Gaming chat platform Discord in early talks with banks about public listing
ft.com
ft.com
[1]: https://revolt.chat
A few assorted features have already rolled out, but the main focus has been on the new clients. A native Android app just got released in early access, there is a native iOS app on TestFlight in heavy development, and there is a new web front-end in beta.
The ecosystem has also matured a lot, and much of our behind the scenes tooling and processes have improved. You can have a look at the blog on the website to see more.
Revolt is extremely well done, and yes this IPO means folks will flock to it when Discord dials up the revenue streams. It's an easy prediction because it's always how things goes...
Why on earth would you remove such a feature?
The only thing I genuinely care about is some kind of a "raise hand" button in VoIP to indicate you have something to say while someone is talking. (emotes don't show user name if you are doing screenshare, and they disappear after a second anyway.) I've been switching between discord and Teams for work chats for years now, and it's literally the only thing I find superior in Teams.
I can't imagine what Discords reasoning is, but it continues to surprise me to see raise hand missing in every single increasingly annoying update. Just give me a stupid little yellow hand! Have it show my username! Keep it on the screen until I turn it off! That's all I need! I don't care about the shop! I don't want nitro! I don't care about party games or holiday integration or anything else.
Just give me the stupid yellow hand!
And if the place people go to is a smaller player with comparatively not that many users, that influx can present scaling problems for them, even if it's a drop in the bucket for the platform they came from.
Slack, discord, teams, zoom, hipchat (if you remember that one) etc. all kind of overlap in functionality. They are all commercial tools with slightly different takes on the same space: team communication. Google's internally paranoid schizophrenic mix of ever flopping chat solutions also have some adjacent products. Meets doesn't do chat and chat doesn't do video.
What do all of these have in common: they are running backwards and are ever fiddling with ways to ask money for their centralized services. Slack is now owned by salesforce. Zoom peaked during the pandemic but turned out to be a one trick pony. Teams is causing MS to retire Skype and is universally hated for its bloat, poor performance, and pervasiveness in dreadful enterprise heavy companies. And discord does essentially the same things but for gamers.
I'm not familiar with revolt. But this stuff is obviously a commodity given the many contenders in this crowded market. So, free and open source should be good enough. There's a long history of chat solutions peaking and then sliding away into obscurity. ICQ, Yahoo messenger, MSN, AOL, etc. The bazillion Google chat/communication products that flopped hard. All gone. All predecessors to Slack and modern equivalents. I was chatting with colleagues in the late nineties using ICQ. These days I use Slack. And Whatsapp. And Meets. And Teams (because our customers are really into masochistic Microsoft products). And all the rest.
Revolt is only partially open source unfortunately. IMHO this is a mistake. It's yet another walled garden. It's 2025; we still don't have a proper federated solution (like email) that doesn't lock you in to 1 company, 1 UI, 1 network, etc. The reason email is still around is that federation is important. Everything else comes, enshittifies, and then goes away. Email stays. Why do I need different apps to chat/video call to different people? I have about half a dozen on my phone currently. It's ridiculous.
Will try it out and share with the IPv6 community on the mastodon as well.
With everything it has provided for us there, I’m somewhere between shocked and flippant that discord hasn’t served our user category well or really at all. For example i’d love to have better tools to track customer support, measure user sentiment, promote the product to discord users, tie our premium features to discord statuses without using random bots and third parties, and so forth. And none of this needs to come at the expense of its free and open nature.
I still love discord, and I buy nitro for myself simply because we get so much value from the product that buying nitro for myself was “the least I could do”. But still. Huge missed opportunity.
I know a lot of large organizations who use discord in spite of this simply because it's better than Slack for their scale.
(BTW we ended up writing our own tool instead and use that now => https://www.inetsoftware.de/products/cowork)
[1]: https://discorch.org
Publicly owned: guaranteed eventual enshitification.
That would be correct
But hey, the shareholder game already started when VCs bought in. I support every company developing a way for utility tokenholders to buy out shareholders. That way we fairly buy out the parasitic shareholder class so we eliminate the main incentives for enshittification!
There might be a period of growth in the beginning when investment leads to development of new features and refining the platform, and more users join. But eventually it hits a point of maximum market saturation. The product is as feature rich as it can be, the user numbers have reached their limit.
It's at that point that enshittification begins. More ads, the minimum amount of money spent to maintain the system, locking features behind premium subscriptions, prices go up. Just look at youtube, netflix etc. At this point youtube in particular has become unusable, and the content is nothing like the stuff you used to watch on there, it's all long video essays full of sponsors as that's what the company promotes and encourages, but not what people really want to see.
Shareholders expect constant growth which will lead to reality-disconnected PMs forcing dumb feature after dumb feature down the users throat until the very codebase of discord will rot and bloat.
I think the fear here is that a public company is going to optimize heavily for profits to the detriment of the service itself, which public tech companies seem to often do (not that private companies don't do this, it just doesn't seem like they generally do it as consistently and to the same extent as public companies). Subjectively I've found acquisitions or IPOs are often a bad sign for product quality.
I think that is largely because we remember the ones that do and not the ones that don't.
As an example, companies like microsoft & amazon, while ruthless, don't really fit that mold.
And as a tangent: I really wonder what I did to FT to get "Sorry, you have been blocked" for quite some time now.
Jitsi meet and mumble can do some of the services, but not for free and not as an IdP.
Also discord isn't encrypted E2E so I have to be honest, with AI analysis being what it will be soon, talking politics is honestly scary. No way the feds don't have hooks into it by now, esp. after that air force guy leaked secret data.
I get why Meta never acquired them (couldn’t) but I’m surprised Amazon and especially Valve never did.
I don't believe they have paywalled any core features, only paywalled a few new features that are cosmetic only. If you don't pay for Discord Nitro or anything, you can still chat, call, join and use servers. The biggest advantage of Nitro is actually shared with everyone on your favorite server, and by 'boosting' the server you give features to everyone on it. I like that.
Is there any way that they could have monetised it better? I see it as pretty creative and user-friendly, given there's not many avenues to monetise a free service such as a chat.
I didn't, until my Discord account was compromised and the attacker was able to make $35 in purchases in the <60s it took me to realize it had happened and revoke all login sessions.
I'd say that's getting worse. Why does a communications app have a store at all? Why is it set up to pull from the credit card I use for Nitro without additional confirmation?
Most of the more annoying added features like TTS, Super-Reactions, and other animated non-sense can at least be moderated in server settings/ user accessibility settings.
The hostility to third party applications is a little annoying but I've only used those on edge cases (Armcord for WinARM laptops, Discord-Lite for PPC Macs)
I'm really going to have to start looking into self hosted alternatives soon