It's beyond ironic that Discord called itself that, being the successor to OpenFeint and its privacy lawsuit scandal, and being proprietary.

Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.

Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.

Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.

[1] https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...

The solution to the growth problem is incubating complementary products.

For regular growth, maybe, but not for investment-fueled hyper-growth.

Every big, lasting company has a product portfolio: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft... A single product will leave you vulnerable to disruption.

Correct. However, I feel the specific companies you mention didn't aim for hyper-growth, and had space to diversify their product portfolio. Discord, much like Reddit, is a one-trick pony. The weird thing to me is, Reddit feels like it should've been in the Google/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft bucket - yet somehow, through all these years, it failed to diversify.

I'm not sure Discord knew what it wanted to be. Private for your friends, but not end-to-end encrypted. Chat for streamers with rooms, but not a streaming platform. (They tried. Twitch also tried to make a Discord-like desktop app.)

Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)

My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.

It wasn't meant to be "private" in the e2e sense. It was just meant to be a modern reimagining of Ventrilo/TeamSpeak, which were group chat programs for gamers. The video call stuff came after (since it was strange to not have video if you were already voice chatting in the year 201X). They want to branch outside of servicing online gaming communities but that was their origin, and you can still see how that culture affects their product design today. A good way of understanding the product is to just ask "would online gaming communities use this?".

Not everything should be preserved forever. It's actually really nice to be able to talk online and not have it form a permanent record that can be instantly referenced by anyone.

Correct. However, some things should be preserved forever and accessible. It's really nice to be able to put a piece of scientific jargon, or a text of an error message, into a search box, and get back links and references to material you can peruse at your own pace and discretion - as opposed to having to join a closed community and keep asking people, hoping someone who knows the answer and is willing to help spots the message before it disappears in the flood of ongoing conversations, and monitoring said flood so that you catch the answer in time to ask follow-up questions, etc.

Point being: different needs require different tools. Current trend is doing everything in closed, ephemeral groups.

Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.

> Also, there's the perpetual issue of people who just want to be assholes to other people on line and not actually help. This has [always] existed in internet based chat platforms and is why they will never be better than documentation.

docs/man pages should still be made, and people who are assholes should be banned.

>Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.

Discord started as a way for gamers to chat with one another. Initially the developers even wanted to sell games directly from the platform [1].

I think it would be incorrect to position Discord as a privacy-oriented platform when the desktop client needs to be run in a sandbox because there's no real way to disable data collection.

1. https://www.pcgamer.com/the-discord-game-store-is-now-open/

This.

Discord came about because all the instant messaging services (eg: AIM, MSN) had recently died, Skype was hot flaming gasoline garbage, Teamspeak and Ventrilo were tedious and expensive (for gamers), and otherwise there were no other means of reliable, easy, free, convenient means of voice communications.

Mumble was the best free voice communications app and briefly took over after Teamspeak fell out of popularity.

Discord was really the best place to hang out with your friends outside of games. Social media was too distant and Steam friends didnt do enough. The old IRC chatroom / Discord format with voice comms and screen sharing is THE way to relate to friends online now.