice channels (like managing a 500 player operation in Eve), features are still lacking.
Also security is a joke. In Mumble, you can manage (certificate based!) permissions on every level imaginable.
They spend their time on making silly themes and Nitro features nobody cares about.
This just hasn’t been my experience at all and with respect to bots it sounds like server run issues not a problem with discord itself.
I play daily with friends and I have maybe one disruption per year with voice not working, zero lags, constant 5ms latency, and since 2018 I had completely ZERO bots pm me. Recently someone messaged me out of nowhere about playing Phasmophobia together, with a girly avatar, and I thought it must be some bot, but it turned out to be an actual person 😅
It’s interesting for me how different experiences we have
Again, I think for gaming it’s a great service. My pain point is that discord grew itself in all directions clearly just for higher valuation.
Also I’m just mad that discord is adopted outside of gaming because it suuuuuucks so bad for those use cases.
Oh, it can get a lot worse
Pay $5 to send 50 messages per month. Then an additional $1 for every fifth message.
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
Discord sucks but this might be easy money if you join at the very start.
I don’t personally understand why people want to use it, but if you’re one of those people, https://revolt.chat/ might be a great alternative. They’re open source (at least for now).
Boo you whore.
I’ve been frustrated with Discord already after their stint with NFTs 3 years ago, and now there are ads in the channel panel and the cost of Nitro has doubled. But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience. Hopefully this will spark some progress, especially if Discord goes the way of Tumblr/Reddit.
But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience.
Been slowly moving to Matrix/Element and was able to convince two buddies to at least make accounts, currently the biggest struggle we’ve had was with the voice channels.
There appears to be two types of voice channels; Jitsi & Element Call, Jitsi works okay but screen sharing appears to not work on either Windows or Linux and also doesn’t appear to allow mobile users to connect with desktop users and vice versa. Meanwhile Element Call seems to work perfectly but there is an unnecessary extra step to install the Element X beta app for mobile for it to work.
Another gripe about Matrix is spaces/room permissions, to my understanding Spaces are like discord servers so when I make a user an Admin you expect them to get admin privilege over every room right? Welp, it’s not and you have to give them admin for every single room also, once you give someone Admin you can’t remove it and they have to do it themselves. While I understand why it’s done this way I find it quite dumb.
The fact that Matrix is apart of the fediverse is enough for me to disregard the issues I mentioned above however, for others it can be seen as a deal-breaker.
Matrix really needs to add channels.
I’m not sure why they don’t just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
Reminder: Matrix is open source and federated
Matrix needs more time in the oven before it’s ready for widespread adoption.
I really did try to make it work (for months) but it’s a buggy and unpolished experience, everyone that tried it with me ended up going back to Discord and Signal for communication.
Unsure if this is satire about the Matrix or an actual platform that thought it was smart to call itself Matrix
It’s an actual platform. It’s basically FOSS discord.
Ohh found it, bad naming in terms of SEO. Does it have screen sharing or is it just a chat/call/videocall app? Personally me and my friends use discord for 2 reasons: Chatting and screensharing. We use teamspeak to talk during gaming
I did find out and do sorta use it now! Still don’t agree with the name though
looks like me and the boys are going back to teamspeak
Catch me firing up Mumble again
Absolutely choosing Mumble over TeamSpeak.
I find it funny that people are picking another proprietary piece of crap that, by the way, also requires a license to host servers with more than 32 users.
I’m going back to Yahoo Messenger voice chat.
I find it funny that people are picking another proprietary piece of crap that, by the way, also requires a license to host servers with more than 32 users.
Gotta go for the ventrillo rofflecopter going soi soi.
teamspeak and skype was the beginning until discord came in my country. Way better for voice over chatting.
You should have used Axon, way better than Discord
Skype was terrible and the reason that Discord took off.
Well fuck. Time for a new platform.
I’ve been wanting a replacement for ages now. The problem is that Discord does everything it does very well (with a few exceptions), way better than any of its competitors. It’s incredibly hard to replace, because no other product really matches it in any category. Cost, ease of use, feature set, cross-app API support… Nobody else comes close; even if you paid a ton of money for premium services to replace Discord, you’re still likely going to downgrade your overall experience.
I really want to see more competition in this space.
Don’t worry, once it goes public it will get worse and easier to replace
It will still have the social platform inertia that keeps many people on Twitter despite wanting to leave. If enough of the other people you want to talk to are there, what good is leaving?
In the case of communities, it’s even worse: you can possibly operate multiple platforms as an individual, but a community splitting its conversations across two platforms is now two communities. The best you can hope for is that most of the active members on the old (also) join the new and eventually bring their activity with them, but that relies on a lot of individual decisions.
Oh I fully get you, and it is a problem, but at least enough of the people I know consider discord’s behaviour problematic already that it would be possible to get things rolling with migrating smaller communities and friends
The big communities though? Yeah no. There’s a reason Facebook is still used, it’s used a lot for organizing things
Reminder that TeamSpeak still exists.
Windows, Mac, Linux clients for TS6, Win, Mac, Lin, iOS, Android clients for TS3.
