https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a
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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.
Boo you whore.
Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
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).
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.
Enshittifcation imminent
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
Oh, it can get a lot worse
Pay $5 to send 50 messages per month. Then an additional $1 for every fifth message.
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.
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.
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.
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
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
I did find out and do sorta use it now! Still don’t agree with the name though
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
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.
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.
Information that cant be indexed by a search engine is completely worthless to anyone looking for answers. It might aswell not be there.
It’s still information. I agree that it should be available publically, but information available to few is still more than information available to none. I agree that you shouldn’t have to join a Discord server to get that information, but eliminating it entirely so that not even those who do join can access it doesn’t help anybody. It would only hurt a few, but a few is still more than zero.
It’s an issue of culture, so simply eliminating one repository doesn’t fix anything. They’d find some other messaging service to congregate on.
That’s not to say Discord are saints and there is nothing wrong with either their business or their platform. That is a separate issue I think we all agree on.
My point is strictly about the hypothetical deletion of Discord over the drift towards opaque information silos: It won’t help.
information available to few is still more than information available to none
If discord didnt exist, that information would just be elsewhere like proper forums, it doesnt disappear magically.
Well, you have one part right: it won’t disappear magically. If it does, it will do so quite naturally, unless someone actively preserves it, e.g. by archiving the chat histories.
Of course, you might mean the people with the knowledge that wrote those histories in the first place. You know, the people that used Discord instead of forums. The people that left forums. The people that apparently didn’t want to use forums.
Why would you assume they’d move to forums? Clearly there was some reason they chose to use Discord, so why wouldn’t they just find a replacement?
Discord isn’t the issue. I mean, Discord has plenty of issues, but this particular one is a cultural one. Unless we find a way to entice people back to forums (or some other publically indexable platform), they’ll just keep going elsewhere.
So maybe instead of condemning Discord we should ask “Why do people prefer it?” Then we can figure out how to address that and actually do something about the root of the issue.
Maybe the search engines should start crawling and indexing discord
Discord blocks all attempts at crawling their “public” servers
😐
It would probably take a lot of information to its grave, but the more known “servers” would probably get crawled by archive teams.
Also - assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access - all new information would be easier to access.
When Discord started, they marketed it primarily as a voice chat software for gaming. I remember them marketing it as “superior audio quality to TeamSpeak” or similar wording (which by the way wasn’t the case). It obviously has chat, video chat and screen sharing conveniently built in which TeamSpeak is only starting to add now in 2025 with the TS6 beta (they seem kind of lost atm).
I always preferred the decentralized nature of TeamSpeak and Mumble though and at least from my own experience, TS tends to work better with fewer connection issues and better autogain and voice leveling.
I don’t like the fact that most people happily gave up decentralized voice chat for a centralized alternative and we still use TeamSpeak in most of my circles to this day.
assuming Discord wouldn’t be replaced by something equally closed off from easy public access
That’s what I mean by issue of culture. I don’t think the habit of gathering on discord-like services to quickly exchange info will change, and if the explosion of bsky is anything to go by, people will just find the next shiny, pretty and well-funded platform that totally definitely won’t enshittify somewhere down the line to pay back their venture capital investors.
We’d be cutting the weed without pulling the root.
Good, that will teach people to use such a shit platform to store “important” information. I hope tons of apps and programs and games crash and burn with it so the lesson sticks.
They probably don’t intentionally use it to store information so much as quickly and conveniently exchange answers and questions. Forums have evidently proven inadequate for that purpose, so unless people find a better solution and make it stick, the lesson sure won’t.
Oh but there’s a shit ton of documentation that’s only available on discord and that’s not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.
Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions, Reddit like platforms are second and then you’ve got whatever discord is and regular chat rooms…
Oh but there’s a shit ton of documentation that’s only available on discord and that’s not searchable anywhere and that will just be wiped out of discord ever dies.
I absolutely agree. That’s part of the point I’m trying to make: The death of Discord might well cause those things to be lost. Hoping for it to crash and burn is counterproductive because thay will only do damage.
Instead, we should figure out why people moved to Discord in the first place, because…
Forums are the best for knowledge accumulation via user interactions
…clearly, whatever makes forums “the best” isn’t enough. Then what is it that Discord does better? How can forums work to match it and entice people back?
I don’t know. I’m not one of the people that preferred Discord and I can’t speak for them. But maybe we should listen first instead of wishing ill on them and hoping their favourite places die.
People want instantaneous replies instead of having to wait like on forums. Steam still has forums and they’re active so clearly not everyone left, Reddit isn’t as good because of the lack of permanence (no bumping).
I’m this case I’m very sorry but people just went for the instantaneous reward of chatting and disregarded what they were losing.
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.
It’s free because you’re the product
you can run an entire community within a Discord for free
Wonder how long this will last. Bet they are burning angel investors money up to now, going public is the first step towards having to become profitable.
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.
Look for the companies that lead by example. Valve comes to mind. But there’s small businesses out there that do as well.
You enjoy discord???
I used to. It’s entirely too easy of a program to use.
Man, it’s one of the worst UI I ever had the displeasure to use…
I came from skype so my bar was already pretty low. I’m not defending Discord, by the way. I’ve just been using it to talk to my friends for years because they all had Discord and it was convenient.
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.
Skype was terrible and the reason that Discord took off.
You should have used Axon, way better than Discord
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
Well, I remember TeamSpeak being really good and easy to use.
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 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
Looks like everyone needs to switch to !matrix@programming.dev
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What a blast from the past
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
