Discord Files Confidentially For IPO

According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video and text chatting capabilities aimed at gamers and streamers. According to a statement in December, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users.

Great confidentiality, guys.

[russotto]

I know Slashdot has lost a lot of audience, but I still think having it known here doesn't count as "confidential".

Re:

[ebunga]

Let me guess, you said something like "Farty farty look I'm years old?"

Well

[liqu1d]

They had been slowly enshittifying over the past few years guess it was bound to happen. IPO then full shittification? I can't imagine they're profitable from their nitro subscriptions.

Re: Well

[wgoodman]

Look at Reddit..

Re: Well

[liqu1d]

Reddit thankfully is relatively easy to avoid the shitty parts. Adblockers hide most of the crap. The biggest issue with Reddit is how it's so full of bots and shills posting and answering questions that it's no longer a valid place to get recommendations. Discord is a completely closed system so can't use adblockers or external content moderation. After the IPO I suspect lowering limits of everything to force more nitro adoption and worsening of service.

Separating out the chaff?

[shanen]

My experiences with Reddit and Discord are similarly useless. I do believe there is some good stuff on both websites, but the volume of chaff is overwhelming and the search functions are deficient. Sometimes better luck from an outside search, but still disappointing more often than not.

I used to be interested in why, but mostly lost interest. Speculations that Reddit has been forced into some sort of defensive crouch and presumptive filtering by spammers, while Discord is just living up to its branding. Or

Re:

[codebase7]

There was a video that some youtuber did that suggested that Discord was angling toward being a "safe" third party chat service for other (gaming) companies to use.

I.e. Discord handles user (age) verification (though their third party verifier), and all of the other legalities, while providing an easy to use integration API for game developers to just plug in to their games. The idea being that the game developers don't have to deal with GDPR / Online Safety Act style legislation themselves, and Discord b

They still aren't profitable...

[Qbertino]

... AFAIK. Which isn't that surprising. It's a glorified IRC with audio and video. This will go the way of Skype I presume.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[antdude]

My online friend loves Discord and told me to stop using IRC. Frak no!

Re:They still aren't profitable...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Discord is fine when it's just video and chat. The problem is that gaming communities, modders and (worse) companies have started to use Discord for things that it isn't: a discussion forum, a help desk system, a knowledge management platform. It is ridiculously bad at all of those, mainly because content is invisible unless you join that particular Discord community, and the content is not indexed by Google. Inside Discord, there is no search across communities either, and the limited search function they have is terrible.

More and more, I see information and discussions disappear off websites and forums, and end up on Discord, never to be found again.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

And like any other company, let the enshittification begin.

Discord probably waited this long to be ubiquitous enough that switching would be hard once they start enshittifiying.

Whelp

[dohzer]

What are we switching to now, guys? TeamSpeak? Ventrilo? Skype? ICQ?

Re:

[znrt]

roger wilco.

Re:

[PPH]

CQ, CQ.

Re:

[nazrhyn]

Mumble

The way they even begun was pretty lucky

[Z80a]

The only platform to not require a bloody phone to make an account when people were leaving skype because it became too bad.

VCs want out?

[bradley13]

I don't get it. Discord is a fine app for chatting, but it's really no better than any other similar app. It's free, which makes profitability difficult. Their attempt at offering games was a complete flop. They make most of their money with "Nitro", which let's you do things like put fancy icons on your profile. Gee, whiz, wow.

An IPO smells like VCs wanting out.

Re:

[Skubman]

Agree on most points. I'd love to see actual revenue from Nitro stuff, though. I'm sure if they charged a subscription to be a mod, though, a lot of sad people would pay up just for that privilege.

well, next massive easy AI training target

[Crenor]

WELL, either AI takes it, and it's used for training (this would be the best option) OR they make it total garbage and everyone leaves It needs to earn money somehow, just a question of how.