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.
Id say enshitification coming but discords kinda already shit so.
It was nice while it lasted.
Back to Ventrillo or TeamSpeak I guess…
Did I Mumble?
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?
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
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.
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.
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
“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.
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 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!
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?
“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!”
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.
Zulip.
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.
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
I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
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.
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.
Matrix really needs to add channels.
I’m not sure why they don’t just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
I guess it’s time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback
“User has joined your channel”
My group of people is looking at moving to revolt if it happens
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
BetterDiscord + https://github.com/riolubruh/YABDP4Nitro
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.
So the userbase is worth $12bn.
I knew this day would come [gently pats 15 year old mumble server].
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 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
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.
A forced ipo happens if they have over 500 share holders and $10 million in assets. It is easiest to avoid the shareholder amount.
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.
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
