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.
Ok time for Matrix & XMPP (or even IRC😉)
I guess I’ll go back to matrix? I wish it was a little more polished
Does matrix have decent voice chat?
Its OK when I’ve used it but I generally stick to text
I have a private discord that me and my friends use to hang out and game. I guess I need to test how it fits our need.
For a private voice group, could you use something like mumble? It’s still out there, doing voice well.
Mumble, wire, etc
it has voice and video… though to be honest I’ve never used it.
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.
looks like me and the boys are going back to teamspeak
Gotta go for the ventrillo rofflecopter going soi soi.
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.
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.
Oh no, its over. Discord going to become unbearable in a few years tops.
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.
I have no idea what nitro is, maybe its some teitch sub kinda thing. But I have no idea what a twitch sub is, maybe its some kinda battle pass thing? But I don’t really understand battle passes either. I miss the days when it was clear what extra features and content you could get for your money.
Anyway what I meant to say is that nitro to me always seemed like some dumb ass microtrabsaction to take money from people with no impulse control so I have ignored it and I have found no change in features. Maybe it affects hosting huge servers but those servers always have some whales paying it already. In my experience it hasn’t been an issue in hosting or using discord.
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.
BetterDiscord + https://github.com/riolubruh/YABDP4Nitro
Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
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.
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/
Well it was fun while it lasted
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 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.
👏
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.
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.
A forced ipo happens if they have over 500 share holders and $10 million in assets. It is easiest to avoid the shareholder amount.
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.
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 might be time to finally get friends to move around if things go south.
Enshittifcation imminent
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
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 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.
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 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
Discord: Hold my beer
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.
Time to introduce my friends to the glory of TeamSpeak!
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
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
