Discord's CTO Is Just As Worried About Enshittification As You Are (engadget.com) 42
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about enshittification. With reports of an upcoming IPO and the news of his co-founder, Jason Citron, recently stepping down to hand leadership of the company over to Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, many Discord users are rightfully worried the platform is about to become, well, shit. "I understand the anxiety and concern," Vishnevskiy told Engadget in a recent call. "I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company." According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord could fail to do right by its users or otherwise lose its way is a topic of regular discussion at the company.
"I'm definitely the one who's constantly bringing up enshittification," he said of Discord's internal meetings. "It's not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That's how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that." The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord.
"We call it embracing the brutal facts internally," he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. "We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn't going well." Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. [...] Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a "phenomenal business," but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. "It wasn't clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions," he said. "Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people's lives, not just now but in 10 years as well," Vishnevskiy said. "That's the journey that Humam joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused."
"I'm definitely the one who's constantly bringing up enshittification," he said of Discord's internal meetings. "It's not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That's how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that." The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord.
"We call it embracing the brutal facts internally," he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. "We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn't going well." Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. [...] Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a "phenomenal business," but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. "It wasn't clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions," he said. "Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people's lives, not just now but in 10 years as well," Vishnevskiy said. "That's the journey that Humam joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused."
I'm worried more about (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm worried more about (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah but these kind of releases are the corporate equivalent of clicking the 'care' button in facebook.
An empty performative social convention.
We are raising prices/eliminating popular offerings/charging for things that used to be included/etc but we just care so much about the customer experience trust us!
It is nonsense. We all know these choices boil down to "we want or perhaps require more revenue" it is what it is
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not so convinced that it's unacceptable in this day and age. I mean, it's a word in the dictionary, for one. He's not wrong that users are worried about enshitification under the new CEO and with an IPO coming up. Discord isn't exactly trying to replicate Microsoft and target the professional demographic either... it's still mostly gamers, who aren't exactly known for their couthness. Your point did drive home how different the times are from when I was a kid: when you would get in less trouble for literally biting someone than you would for swearing after having been bit. In retrospect, that was pretty fucked up and I was right to tell off those adults.
That brought up a memory. The swearing segment of "A Christmas Story" Where Ralphie got in trouble for dropping an F-Bomb, than claimed it was his friend who taught him the word, and the friend's mom ends up beating the friend.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, it's a word in the dictionary, for one.
English has only descriptive not prescriptive dictionaries. So a word being in a dictionary is only documenting the fact that people use it, it does not really confer any legitimacy upon it outside games of scrabble.
Presence in the dictionary also does not itself indicate if the word is considered a vulgarity or offensive, though the dictionary might document if that is in fact the case.
That said industry chatter, isn't formal business communication and enshitification along with a lot of language we might
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not so convinced that it's unacceptable in this day and age. I mean, it's a word in the dictionary, for one. He's not wrong that users are worried about enshitification under the new CEO and with an IPO coming up. Discord isn't exactly trying to replicate Microsoft and target the professional demographic either... it's still mostly gamers, who aren't exactly known for their couthness. Your point did drive home how different the times are from when I was a kid: when you would get in less trouble for literally biting someone than you would for swearing after having been bit. In retrospect, that was pretty fucked up and I was right to tell off those adults.
I think you missed the caefully hidden sarcasm in the OP's post:
Such cocksuckingish fuckassery of cuntish twatwaffles, if you ask me!
For what it's worth, I agree with you, knowing how to use profanity correctly is a sign of intelligence, using it incorrectly is a sign of the opposite... I guess profanity is the same as most other parts of the language. Using profanity correctly adds impact and emphasis to an argument or statement. However it's best to treat profanity as a valuable and rare commodity, used judiciously it has a phenomenal impact, however flooding the market ma
Re: (Score:2)
It's the common word for it. And it fits.
The Users Are Worrying Too Late (Score:1)
Discord has been shit for a decade and *now* they're worried?
Re: (Score:1)
It's always been bad. No open protocol, no source. Preferring to even have a closed off SDK. It's a damn shame that open source projects use Discord over better alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
There are no thirdparty clients. Official clients don't run on older OS versions and struggle to run on lower spec hardware. Discord actively works against people modding their web interface. Log export is not officially supported (try the export function and see how it only exports your messages instead of full chatlogs), but at the same time they retain the logs on the server and even keep deleted messages.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it a shame or a sign?
I don't like discord at all (it fits in a trend of using ephemeral communication and knowledge instead of persistent, findable knowledge). However, I wouldn't be able to tell you what to use instead that has similar functionality.
Re: The Users Are Worrying Too Late (Score:1)
Which features? IRC can do all of the same things. For images a client would just need to support showing a preview. Personally I prefer to see a link and instead of being forced to see an image. Especially animated clips from media that are used as reactions. Ugh.
The other option is Matrix which comes closer to Discord but I see no need over IRC.
