Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#221

Post by clofresh » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #16

I'm bearish on Discord. Unlike Slack, it targets a price-averse demographic and is attempting to enter spaces that are very saturated (Steam, Origin, Epic, Ubisoft are already crushing the digital distribution medium), so then it's basically an IRC replacement for gamers. I understand Slack's valuation as it targets huge companies with up to decades-long contracts and has projected revenues > $1B for this year, but I…

Many game developers use Discord to organize beta tests, gauge feedback, share announcements and manage and measure their community following in general. The fans feel good for being included in the process and the devs feel good knowing roughly how many people they can expect to buy their games at launch time. I hope they figure out a good way to monetize this, since I see it as their killer app.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#222

Post by nikanj » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

legionof7 wrote: post #139

I've used Discord for a long time and my previous startup was even part of the Hypesquad program. However, I'm really concerned with their views around E2E encryption. We've asked many times for an end-to-end encryption service. This became the #3 most upvoted request ( https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600... ). Unfortunately, their "rejection" and user comments were deleted after they switche…

Pretty much every major messaging product with e2e encryption has had child pornography and terrorism claims made against it.

Maybe they want to avoid that publicity, even if it costs them some of the most paranoid users?

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#223

Post by degenerate » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

Cypher wrote: post #188

Meanwhile... who here has updated skype recently?

I refuse to update to the new monstrosity UI... so if they eventually make my version stop working, so be it. Bye Skype.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#224

Post by ineedasername » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #171

freddie_mercury wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this: Skyrim sold 30 million copies. That's more than all but 7 music albums ever made. Wii Sports (12 years old) sold 80 million copies. That's more than any album ever. Individual videogames regularly sell more than MUSIC and have done so for well over a decade. I don't know what definition of mainstream there is where something sells 80 million copies and still isn't mainstream.

Wii Sports was one of the first mainstream games. That's pretty much the boundary of the two eras. Everyone at the time was talking about how the Wii was penetrating all these "mainstream" markets that gaming had never managed to touch before, remember?

I'm wondering if comments like this, that place "mainstream" somewhere in the mid 2000's, are being made by people born later, who grew up with ps2/gamecube and then wii console gen. They strike me as not being very familiar at all with the actual success and market penetration of videogames before then.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#225

Post by sascha_sl » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #200

starshadowx2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a pretty big discord user, early supporter/nitro/hypesquad and all that, and I have never heard of this "influential crowd" calling it uncool. All I've seen is servers getting larger and more servers popping up. Discord themselves just ran a Snowsgiving server which raised 100k for charity in under a week and had ~10k people in it at any time I checked chatting. I don't have any lag on any devices nor do I hear o…

You can bet that they save every audio sample you generate.

the GDPR data takeout option (maybe only for european users) contains a lot of creepy shit (essentially every click and mouse movement), but no audio data

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#226

Post by dtech » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #192

x220 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different when adults spend excess mental energy on video games instead of their career? Both are inherently meaningless and illusory.

Careers are inherently meaningless?! Would you mind elaborating? The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have. So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you a…

> The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.

Under the view of the grandparent, the metric/proxy of salary has become so utterly meaningless because of modern day business behavior that it is no longer a meaningful thing to pursue (or never was).

I personally also have some problems with your view. According to you a corporated lawyer earning $500/hour by drafting contracts is 50x as valuable to society as someone earning $10/hour caring for disabled people, which I think is very untrue. What "the market" values and what we as people should value only has a partial correlation.

Another example, a lot of people value their family and children above all else, while having children leads to almost zero reward from "the market".

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#227

Post by sbarre » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #150

Discord is in this weird situation where they've been massively successful at some specific things that people aren't willing to spend money on, and not, as best as I can tell, anywhere else. They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together. But things like Nit…

Do you have a citation on "Nitro seem to have minimal adoption"?

Genuinely curious, as all over this thread there's people saying "so many people have Nitro!" and other saying "no one pays for Nitro"..

I'd love to see stats to figure out who is actually correct.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#228

Post by sbarre » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

6cd6beb wrote: post #13

ohiovr wrote: post #2

I'm not a user of it but I'm wondering how they make money?

Same way slack and moviepass do: Not really. Unless you consider taking VC captial "making money"

The money my company pays Slack each year could buy a house in most US states.

Slack makes good money.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#229

Post by sbarre » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

goldenkey wrote: post #207

Discord banned my account a few weeks ago when a user reported a one word joke I'd made. Here's the scenario: Troll: "Whats your age?" Me: "9" Troll reports messages to Discord after completing the baiting technique (clearly has done this before to other people.) Discord immediately disables my account despite the fact that I 1) paid for Nitro with a credit card in my name and have an ongoing subscription to Nitro 2)…

Odds are that their reporting and content moderation services are outsourced to companies that are given guidelines and follow them strictly, with no room for interpretation or nuance.

No one in that support org is going to go cross-reference your account details and look that stuff up because (1) they hopefully don't have access to it and (2) no offence, you're not important enough to get some kind of special treatment.

Your expectations that a company with millions of customers should "get the joke" or spend time triple-checking whether you were serious or not are unrealistic.

That's just the reality of moderation services at scale in today's Internet. No one does it in-house anymore, so it's all very very black-and-white when it comes to enforcement.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#230

Post by pmarreck » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #16

I'm bearish on Discord. Unlike Slack, it targets a price-averse demographic and is attempting to enter spaces that are very saturated (Steam, Origin, Epic, Ubisoft are already crushing the digital distribution medium), so then it's basically an IRC replacement for gamers. I understand Slack's valuation as it targets huge companies with up to decades-long contracts and has projected revenues > $1B for this year, but I…

Nitro user here.

Not long ago they gave me access to a huge amount of their new game library just for being a Nitro user. And they're competing with Steam by offering a better deal to publishers... which is a good thing. And of course, their voice chat is top-notch.

Bias: They're also powered by Elixir, my current favorite language.