Brace yourself for Discord to get worse: Reports swirl that the company is in talks with bankers about opening itself up to shareholders

I am not, on the whole, pro-Discord. I don’t like that it has supplanted easily searchable forums. I don’t like that so many mods now ask me to keep up with them via the service rather than a GitHub or Nexus Mods page. I don’t like that the process of joining a new server requires wrestling the whole thing into usability by painstakingly unfollowing and muting channels.

Oh, and I really don’t like that I can’t set Stages to play in speaker mode on mobile—I can only listen to them like a phone call (alright, this one is a bit me-specific).

But hey, it could be worse, and maybe it’s about to be, because the New York Times reports that Discord head honchos have been meeting with investment bankers to talk about an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as this year.

Back in 2021, quoth the NYT, Discord was valued at around $15 billion, which is just the kind of number to make company bosses start slavering at the potential lucre that’d come from putting it on the stock market.

There is some reason to hope. The NYT’s anonymous sources stressed that the talks between Discord and the bankers—whom I’ve elected to imagine as the porcine guy in a top hat from Stachka—are just exploratory for the moment, and any IPO inclinations among Discord brass could still change. Likewise, a Discord spokesperson told the NYT it had no comment as to whether it is or isn’t considering an IPO.

But I gotta be honest, folks, I find it hard to imagine a corporation choosing not to take a big ol’ cash injection once it’s scented blood on the wind.

The issue, of course, is that once Discord is subject to the short-term whims of a board of investors whose only interest is making the lines on the charts go up as quickly as possible, it quickly becomes prone to the process of enshittification—prioritising shareholder demands over user experience and quickly degrading the quality of the overall service.

Am I cynical? Yes. I stress this is all conjecture on my part. Maybe Discord will get a stock market ticker but remain the service we know and… tolerate, or maybe the execs will decide that, actually, they’re not up for this IPO thing at all. But all hitherto existing history in the games industry and, hell, capitalism as a whole has me wearily preparing to pick up sticks from Discord and move onto a new thing once the enshittification proves too much.