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.
Well, I remember TeamSpeak being really good and easy to use.
I’ve been frustrated with Discord already after their stint with NFTs 3 years ago, and now there are ads in the channel panel and the cost of Nitro has doubled. But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience. Hopefully this will spark some progress, especially if Discord goes the way of Tumblr/Reddit.
Matrix really needs to add channels.
I’m not sure why they don’t just copy the features that should be standard from Discord.
But, none of the FOSS alternatives work well enough to move my friends over there, in my experience.
Been slowly moving to Matrix/Element and was able to convince two buddies to at least make accounts, currently the biggest struggle we’ve had was with the voice channels.
There appears to be two types of voice channels; Jitsi & Element Call, Jitsi works okay but screen sharing appears to not work on either Windows or Linux and also doesn’t appear to allow mobile users to connect with desktop users and vice versa. Meanwhile Element Call seems to work perfectly but there is an unnecessary extra step to install the Element X beta app for mobile for it to work.
Another gripe about Matrix is spaces/room permissions, to my understanding Spaces are like discord servers so when I make a user an Admin you expect them to get admin privilege over every room right? Welp, it’s not and you have to give them admin for every single room also, once you give someone Admin you can’t remove it and they have to do it themselves. While I understand why it’s done this way I find it quite dumb.
The fact that Matrix is apart of the fediverse is enough for me to disregard the issues I mentioned above however, for others it can be seen as a deal-breaker.
Well, time to look for a new platform.
Matrix is the replacement, but it’s still missing features like channels.
Did you know there’s a better open source product that fills this hole? It’s called matrix / synapse, only problem is the clients sucked at least two years ago
I’m calling it. Backup all your data and move it elsewhere, you may have to pay to access or have it deleted.
My group of people is looking at moving to revolt if it happens
Looks like everyone needs to switch to !matrix@programming.dev
Reminder: Matrix is open source and federated
Matrix needs more time in the oven before it’s ready for widespread adoption.
I really did try to make it work (for months) but it’s a buggy and unpolished experience, everyone that tried it with me ended up going back to Discord and Signal for communication.
Unsure if this is satire about the Matrix or an actual platform that thought it was smart to call itself Matrix
It’s an actual platform. It’s basically FOSS discord.
Ohh found it, bad naming in terms of SEO. Does it have screen sharing or is it just a chat/call/videocall app? Personally me and my friends use discord for 2 reasons: Chatting and screensharing. We use teamspeak to talk during gaming
Enshittifcation imminent
Can it be any more enshitified tho?
Discord is completely fine. It doesn’t break. Practically no bugs. The only annoying thing is that sometimes the shop gets a red badge but that’s it
Disagree, it was fine when all it did was gaming parties but everything else from shitty UX, to rampant bots, to barely working functionalities. It’s so bloated it cant keep up. Also it’s proprietary, unencrypted and frankly just overall bad piece of software for anything but gaming.
This just hasn’t been my experience at all and with respect to bots it sounds like server run issues not a problem with discord itself.
Pay $5 to send 50 messages per month. Then an additional $1 for every fifth message.
Oh, it can get a lot worse
Discord: Hold my beer
It’s already pretty shitty to be fair
It might be time to finally get friends to move around if things go south.
looks like me and the boys are going back to teamspeak
Catch me firing up Mumble again
I’m going back to Yahoo Messenger voice chat.
Gotta go for the ventrillo rofflecopter going soi soi.
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.
You should have used Axon, way better than Discord
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 about money, specifically with a near-term “exit strategy” for investors.
It lets them push the company into choices that will pump up the stock price so that early shareholders can sell their stock and walk away with profits… without any concern over how those choices will impact the company, its employees, its customers, or the new shareholders in the long term.
I won’t shed a tear for Discord, though. They are a parasitic corporation that extracts profit from the world’s online communities by using the network effect to lock our communications and collected knowledge behind their terms of service. No company should have control over so much of humanity’s cultural development and history.
👏
it’s literally just money
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.
