Discord is going public

28 Apr, 2025

Discord is going public. These are not just rumblings anymore; they are stated intentions. This is frustrating. But I need to make peace with it, these are just the ebbs & flows of online platforms. Nothing lasts forever, no place is ever truly stable, adapting with the times and finding new solutions (until they inevitably enshittify as well) seems like part of the course. Anything that works too well finds this fate.

“What’s the big deal?”, you may ask. Perhaps nothing, but I wouldn’t place my bets on that. I don’t think discord is going anywhere, and I certainly have plenty of reason to keep using it. But I also have reason to remain alert. It won’t surprise me to see small changes gradually reduce quality of life or undesirably shape the ways we interact there. For me, ultimately, it comes down to 2 things:

1. The question of value: what happens when you are beholden to shareholders
2. Boiling the frog: Dark design patterns towards enshitification

Do I believe that publicly traded companies can never do something good? Not exactly. What I believe is that when a company is beholden to shareholders, then decisions are made to deliver value to shareholders. The product or service is seen less as an end in itself and more as a vehicle to extract value. Decisions, then, are made to optimize the ways in which value can be extracted, regardless of whether that makes for an enjoyable user experience. To be fair, (as I understand it) Discord has already received rounds of VC funding, and thus, are already beholden to private investors. This is not a drastic change, but a gradual progression of the power and economic dynamics the platform is subject to.

What I want to remain alert for is what has been called dark patterns of design.¹ If we think about the way enshitification happens, it is never one big change that makes a platform shit. They are slow dial turns that seem pesky and annoying, but to which the userbase ultimately adapts. “Yeah, I didn’t like that change, but I still need to use this platform for x and y”. Like the notion that if you drop a frog in boiling water it jumps out, but if you gradually increase the heat, they will stay.² By the time you stop and look back, the platform has had significant changes from when you joined. Changes that, if they were in place when you were joining, perhaps you would’ve chosen not to. But, since you were here already, and they were gradual, they became normalized and expected.

These Dark patterns are, as Zagal et al. define them, “used intentionally by a game creator to cause negative experiences for players which are against their best interests and likely to happen without their consent”. Meant to discuss exploitative dynamics in videogames such as predatory microtransactions, this notion is easily expanded to platforms or other forms of online spaces of dwelling and interaction. An experience can be deliberately crafted to be just frustrating, unsatisfying or annoying enough that it doesn’t push most of its userbase off the system yet makes them more miserable in an attempt to extract more value. What is important to note for me is that this is not reduced to individual decisions of “am I ok with this? Am I willing to engage with this?” but broader questions of how these systems impact the way people relate to each other; people that already tacitly accept to be part of a dynamic they are not aware is being shaped in a specific way and produces specific outcomes. Designed systems shape how we engage in intentional ways that are rarely obvious, but the result of complex dynamics of the system. We must ask what type of interactions a platform elicits from us, and what type of subject positions does it enable or create. What forms of interaction emerge from them?

This is not to say we should jump ship. I have no Idea how Discord will continue to change and how it will affect users. But it’s a reason to pay attention to these questions.

I’m thinking, particularly, of how indie communities have congregated around Discord servers, and the information sharing and expertise that resides in these spaces as well. A lot has been said about the differences between forums and social media, and of the wish to return to forums and their mode of interaction. It’s true that a lot of what used to be discussed in open forums has now shifted to private discords, making hobbyist discussions less accessible for people outside of specific groups. It’s also true that discord is not particularly useful as an archive or repository of knowledge or discussions that could be more easily navigated in forums. Yet there’s also benefits to the ways people have been able to articulate these more private spaces and nurture tight knit communities. Both these spaces enable different types of interaction that are interesting and worthy of attention.

Once again, none of this is drastic. Not yet at least. I’m not saying Discord is over. I’m just a bit scared. I’m fearful of potential diasporas and the loss of spaces many have come to rely on and to dwell in. Still, communities will continue to find new ways to congregate and new ways to dwell online, and perhaps even new and exciting systems spring from this change.

#blog