Re:Discord does not allow 3rd party clients
by ApolloFortyNine on Thursday July 05, 2018 @10:52AM
(#17463693)
As with most of these "lose money now, make money later" startups, I think Discord's longterm goal is to get bought out.
I don't see any way they can turn a profit. If they charge for hosting servers, they'll lose a large number of servers (people will just consolidate). If they charge for quality, users will start leaving for the oldguard services (Teamspeak/Mumble).
Persistent text chat is definitely a plus, but all it would take is for one of the slack clones to have a mumble client built in for there to be a free/easy alternative. Or people to just go back to a groupme/whatsapp and a voice service.
What other avenues do that have for monetization? Could they potentially be collecting user data, chat logs, or voice recordings to potentially monetize off of down the road? Might they decide to start automatically injecting targeted ad content into chat sessions?