Re: The Users Are Worrying Too Late (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be disingenuous. IRC can not do all of the same things. Discord supports sharing your screen, easy voice chatting and a whole slew of minor features that IRC can't touch on any level of convenience.
Remember that you have to think from the perspective of a non-tech random gamer. IRC ain't it.
If you truly care about the product (Score:3)
it should never be taken public.
Re: (Score:2)
It's too late -- much too late (Score:3, Interesting)
The best thing that Discord could do right now -- to avoid further enshittification -- would be to shut down. Not coincidentally, this would also be the best thing for the Internet and for human society.
Re:It's too late -- much too late (Score:5, Insightful)
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The DMCA issue is tricky. I'm inclined to side with privacy advocates nearly all the time, and I very much dislike companies wielding the DMCA like a club, doubly so when their requests/demands are overbroad and clearl
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Public forums and chats don't have to allow porn. But it's not the business of a chat provider to monitor what happens in private messages. They should not even have the possibility to look into PMs.
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Discord IS an enshittified service since years. But they are just some typical web company doing what web companies do. The problem is the users, who jumped from team speak to Discord (see how they even use "server" as metaphor, where team speak had actually independent servers users hosted themselves?" And the worst is, that many open source projects of inexperienced developers use Discord.
Hey people, IRC exists. IRC exists since more than 30 years and will still exist when Discord went bankrupt because en
Re: (Score:2)
I've long hated discord and have always complained that it's killer features could easily be added to IRC and that internet chat should be a solved problem with open protocols and a large body of totally unencumbered public domain implementations.
The conversations i have with other people when i espouse these views, even to old guys like us, has convinced me nobody is going back to IRC, nobody is going back to XMPP. I am frankly baffled how hipchat, slack, and discord all seemed to displace open source ch
Re: (Score:1)
IRC is still the only service capable of running group chats with hundreds of active users. Discord does not even have an UI that is usable for high-volume channels, and we're not even talking about how it cannot provide low-latency chat. With IRC, you see the message a second later, whereas with Discord, it takes much longer. Their model only works if you don't have highly active chats, which is usually the case as their interface isn't suited for highly active chats at all.
XMPP is a good question. Back in
The vicious cycle. (Score:2)
Build a product. ...repeat enough times...
Make some money. Reinvest. Make some money. Reinvest. Make some money. Reinvest .
Oh no! The sales are falling! We've got too many people and investors dependent on us now! We can't fail! Quick! Do something! I don't care it's stupid! Do anything! Anything to make more money!
And then they fail anyway.
I am not "worried"... (Score:2)
I am watching in fascination as supposedly smart people make the same demented mistakes again and again and again.
A chief executive's JOB is PR (Score:2)
He wants you to think he's one of the "good guys." Remember when Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page presented themselves as "the good guys"?
Probably legitimate, he is CTO, not CEO (Score:2)
There is a good chance that enshittification bothers him more than most, as he is the one to implement the technical solutions for all this shit, which is a lot of work that goes against making good quality software. And of course, if people start complaining about things like crashes, lag, etc... he will get the blame.
I guess he likes making money, so he is not completely innocent, but I am sure he'd rather make the money-making part somebody else's job.
I bet he thinks about it a lot (Score:2)
He thinks about it a lot because he's all looking for ways to enshittify it more. I remember before there were popup ads you had to click through to use it and constantly trying to sell the ability to post special small images. I also remember when blizzard enshittified my favorite game with skins for sale that legitimately give the purchaser an advantage over other players. The sad part is they still didn't make much money and pulled support from the game.
ok... so... (Score:2)
Has he considered resolving this by not trying to add more 'value' to a functional tool?
Discord used to be usable for actually organising things. Not just game or streamer communities oriented around turning their members into revenue streams... I knew of several academic and union groups that used Discord as their primary platform during the pandemic, with Zoom only used when they had to go through their university's infrastructure for whatever reason.
Now it is oriented towards making the most intr
It already is (Score:2)
Discord is already enshittified.
Who is paying for Discord?!?! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, that while paying for a good service service could be a good business model, most services prefer to take your money and fuck around with your data, employ dark patterns, and try to get even more money from you.
And the (not so) paradox thing is, that once you payed you are on the list of people who are willing to pay and they try to get you to pay even more. You payed for some kind of "boost"? Let's rank you down, as you know how to get the boost you will need. You payed for not seeing ads?
Re: Who is paying for Discord?!?! (Score:2)
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Considering Reddit's shareprice, muppets will pump the shares for a good while regardless. So it doesn't matter.
enshittification = all social media !!! (Score:2)
Nothing Thoughtful About Discord (Score:2)
If thought were actually used, half of the very common problems would not be a problem at all.
Instead, the focus is on making new features and not fixing broken garbage.
And the software is so bloated now that what used to run fine on a 4th-gen i3 barely runs at all, now.
Enshittification already hit Discord and it hit it HARD, and that's why I quit paying for nitro.