Discord's CTO Is Just As Worried About Enshittification As You Are (engadget.com)
- Reference: 0177938856
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/05/2057234/discords-cto-is-just-as-worried-about-enshittification-as-you-are
- Source link: https://www.engadget.com/gaming/discords-cto-is-just-as-worried-about-enshittification-as-you-are-173049834.html
> Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about [1]enshittification . With reports of an upcoming IPO and the news of his co-founder, Jason Citron, recently stepping down to hand leadership of the company over to Humam Sakhnini, a former Activision Blizzard executive, many Discord users are rightfully worried the platform is about to become, well, shit. " [2]I understand the anxiety and concern ," Vishnevskiy told Engadget in a recent call. "I think the things that people are afraid of are what separate a great, long-term focused company from just any other company." According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord could fail to do right by its users or otherwise lose its way is a topic of regular discussion at the company.
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> "I'm definitely the one who's constantly bringing up enshittification," he said of Discord's internal meetings. "It's not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That's how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that." The way Vishnevskiy tells it, Discord already had an identity crisis and came out of that moment with a stronger sense of what its product means to people. You may recall the company briefly operated a curated game store. Discord launched the storefront in 2018 only to shut it down less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes that as a period of reckoning within Discord.
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> "We call it embracing the brutal facts internally," he said of the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Citron started Discord, they envisioned a platform that would not just be for chatting with friends, but one that would also serve as a game distribution hub. "We spent a year building that component of our business and then, quite frankly, we quickly knew it wasn't going well." Out of that failure, Discord decided to focus on its Nitro subscription and embrace everyone who was using the app to organize communities outside of gaming. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include a few different perks, but at its heart, Nitro has always been a way for Discord users to get more out of the app and support their favorite servers. [...] Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a "phenomenal business," but the decision to look beyond gaming created a different set of problems. "It wasn't clear exactly who we were building for, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that drove a lot of distractions," he said.
"Discord is something that is meant to be a durable company that has a meaningful impact on people's lives, not just now but in 10 years as well," Vishnevskiy said. "That's the journey that Humam joined and signed up for too. We are long-term focused. Our investors are long-term focused."
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/02/06/0454231/the-enshittification-hall-of-shame
[2] https://www.engadget.com/gaming/discords-cto-is-just-as-worried-about-enshittification-as-you-are-173049834.html
The Users Are Worrying Too Late (Score:2)
Discord has been shit for a decade and *now* they're worried?
Re: (Score:2)
It's always been bad. No open protocol, no source. Preferring to even have a closed off SDK. It's a damn shame that open source projects use Discord over better alternatives.
If you truly care about the product (Score:2)
it should never be taken public.
It's too late -- much too late (Score:3)
Discord is already one of the worst (mainstream) operations on the Internet - and in a world where sociopathic fascist billionaires are running some of them, that's saying a lot. Let's review a few samples briefly:
[1]Discord Cracks Down on NSFW Furry Art, Extremist Problem Persists - Rolling Stone [rollingstone.com]
[2]Discord Is the World’s Most Important Financial Messenger, and a Hotbed for Scammers [vice.com]
[3]Discord.io suffers massive data breach, announces closure | Mashable [mashable.com]
[4]Discord Disputes DMCA Subpoena, Rejects Role as Anti-Piracy Partner * TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com]
[5]Discord Begins Testing Facial Scans for Age Verification [gizmodo.com]
[6]New Jersey attorney general sues Discord app for alarming security lapses New Jersey Monitor [newjerseymonitor.com]
[7]Discord servers used in child abductions, crime rings, sextortion [nbcnews.com]
[8]Discord gets sued for allegedly violating child safety laws | The Verge [theverge.com]
The best thing that Discord could do right now -- to avoid further enshittification -- would be to shut down. Not coincidentally, this would also be the best thing for the Internet and for human society.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/discord-nsfw-ban-furry-porn-server-1155178/
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n848/discord-is-the-worlds-most-important-financial-messenger-and-a-hotbed-for-scammers
[3] https://mashable.com/article/discord-io-data-breach
[4] https://torrentfreak.com/discord-disputes-dmca-subpoena-demands-rejects-anti-piracy-partner-role-241015/
[5] https://gizmodo.com/discord-begins-testing-facial-scans-for-age-verification-2000590188
[6] https://newjerseymonitor.com/briefs/new-jersey-attorney-general-sues-discord-app-for-alarming-security-lapses/
[7] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/discord-child-safety-social-platform-challenges-rcna89769
[8] https://www.theverge.com/news/650849/discord-gets-sued-for-allegedly-violating-child-safety-laws
Re: (Score:3)
I've got my own criticisms of Discord (#1 being how it's replacing forums with unsearchable outside the app conversation quickly lost), but there's endless articles like most of those for every other social network too. What's the evidence Discord is worse? (Also not everywhere needs to allow porn, and the DMCA link you posted, good for them, that's a point in their favor over other networks that go far beyond the DMCA to let large copyright holders chill speech and suppress fair use).