I agree, but I understand the temptation. It can take your company from 0 to 100 almost instantly, since you have the budget to hire social media and SEO experts to take you to that magical “viral” status. Not doing this often means toiling in obscurity and never going anywhere. If you do manage to make enough money for your whole team to quit their day jobs, then it almost certainly took longer.
Quick and easy path leads to the Dark Side.
I don’t think an app like Discord could exist without great initial investment
Discord probably not, but there are many that could.
at a certain size companies are required to go public. and indeed, as a public company your first and only responsibility is ensuring shareholders can grow capital based on nonsense quarterly projections.
There is no requirement to ever go public, in the US anyway. I work for a multi-billion dollar company that’s entirely privately held. It just tends to happen because it’s the best way for the equity holders to convert their ownership into cash. It can be hard to sell a whole company because that requires someone to go all in to buy it and they must accept all the risk of maintaining its value. But you can go public and get tons of investment money without having to sell.
it’s called a forced ipo and if’s a thing in the US specifically.
The company must have more than 500 equity holders and have more than $10 million in assets. If the company maintains a limited number of owners, they will never be required to go public regardless of their valuation.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/forced-initial-public-offering-ipo.asp
Valve is huge and still privately owned. There’s no requirement for a company to go public.
People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.
A forced ipo happens if they have over 500 share holders and $10 million in assets. It is easiest to avoid the shareholder amount.
There goes the neighborhood.
And all of your data that they’ve collected over the years.
Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.
For a training set. Natural, and familiar conversations.
I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?
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?
Nickserv was always a stupid idea. In fact, calling nicknames “nicks” was always an ill-omen for how poorly conceived IRC was.
The onboarding process for IRC is just too much of a hassle. A lot of terrible, horribly awful design decisions went into it. The few people who use it are too resistant to change so there’s not really a point in promoting it.
Matrix is the replacement for discord, although it still needs work like adding channels.
“Obviously better” this isn’t obvious to me at all. Just because you don’t use the many features it offers doesn’t mean other people don’t.
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’ve been saying this for years, but the general mood still hasn’t shifted against Discord. People were actually amazed back when it added… forums. But now if the company is going public the enshittification is imminent.
I like to play rom hacks, and sure enough, most of them want you to join their Discord to get information about any upcoming updates or what the mod author is making next. I hate it to absolute death.
Agreed. For me it’s very hard to feel the same about software projects that are like “fuck the corporations! Learn more on our discord.” Because the mental gymnastics are wild
A lot of people just don’t see the bigger picture, and it shows.
Just a replacement as a newsletter is totally fine.
What’s not good is knowledge being solely shared there instead of a Wiki.
Github literally has wiki functionality built-in.
My 4GBs agree. I literally cannot use discord. It takes ridiculous amounts of resource because you are meant to goddamn live in it, not just chat.
Discord was great when it had a goal to be a connection point for gaming parties but then they got greedy.
I hate how companies will refer to their Discord for customer service… Fuck that shit. Should be illegal.
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
Reaction emojis, threads, screen sharing, and voice chat. IRC has none of these features. Better to get on the Matrix train
Matrix is so bad though. Slow, sometimes just doesn’t load, bridges are crap… Why would I want to switch to it?
Do you have an alternative to suggest or are you just here to whine?
Honestly if Discord went away I’d switch to posting notes on a cork board on the wall before I switched to Matrix in its current state.
“But I don’t want to eat the moldy cabbage on the ground outside!”
“Okay, do you have an alternative, or are you just gonna whine? Eat up!”
“We have these delicious carrots.”
“I ONLY WANT CABBAGE THAT’S BEEN SITTING OUT FOR A WEEK!”
Ok time for Matrix & XMPP (or even IRC😉)
This only exelerates the enshittification that already started
accelerates
Did they fucking stutter? Exelerates.
The enshittification has finally struck the English language
I blame dyslexia in combination with english not being my first language
This is not enshittification, this is evolution. “Exelerates” is superior to “accelerates”.
I was trying to make a joke
Coldside was just emplifying your joke
What? Its evolving!
Accelerate turned into exelerate!
I kinda want discord to get shitter. It might eventually get to a point it pushes more people to using IRC instead.
man of culture, but it kinda lacks features xD
