Discord: IE Chrome in disguise + maybe we have your data + IPO incoming money money money
I have pushed nearly all of my communication onto this platform. I have a channel for chats with my wife, a channel for my company, one for “gaming with the bois”, etc. I have joined dozens of community channels where I mostly lurk, especially after the great reddit exodus of 2024.
From a functionality side, it rocks
- semi-permanent text and images, including parsing links sensibly
- excellent VOIP stuff
- Vid / screenshareing good enough TM
- Everyone is there. Massive marketshare with the computery folks.
- UI is solid
- Bots are neat / API stuff makes sense. (I should make a post about my discord bot adventures)
I have my minor grievances:
- Heavy ass program (yay chrome)
- Search suuuucks.
- Weird forced name change they did a few years ago
But the main problem is the company / service, right?
- IPO stuff. Classic cycle, Discord gets started in the ol silicon valley business incubator, gets a bunch of users, gets more investors, then years later the bill comes in. I’m- I’m struggling to think of software or a service that was built on this pipeline that has NOT enshitified.
- Similarly, if the service is free and the company needs money, then you are the product. There is no doubt in my mind that Discord, like nearly every other “big” free service, is flirting with or is already outright selling data in some way shape or form. That is the world we live in these days, I suppose.
- Discord isn’t a website, and thus communities creating awesome content and helpful information are creating it in an unindexable vacuum only accessible to those who a. know of the channel’s existence, b. actually join the channel, and c. were present when the info was posted (forget searching in Discord). This is a well documented and shared grievance, but still, it bears repeating.
There are no frontrunners in the upcoming great discord replacement, and I’m not sure if we will see one. My prediction? Ultimately, eventually, it will go the way of Twitter. Hmm.