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, believe me, I'm painfully well aware that they've got competition in the race to the bottom, and one could well make the argument that they're no worse than anyone else. (I don't happen to agree with that argument, but I'll grant that it's plausible and an interesting topic to debate.)
The DMCA issue is tricky. I'm inclined to side with privacy advocates nearly all the time, and I very much dislike companies wielding the DMCA like a club, doubly so when their requests/demands are overbroad and clearl
The vicious cycle. (Score:2)
Build a product.
Make some money. Reinvest. Make some money. Reinvest. Make some money. Reinvest . ...repeat enough times...
Oh no! The sales are falling! We've got too many people and investors dependent on us now! We can't fail! Quick! Do something! I don't care it's stupid! Do anything! Anything to make more money!
And then they fail anyway.
I am not "worried"... (Score:2)
I am watching in fascination as supposedly smart people make the same demented mistakes again and again and again.
A chief executive's JOB is PR (Score:2)
He wants you to think he's one of the "good guys." Remember when Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page presented themselves as "the good guys"?
Probably legitimate, he is CTO, not CEO (Score:2)
There is a good chance that enshittification bothers him more than most, as he is the one to implement the technical solutions for all this shit, which is a lot of work that goes against making good quality software. And of course, if people start complaining about things like crashes, lag, etc... he will get the blame.
I guess he likes making money, so he is not completely innocent, but I am sure he'd rather make the money-making part somebody else's job.
I bet he thinks about it a lot (Score:2)
He thinks about it a lot because he's all looking for ways to enshittify it more. I remember before there were popup ads you had to click through to use it and constantly trying to sell the ability to post special small images. I also remember when blizzard enshittified my favorite game with skins for sale that legitimately give the purchaser an advantage over other players. The sad part is they still didn't make much money and pulled support from the game.
ok... so... (Score:2)
Has he considered resolving this by not trying to add more 'value' to a functional tool?
Discord used to be usable for actually organising things. Not just game or streamer communities oriented around turning their members into revenue streams... I knew of several academic and union groups that used Discord as their primary platform during the pandemic, with Zoom only used when they had to go through their university's infrastructure for whatever reason.
Now it is oriented towards making the most intr
It already is (Score:2)
Discord is already enshittified.
I'm worried more about (Score:3, Interesting)
The coarseness of people who think it is acceptable to use words like Enshittification in public statements. Such cocksuckingish fuckassery of cuntish twatwaffles, if you ask me!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not so convinced that it's unacceptable in this day and age. I mean, it's a word in the dictionary, for one. He's not wrong that users are worried about enshitification under the new CEO and with an IPO coming up. Discord isn't exactly trying to replicate Microsoft and target the professional demographic either... it's still mostly gamers, who aren't exactly known for their couthness. Your point did drive home how different the times are from when I was a kid: when you would get in less trouble for lite