Mumble also still exists, less official support for mobile clients tho.
What a blast from the past
TeamSpeak doesn’t include video and you don’t get notifications for posts in channels and there are no “chat only” channels. There is no media uploading or viewing within the client itself.
This is like pitching, ”just buy a bike” to someone who lives in the suburbs 50 miles from work.
Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?
because it’s way more convenient
If you say so.
I didn’t say these were at feature parity and frankly I don’t care for half those features.
I’m fairly sure you can still set up a TS channel to automute everyone and have that act as a chatroom or chat channel, and I’m also fairly sure you can ping user groups with a pop up or TTS message for announcements, unless TS has radically changed.
You can also set up small html/xml pages per channel if you want to keep some pertinent info posted, and ping people when an update to one of those pages occurs.
There is media viewing in the client itself.
Host an image somewhere, throw it in a channel or server page description.
Yep, there’s no built in, automatic, free image hosting in the chat feed or video livestreaming.
Discord is enshittifying and mtx monetized because it has massive serverside costs from hosting everything, streaming everything, and thus must seek revenue in increasingly shitty ways to pay for it.
They’ll be selling all your data, introducing advertisements, monetizing even more, and moderating/censoring within a year or two of going public on the stock market.
If you want to host a teamspeak server, you pay the basically negligible cost of running your own server, and you make your own rules.
I’d say this is more like pitching a motorcycle to someone who takes the bus to work, but the busses are all getting privatized and will have their fares go up by 500% and they’ll require a blood sample upon every embarkation and debarkation.
Matrix (element?) can do everything Discord does.
it can’t. it does most things ok, but if I had to move my communities there, it would be hellish to get stuff running the way discord runs them.
Funny how you say “my communities” and then “discords run them”.
yes. like the act of running an application. usually when someone says they’re going to run something, it means that.
hope this helps!
Not custom emojis.
Its even less organized
Well, time to look for a new platform.
Check out Revolt. They’re trying to mimic Discord.
Did you know there’s a better open source product that fills this hole? It’s called matrix / synapse, only problem is the clients sucked at least two years ago
Matrix is the replacement, but it’s still missing features like channels.
This only exelerates the enshittification that already started
accelerates
Did they fucking stutter? Exelerates.
The enshittification has finally struck the English language
This is not enshittification, this is evolution. “Exelerates” is superior to “accelerates”.
I was trying to make a joke
Coldside was just emplifying your joke
What? Its evolving!
Accelerate turned into exelerate!
I blame dyslexia in combination with english not being my first language
I kinda want discord to get shitter. It might eventually get to a point it pushes more people to using IRC instead.
man of culture, but it kinda lacks features xD
FOSS alternative that looks and feels the same.
Matrix and XMPP are decentralized, much better than Revolt for that purpose.
And the ui of those are terrible and will never have non technical people adopt them. Also discord has end to end encrypted video calls and screen share which neither of those two have
depending on which client you use, the ui can be very discord-like (this is cinny): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png
Also matrix has calls (at least element does), though not sure about screen share. And since when was discord e2e?
I ll admit matrix was for a long time really slow but matrix 2.0 largely solves this and other usability issues. Calls and screen share are still not standardized but its all being worked on.
With matrix, its not just about building one app, its about building a decentralized ecosystem all connected by the matrix protocol. So things tend to take more time.
They need to add voice rooms like discord/TS/mumble, where they are there in the sidebar and can be joined/left instantly.
Real-time game streaming like discord has is important also to get disord users to switch over.
The other issue I’ve had with getting gaming friends on matrix is its pretty slow sometimes, and clients don’t all have the same features which can be frustrating.
You can integrate it with Jitsi (also self hosted) and call, screenshare and whatever else you want there.
As we all know, UI is a fundamental part of any piece of software’s architecture and cannot be changed without a ground-up rewrite.
They are undoubtedly better, but neither of them feel like Discord. They are more like WhatsApp or Signal.
Not suited for the job.
but it can look similar to discord: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cinnyapp/cinny-site/main/assets/preview2-light.png
Well well, that surprises me. But it still lacks the features.
Btw image embedding can be done using this syntax:
aha thanks! i was wondering how ppl do this yeah but tbf discord has a lot of features
Terrible video calls. No screenshare last I checked. UI feels dated.
Matrix does not support custom emojis, which are the killer feature of Discord.
[Buy Turbo to unlock on all servers]
you were right, a bit austere but essentially the same
You can customize all that with your own color scheme you get to chose. Which is kinda cool
It’s not meant to be selfhosted. And it’s not federated either. I don’t trust this. The developer seems very shady.
It’s not meant to be selfhosted.
https://github.com/revoltchat/self-hosted
it’s not federated
I’ll agree on that one. Though the FAQ says that it is not on their future roadmap, but is possible. https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html
The developer seems very shady
Why?
I’m just doing a bit of research (I’m also not the guy you were replying to :p), but I found the developer is really just one person seemingly (the only registered person I could find for the company representing Revolt [based in the UK]) and that is Pawel Makles. He’s also listed as the data controller of all of your data https://revolt.chat/legal/privacy
My concern at first glance is this guy is only 21 years old (born 2003). I don’t think the dev seems too shady from this quick look, but being only 21 with a bunch of private data doesn’t seem too stable imo.
