Discord

I have used Discord since December 19th, 2016. I have seen it change from a niche platform for voice chat to a massive social media platform. It is no longer just an application for voice/text chat. It is a money making machine. In my opinion, Discord is quickly descending down the slippery slope of becoming a public company. They are not interested in providing a platform for people to talk to their friends any more. They are in the business of hashing out corporate sponsorships and grabbing the bag.

I love Discord. At its core, it represents what an online communications app should be - user-friendly and unobtrusive. It, mostly, does not get in the way of what the user wants to do, which is send someone a message or join a server to chat with friends; however, there is slowly more friction being added to this experience. You can see "quests" (advertisements) pop up occasionally on startup now. While they are tasteful right now, you give them an inch and they take a mile. Eventually once Discord goes public, the shareholders will want those ads right in the user's face. Perhaps they'll even appear in the voice chat interface, or in other unused screen real estate. Going public is like opening the Pandora's box of money-loving kleptocrats.

Valve is a prime example of how to run a company. They are privately owned and will never go public (hopefully). In recent years, they have only made good products. They value the consumer first, and they're able to do that because they don't have to suck up to shareholders. Discord, on the other hand, is losing its vision. The former CEO, Jason Citron, claims that Discord still prides itself on "bringing people together around games," but what that tells me is that they actually want to bring people around so that they can pay Discord for silly cosmetics.

The only way, in my opinion, to create a truly free online communications platform is to not make any money. Communications on the internet is done through various protocols that aren't really owned by anyone - they are technologies developed so that people, or groups of people, can use them to make more technologies. It's up to the creators to decide how they do that.

That's the beauty of the modern internet. You don't have to start a business to make a successful application because the infrastructure is already there to support independent development. The infrastructure (database applications, cloud services, protocols, programming languages, web frameworks, etc.) has been built over decades of research and development. A random person can build an application in a day (if they really had that sort of time) and give it out for free.

Discord is building itself to be a scam. They are going to take advantage of their user base because the users have nowhere else to go. It is one of the only widely known applications for people that have niche friend groups and interests. There is Slack, but that is marketed toward companies, not the average gamer. There is Team Speak, but that is archaic (though a good alternative). Discord will quickly realize that by making money, they are losing what made them popular in the first place. Their software is no longer unique. Just like how Discord killed Skype, something else will kill Discord. It may very well be not one thing, but many free applications that achieve a similar purpose.