Re:Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
by saalweachter on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @06:50AM
(#26553437)
Do chat apps lock in users for long?
My online circle has been on Discord for a couple of years, but they've migrated from IRC to Campfire to Hangouts (or whatever it was at the time) to Slack to Discord with maybe a few stops in between. Maybe Discord is finally perfect and we'll never move again ... but moving a community from one chat venue to another has been pretty easy so far.
Re:Microsoft in talks to buy Discord for more than $10B
by bluecalm on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @07:49AM
(#26553906)
Try following some projects on Discord. Maybe a small one like Leela Chess Zero. It's a completely different experience than Slack. Maybe you and your friends could be happy there but for projects with hundred/thousands of fans/developers/contributors it's in league of its own. It got it users because of it. It didn't luckily stumble into a userbase.
If it disappeared today people would be sad and switch to something else if it would reappear in 2 years everyone would be switching back ASAP.
If discord shutdown tomorrow my friends would be annoyed and would just move to some other similar group chat + audio.
The value is entirely in the user base. I wouldn’t be on it if nobody was there.
> Really? How did you come to this conclusion?
Because that’s how every social network works. Here’s a thought exercise. Do you think Microsoft would offer $10B to buy Discord if they weren’t allowed to transfer over any of the existing accounts?
If it’s $10B worth of just software engineering, then that’s an easy “yes”. The realistic answer though is “no” because Discord is useless without the user-base.