Discord, the social chat app popular with the video game community, has met with investment bankers in recent weeks to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year, two people familiar with the talks said.
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The people, who requested anonymity because the conversations are confidential, cautioned that the talks were still exploratory and that I.P.O. plans remained subject to change.
Discord knows everything about its users. Why don’t its users get to know about the future of their app
That explains all the AI crap they’ve been chasing for a while now. They’ve been trying to juice up the value to make it look appealing to potential buyers because you can basically slap “AI” on anything and it instantly shoots up in value.
Discord is effectively dead if this goes through.
It has been in the works from the very beginning. They dropped their mask when things got put behind paywalls and they started censoring criticism. Hell they artificially pumped up emote slots on servers they were secretly running just to get the most users on them. why? To control the narrative. Those servers had the most users for this reason and their owners were thrilled about becoming essentially redundant over night which was more than just a little suspicious until they got found out. They also run their subreddit where they also censored any criticism for this weird bait and switch.
To those who say „who cares about emotes?“ I can only reply: You‘re missing the point. It‘s not about the what but the how. Discord is a sleazy company that gaslights their users to an extreme degree sometimes.
Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.
I just hope further Enshittification will cause devs to ditch it and start using proper forums instead. It‘s always tragic when a software has no other way of giving feedback and answering questions than Discord where you can‘t find anything, let alone with an external search engine. The abandonment of internet forum culture and searchable discussions has been one of the biggest losses in the virtual space.
What’s the best alternative software to gear up to transition to? I’m pretty pissed because they finally got decent integration for PS5. I was playing Space Marines with a couple friends, one of whom is playing on PC, so we’ve been able to crossplay with voice chat.
Any suggestions for an XMPP client?
In an ideal world I want something that has Discord’s “drop-in” chats where you don’t need to “start a call” anywhere, you just join in. My biggest gripe with Element’s voice chat
Could we add Zulip? I think it even has IRC integration if I’m not mistaken.
Enshitification is on the horizon…
