Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
US group has sought to broaden its appeal to a mass audience
https://archive.is/2025.03.06-011758/https://www.ft.com/content/4ab9efe7-36bc-44ff-b2cd-06eb2c38203a
Tap for article
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?
Oh, it can get a lot worse
Discord: Hold my beer
It's already pretty shitty to be fair
Glad I already nuked mine.
Ok time for Matrix & XMPP (or even IRC😉)
looks like me and the boys are going back to teamspeak
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.
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.
it's literally just money
There goes the neighborhood.
Well it was fun while it lasted
It was nice while it lasted.
Back to Ventrillo or TeamSpeak I guess...
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?
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.
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 hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service... Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
I only use discord for stuff that doesn't provide an alternative. It's terrible for finding info and questions that have already been asked. Hopefully this will bring back actual forums, discord is not the place for support.
I hate discord so much
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!
Oh no
Anyone that need to clear their history https://discorch.org/
Browse and archive your messages, and easily request deletions — all while respecting Discord's guidelines
This is exactly what I was looking for... Thank you so much. I was so close to paying for redact to deal with this.
So the userbase is worth $12bn.
FOSS alternative that looks and feels the same.
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?
you were right, a bit austere but essentially the same
You can customize all that with your own color scheme you get to chose. Which is kinda cool
Matrix and XMPP are decentralized, much better than Revolt for that purpose.
Terrible video calls. No screenshare last I checked. UI feels dated.
No man! Think of the future shareholders!! 😢
Jesus fucking Christ, can I not just enjoy one thing in my life without it eventually turning adversarial?
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.
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.
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.
I think it's less about trusting Discord and more about not giving a shit. It does the thing they want it to do and that's the extent of their consideration. It's the reason why everyone still uses Windows even though it's basically spyware at this point. Talking to my friends about it is like talking to a brick wall and they just check out of the conversation.
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.
The best part about discord is the streaming feature. So far I haven’t been able to find a replacement for that.
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.
"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
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.
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
Well fuck. Time for a new platform.
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
Matrix (element?) can do everything Discord does.
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.
🎶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.
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/
I knew this day would come [gently pats 15 year old mumble server].
saving this for later, thanks
God fucking damnit can we just have one thing???
I guess it's time for TeamSpeak to make a comeback
"User has joined your channel"
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.
Discord was never "good". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNkdAggUGU
Nooo, enshitification. I've only recently stared using it.
What do we use instead? Is Matrix the only option?
Time to try Matrix again.
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.
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.
BetterDiscord + https://github.com/riolubruh/YABDP4Nitro
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.
I may have to go back to IRC, hell even running my own fucking server
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)