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

Jesus fucking Christ, can I not just enjoy one thing in my life without it eventually turning adversarial?

"No. Fuck you. Pay me. Now pay me more. Now enjoy ads. Pay me again. We're now introducing fees associated with the privilege of paying me. So pay that while paying me."
-- approximately everything
Dude i am so glad. Discord was always a cancer, i hope this will spell the beginning of the end of discord. Its the number one biggest offender in terms of limiting access to information on the internet right now. It needs to die.
- The number of times I've been directed to a useless discord chat while looking for help on a topic is infuriating. Can't wait for this shit to stop.
- It also has plenty of utility for non-information-storing purposes. It's more of a cultural issue than an issue with the tool.
  Besides, wouldn't it take all the information there to its grave as well, making its death a net information loss? After all, information confined it is still information stored somewhere, just not as easily accessible directly from the Web.
I don't know why people trusted Discord, it's one of the worst platforms and I say this while I use it because I had to settle for that (friends) like I had to settle for WhatsApp (family and work)
Irc was better for chat, ventilo and mumble better for audio, and matrix is pretty much the same but better. Discord sucks like Twitter did and I can't wait for it to go away. And forums are a better platform for help and documentation.
Thank God I convinced my fiancee to move our VCs to Wire, away from WhatsApp and Discord.
- Discord does exactly one thing not entirely shittily. It puts all those features in one place. It gets beat out in any one feature, but you can run an entire community within a Discord for free. You shouldn't because it's terrible at most of that and mediocre at the rest, but it's free and just good enough if you bludgeon it into shape with tools and bots and stuff.
- The best part about discord is the streaming feature. So far I haven’t been able to find a replacement for that.
- I think it's less about trusting Discord and more about not giving a shit. It does the thing they want it to do and that's the extent of their consideration. It's the reason why everyone still uses Windows even though it's basically spyware at this point. Talking to my friends about it is like talking to a brick wall and they just check out of the conversation.
One of the reason people here are so insistent about free and open source software is so that you can enjoy things indefinitely.
- But the problem I keep running into is getting my friends to switch. They're not very tech literate as they came from console gaming. I could try to educate them but the response I usually get is "why would I switch to something that might not work when this already works perfectly fine?" And I can't really argue with it. It's just not even an issue for them.
I have bad news for you, it was adversarial from the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
No, not until you embrace open source software. It was always going to be enshittified. Just a matter of time
- I've already switched to Linux. The problem I have with this is that all my friends, a Discord server of around 20 people, are not going to be willing to switch. It's been the way we have stayed in contact for the past 5 years.
You enjoy discord???
- I used to. It's entirely too easy of a program to use.
Look for the companies that lead by example. Valve comes to mind. But there’s small businesses out there that do as well.

Enshittifcation imminent

Can it be any more enshitified tho?
- Oh, it can get a lot worse
- Discord: Hold my beer
- Pay $5 to send 50 messages per month. Then an additional $1 for every fifth message.
- 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
It's already pretty shitty to be fair

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
Reminder that TeamSpeak still exists.
https://www.teamspeak.com/en/
Windows, Mac, Linux clients for TS6, Win, Mac, Lin, iOS, Android clients for TS3.
https://www.mumble.info/
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.
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.
- Not custom emojis.
- Its even less organized

Every time something goes public it turns into shit. Every single time.

But what is shit cannot turn into shit
- 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.

https://revolt.chat/

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
- Terrible video calls. No screenshare last I checked. UI feels dated.
- They are undoubtedly better, but neither of them feel like Discord. They are more like WhatsApp or Signal.
  Not suited for the job.
- Matrix does not support custom emojis, which are the killer feature of Discord.
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?
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
Does it show the current game one is playing?
- No? But it can be implemented. Though I don't think anyone really cares about it, so most likely it won't. Revolt does not even advertise itself as a gaming chat platform, but just a chat platform.

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?

This only exelerates the enshittification that already started

accelerates
- Did they fucking stutter? Exelerates.
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

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.
Gotta go for the ventrillo rofflecopter going soi soi.
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.
teamspeak and skype was the beginning until discord came in my country. Way better for voice over chatting.
- Skype was terrible and the reason that Discord took off.
- You should have used Axon, way better than 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.
- No its a real platform

🎶It's beginning to look a lot like enshitification,
\ Everywhere you go,
\ Just look at Reddit and x, they're all a mess,
\ With racist Nazi bigots and all the transphobes.

reddit is just reposting X , and truth social posts for the political posts.

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.
- 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.
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.
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?
- 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 :)
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
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.

I only use discord for stuff that doesn't provide an alternative. It's terrible for finding info and questions that have already been asked. Hopefully this will bring back actual forums, discord is not the place for support.

I hate discord so much
- My people. I hate it as well.

I guess I'll go back to matrix? I wish it was a little more polished

Does matrix have decent voice chat?
- it has voice and video... though to be honest I've never used it.
- Its OK when I've used it but I generally stick to text

I knew this day would come [gently pats 15 year old mumble server].

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.

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.