Apparently they changed their policy on self-hosting. Last I checked they explicitly said that you can self-host (with a very complicated incomplete documentation) but it’s not intended to be self-hosted. He also said various other things that caught my attention but I don’t remember the details.
I’ll look at this more closely and see whether I like it.
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
Every time something goes public it turns into shit. Every single time.
But what is shit cannot turn into shit
Well, ever since stock buybacks were re-legalized and other safe guards that once incentivized the health of the company, not only quarterly share holder value. Publicly traded company wasn’t always synonymous with strip mining value. Reagan was an accelerant on that decay for sure.
Stock buybacks are just more tax-efficient dividends. Both return value to the shareholders, but buybacks only realize the gains for the shareholders that want to sell some stock.
If they were illegal companies would issue more dividends
In the past this wasn’t true, but it’s definitely true for new tech products.
There are 2 reasons for that, IMO.
- Tech investors expect year after year, decade after decade of serious growth
- Tech these days is not something you buy, it’s rarely even something you rent, it’s often free and paid for by shoving ads at you
That means that they can’t just land on a good product and stick with it. They have to keep changing it to try to get more engagement, more use, more growth.
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
I hate that everyone uses discord. Why can’t we use IRC which is obviously better and uses a tiny fraction of the system resources that discord uses?
The worst part about discord to me is that it’s used as a knowledge base for open source projects and games and such. This puts things in a walled garden. I instantly get turned off by a thing when the homepage is “join our discord” or I see a comment like “oh it’s explained in the discord.”
It’s only a matter of time before discord becomes paywalled, and all the knowledge out there ceases to be public.
I like to play rom hacks, and sure enough, most of them want you to join their Discord to get information about any upcoming updates or what the mod author is making next. I hate it to absolute death.
Agreed. For me it’s very hard to feel the same about software projects that are like “fuck the corporations! Learn more on our discord.” Because the mental gymnastics are wild
A lot of people just don’t see the bigger picture, and it shows.
Just a replacement as a newsletter is totally fine.
What’s not good is knowledge being solely shared there instead of a Wiki.
Github literally has wiki functionality built-in.
I’ve been saying this for years, but the general mood still hasn’t shifted against Discord. People were actually amazed back when it added… forums. But now if the company is going public the enshittification is imminent.
“Obviously better” this isn’t obvious to me at all. Just because you don’t use the many features it offers doesn’t mean other people don’t.
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
Reaction emojis, threads, screen sharing, and voice chat. IRC has none of these features. Better to get on the Matrix train
Matrix is so bad though. Slow, sometimes just doesn’t load, bridges are crap… Why would I want to switch to it?
Do you have an alternative to suggest or are you just here to whine?
Zulip.
Honestly if Discord went away I’d switch to posting notes on a cork board on the wall before I switched to Matrix in its current state.
“But I don’t want to eat the moldy cabbage on the ground outside!”
“Okay, do you have an alternative, or are you just gonna whine? Eat up!”
“We have these delicious carrots.”
“I ONLY WANT CABBAGE THAT’S BEEN SITTING OUT FOR A WEEK!”
Ircv3 has reactions, and threads. Along with some other features, like persistent convos.
Voice and screen sharing can be implemented via external services.
Edited condo to convo… ircv3 does not have condos :)
Are you serious? That’s excellent news!
Nickserv was always a stupid idea. In fact, calling nicknames “nicks” was always an ill-omen for how poorly conceived IRC was.
The onboarding process for IRC is just too much of a hassle. A lot of terrible, horribly awful design decisions went into it. The few people who use it are too resistant to change so there’s not really a point in promoting it.
Matrix is the replacement for discord, although it still needs work like adding channels.
My 4GBs agree. I literally cannot use discord. It takes ridiculous amounts of resource because you are meant to goddamn live in it, not just chat.
Because I don’t care to set up a bot that monitors what is being said while I’m offline. Matrix is actually better, though
I would be tempted to say that it will now turn to shit, but in Discord’s case it was pretty shit already.
But it might get even worse…somehow
Ads in chats?
Probably…
Oh my god that would be shit
There goes the neighborhood.
And all of your data that they’ve collected over the years.
Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.
For a training set. Natural, and familiar conversations.
I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?
No, it’s definitely still valuable. It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web. I’m sure it will be even more valuable moving forward because you don’t want to train LLM models on LLM-generated stuff, and there isn’t as much incentive on a platform like Discord for bots to masquerade as users… unlike on a persistent public and searchable forum like Reddit, where there are obvious incentives to fabricate posts and comments to sell stuff/astroturf/spin public opinion. Bots exist, of course, but they’re identifiable and can be excluded.
That’s fair.
It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web.
I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.
Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.
Yeah, they claim that as of 2022 they had trillions of messages in their database, and this website claims four billion messages are sent per day as of 2022, apparently according to Discord, although I wasn’t able to verify that source.
Different styles of conversation.
