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.
Enshittifcation imminent
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Oh, it can get a lot worse
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
And there goes another good company…
It’s a 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/
Boo you whore.
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
Every time something goes public it turns into shit. Every single time.
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.
But what is shit cannot turn into shit
God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???
Well, time to look for a new platform.
Matrix is the replacement, but it’s still missing features like channels.
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
Check out Revolt. They’re trying to mimic Discord.
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
Matrix (element?) can do everything Discord does.
Its even less organized
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.
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.
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.
Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?
because it’s way more convenient
If you say so.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
it’s called a forced ipo and if’s a thing in the US specifically.
The company must have more than 500 equity holders and have more than $10 million in assets. If the company maintains a limited number of owners, they will never be required to go public regardless of their valuation.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/forced-initial-public-offering-ipo.asp
Valve is huge and still privately owned. There’s no requirement for a company to go public.
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.
I agree, but I understand the temptation. It can take your company from 0 to 100 almost instantly, since you have the budget to hire social media and SEO experts to take you to that magical “viral” status. Not doing this often means toiling in obscurity and never going anywhere. If you do manage to make enough money for your whole team to quit their day jobs, then it almost certainly took longer.
Quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side.
I don’t think an app like Discord could exist without great initial investment
Discord probably not, but there are many that could.
it’s literally just money
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!
You can even trivially run your own server on an old Raspberry Pi.
I used to run one on a Pi 2 that would regularly have ~100 concurrent users without any hiccups
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!
I know they had a terrible redesign last year and then it went all terribly down hill
Not very promising. What a shame.
They had another redesign this year too as well, to try to make it more “discord-y” that’s currently in beta I believe.
Though I do think they’re a little too late…
They’ve been working on the redesign for awhile now, but the version everyone’s used to (Teamspeak 3) still works perfectly fine. TS3 clients can connect to new Teamspeak servers, and new Teamspeak clients can connect to old teamspeak servers, just without the new features like screen share
My group still uses TS3 on a daily basis on a self hosted server
Time to try Matrix again.
looks like me and the boys are going back to 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.
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
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.
My group of people is looking at moving to revolt if it happens