Matrix really needs to add channels.
I'm not sure why they don't just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
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.

Anyone that need to clear their history https://discorch.org/

Browse and archive your messages, and easily request deletions — all while respecting Discord's guidelines

This is exactly what I was looking for... Thank you so much. I was so close to paying for redact to deal with this.

Can anyone with knowledge on business explain why these companies keep going public other than the simple fact of money?

I feel like everytime a company does they go full throttle into making shareholders money and lose sight of their original company. Honestly I assumed discord was already public based on some of their monetary features that are overpriced lol.

it's literally just money
It’s the path for the startup industry to rewards the venture capitalist investor basically either IPO by going public or M&A by being bought (like instagram by meta).
Here some more info on the different startup stages https://www.latitud.com/blog/stages-of-a-startup
- Too many startups go for VC money when they shouldn't. It's a cancer.
  If you've managed to bootstrap it, or get some non-vc money, things are growing and doing well, maybe just try to keep growing that way. Your company is fucked the moment you take that VC money.
It's about money, specifically with a near-term "exit strategy" for investors.
It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits... without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.
I won't shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world's online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity's cultural development and history.
- 👏
at a certain size companies are required to go public. and indeed, as a public company your first and only responsibility is ensuring shareholders can grow capital based on nonsense quarterly projections.
- There is no requirement to ever go public, in the US anyway. I work for a multi-billion dollar company that's entirely privately held. It just tends to happen because it's the best way for the equity holders to convert their ownership into cash. It can be hard to sell a whole company because that requires someone to go all in to buy it and they must accept all the risk of maintaining its value. But you can go public and get tons of investment money without having to sell.
- Valve is huge and still privately owned. There's no requirement for a company to go public.
- People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It's true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn't really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.
- A forced ipo happens if they have over 500 share holders and $10 million in assets. It is easiest to avoid the shareholder amount.

https://spacebar.chat/

How far along is this? Last time I checked it out is was no where near ready.
- I mean, what's "ready" mean in this context? Voice and video are still being worked on. They're going for maximum compatibility so they have to reverse engineer the way Discord does things, so it's taking a while.
saving this for later, thanks

Oh no

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).

So the userbase is worth $12bn.

God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???

Time to introduce my friends to the glory of TeamSpeak!

mumble works very well and is foss as well.
- Ah, haven't used that in a long while. I'll add that to the list to peddle to my mates as well. Thank you!
It shut down, didnt it?
- It's been a number of years since I used it while playing Eve Online, but say it isn't so! I'm going to check now!
  Edit: Still exists!

Well, time to look for a new platform.

Check out Revolt. They're trying to mimic Discord.
https://revolt.chat/
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.

I guess it's time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback

"User has joined your channel"

I'm calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.

Seeing how well Reddit did in its IPO, it seems that this type of closed platforms keep people captive enough not to look elsewhere and bank on it. Investment wise that seems like a buy, unfortunately.

Well it was fun while it lasted

Looks like everyone needs to switch to !matrix@programming.dev

Ok time for Matrix & XMPP (or even IRC😉)

And there goes another good company...

Discord has never been a good company, they can (and probably do) read all chat and data being uploaded there.
- Jason Citron, the Discord founder and CEO, had a company called OpenFeint that got into a lot of trouble regarding selling illegally obtained private user data.
  In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications".
  https://www.courthousenews.com/gamers-say-openfeint-sold-them-out/
It's a good company?

Well, I remember TeamSpeak being really good and easy to use.

https://www.teamspeak.com/en/

Also proprietary and requires a "Gamer License" to host servers for more than 32 users.
Mumble is, and has always been, the king of voice chat apps and is completely FOSS. Also it works a lot better.

This is bad news for discord users. Making it a public company means that all their data will be up for sale when the company goes under

and also the enforced heavy moderation, will silence crtiics in favor of the most "ad-revenue, traffic groups too" thats whats happening with reddit.

Nooo, enshitification. I've only recently stared using it.

What do we use instead? Is Matrix the only option?

Time to try Matrix again.

Discord was never "good". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU

Its already unbearable with how much is gated behind Nitro. Its gonna drop off and quick once the IPO hits.
Search history will be the first thing to go, like Slack it'll be a pay thing and that's gonna be a big hit.
I miss IRC.
- BetterDiscord + https://github.com/riolubruh/YABDP4Nitro
- IRC is still alive and well. I still use it to hang around when I'm using my tablet with Termux+weechat, and some projects are stubborn about not abandoning IRC.

I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server

My group of people is looking at moving to revolt if it happens

It was nice while it lasted.

Back to Ventrillo or TeamSpeak I guess...

Did I Mumble?

It might be time to finally get friends to move around if things go south.

Boo you whore.

Glad I already nuked mine.

Sadly they do keep all of your messages just anonymised
- Thanks for the heads up at least

Everyone tries to cash-in before the AI balloon pops-up.

MS(microsoft) admitted already AI isnt super profittable. thats because the customers being only other large corporations, and not the individual users(who does not care for AI in any form)