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.
Jesus fucking Christ, can I not just enjoy one thing in my life without it eventually turning adversarial?
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.
“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
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.
I have bad news for you, it was adversarial from the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
One of the reason people here are so insistent about free and open source software is so that you can enjoy things indefinitely.
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…
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.
Matrix (element?) can do everything Discord does.
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
Enshittifcation imminent
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
Discord: Hold my beer
Oh, it can get a lot worse
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
Reaction emojis, threads, screen sharing, and voice chat. IRC has none of these features. Better to get on the Matrix train
Ircv3 has reactions, and threads. Along with some other features, like persistent condos.
Voice and screen sharing can be implemented via external services.
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?
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!”
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
Time to introduce my friends to the glory of TeamSpeak!
mumble works very well and is foss as well.
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!
Reminder: Matrix is open source and federated
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.
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.
FOSS alternative
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.
You can integrate it with Jitsi (also self hosted) and call, screenshare and whatever else you want there.
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.
Matrix does not support custom emojis, which are the killer feature of Discord.
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
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.
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 kinda want discord to get shitter. It might eventually get to a point it pushes more people to using IRC instead.
How far along is this? Last time I checked it out is was no where near ready.
Oh no
🎶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.
