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.
Glad I already nuked mine.
Sadly they do keep all of your messages just anonymised
Thanks for the heads up at least
I guess I’ll go back to matrix? I wish it was a little more polished
Does matrix have decent voice chat?
it has voice and video… though to be honest I’ve never used it.
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
Well fuck. Time for a new platform.
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”.
Not custom emojis.
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
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
🎶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.reddit is just reposting X , and truth social posts for the political posts.
God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???
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.
But what is shit cannot turn into shit
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.
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.
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.
Information that cant be indexed by a search engine is completely worthless to anyone looking for answers. It might aswell not be there.
Maybe the search engines should start crawling and indexing discord
😐
Discord blocks all attempts at crawling their “public” servers
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.
Your 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…
“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 have bad news for you, it was adversarial from the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
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.
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.
It’s free because you’re the product
The best part about discord is the streaming feature. So far I haven’t been able to find a replacement for that.
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.
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.
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.
I knew this day would come [gently pats 15 year old mumble server].
I guess it’s time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback
“User has joined your channel”
saving this for later, thanks
How far along is this? Last time I checked it out is was no where near ready.
I mean, what’s “ready” mean in this context? Voice and video are still being worked on. They’re going for maximum compatibility so they have to reverse engineer the way Discord does things, so it’s taking a while.
Given we’re talking about a Discord replacement and you say voice and video are still being worked on I’d say it’s not ready to replace Discord smh
Where did that I say that it was though? I posted it as an alternative. Not once did I say or even hint that it was ready… You’re going to great lengths to put words in my mouth on a public forum where anyone can see what’s been written. It’s very bizarre.
Where did I say you had said it was ready? I answered your question on what “ready” means in the context. Talk about putting words in people’s mouths…
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.
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.
I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server
Time to try Matrix again.
