Is Discord succumbing to enshittification? Time and again, I am tormented by this question. My answer, in a word, is, “Yes, I think so, but I don’t know how it all comes together.” That’s thirteen words. Writing everything down, I still don’t have an answer. The long and short of it, as always, is not ‘if,’ but ‘when;’ I’m stuck in If, knowing I need a bus to get to When, but the timetable changes every time I look.
I can’t help but point out to my friends that Discord got its start in an eerily similar fashion to Facebook. Both are, in origin, cut from the same cloth – they’re both billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups propped up by venture capital. Back when Facebook first opened to the public, its biggest competition was Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace. Murdoch does at least half your PR for you – he’s a senescent media mogul who spies on end users with a nagging twitch.
For Discord, it was very direct in addressing its competition: “It’s time to ditch Skype and Teamspeak. Discord is here:”
https://web.archive.org/web/20151225064513/http://discordapp.com
The former is owned by Microsoft, a pathological monopoly, and, well, let the EFF have the last word on Skype (or, as it prefers to be called these days, Microsoft Teams):
https://web.archive.org/web/20170212155903/https://www.eff.org/node/82654
The latter, at the time, was a paid service. There was a free version, but you were limited to 32 users at most. Certainly not enough to grow beyond the dark corner of the web that you call home:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150508215238/https://www.teamspeak.com/
All Facebook had to do was not be MySpace. They promised potential users, “Sign up for our service, tell us who your friends are, and we’ll make sure that their posts reach your eyeballs as soon as they’re posted. Oh, and we’ll never, EVER spy on you. Promise.” We all know how that turned out. It’s only a promise if it can be broken.
All Discord had to do was not be Skype or TeamSpeak. It promised WoW gamers a platform where they could speak clearly, be heard, and have their IP hidden through server-to-client1 encryption to prevent what they call ‘ganking’ (which I assume is a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to a DoS attack):
The word ‘enshittification’ has developed two meanings, and when a company enshittifies, it’s usually doing both. The first meaning, defined by Cory Doctorow as a counter-theory to surveillance capitalism, points towards the tendency of businesses to establish a two-sided market when it cannot grow further:
It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel
Which leads into the second meaning: You can evoke enshittification any time you observe a decline in the quality of a service. Google’s a fantastic example. You used to be able to find things on Google:
https://twitter.com/Defunctland/status/1754647768465887445
I’m talking about information of value. Not just LLM guff, ads, things to buy, and SEO-boosted clones, run by scammers who markup everything, phone in your order, and skim the profits.
Discord, like all Big Tech companies, has the potential to enshittify. Trouble is, none of its major ‘fucky-wuckys’ have caused a seismic schism in its userbase. Take the Discool scandal, for instance:
This is the same platform that went in swinging against guilds hosting NSFW art depicting underage humans, but were quite content in dithering when the very same issue reared its head again, but for furries:
https://www.polygon.com/2019/1/30/18203692/discord-nsfw-policy-furry-cub
Facebook, when it fucks you over, at least pretends to not be the site that was founded on nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads. When Google fucks you over, at least it said it wasn’t evil. When Discord fucks you over, there’s nothing. It feels incredibly sleazy. It offers no such spectacle to suggest that it gives a single fuck. And I rely on this platform to communicate with my friends every single day.
I can’t say “orange” to Discord.
It’s no secret, either, that Discord is a security and privacy shitemare – these blogs, sent to me by an acquaintance, are a must-read on that front (among its myriad other issues):
https://austinhuang.me/discord-issues.html
https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-discord
Discord spends an awful lot of time claiming how nice it is to its end users. They add a lot of new features every update. That’s good, isn’t it? How can it be enshittifying when it’s constantly developing new ways to enrich our communities? Where’s the rugpull? Where’s the abuse to us end users to make way for business customers?
In the words of Granny Weatherwax: “Good ain’t nice.” Nice ain’t good. Discord is in an epistemological quagmire. None of us on the outside know what’s going on internally, but you don’t need to know to understand that its long list of controversies should raise a few eyebrows. You can’t take any of those back by adding new bells and whistles.
Discord is not a scrappy underdog anymore (besides which, it never really was). Its attempts to pivot to NFTs and LLMs are telling. We’re at a point where it’s big enough that it feels the need to pivot in order to grow more. We’re at a point where, to grow, it actually needs to shrink. While writing the Zettel back in January that became this post, Jason Citron announced in an all-hands that Discord would lay off 17% of its staff:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034705/discord-layoffs-17-percent-employees
Apparently, according to an email sent to one (ostensibly) disappointed internee, this was not “a result of business concerns but [instead] to sharpen our focus and improve the way we deliver for our customers:”
This is not a very good excuse to hear when your company is not only not profitable, but increasingly relied on venture capital loans to operate at scale. It’s corporate bloodletting.
Discord’s feature creep is the rugpull. I never really got the point of its threads and forums until very recently. Over the years, many have complained that if you want to find anything about a game these days, you have to join a Discord guild2 dedicated to it. This was certainly my experience of playing NASB2 – if you’re not in one of its central servers, good luck finding any information about it. Join Discord, or suffer.
Enshittification doesn’t just happen when billionaires buy platforms for shits and giggles. It’s a slow burn, like boiling frogs. The whole point of implementing forums and threads is to cement the capture of gaming communities. Where FAQ forums once served as places to archive answers for the seekers of tomorrow, they are now slowly drying up.
Discord used to be a kind of IRC/VC deluxe – ‘just a casual chatting app’ – now it wants to be another one of those five giant websites filled with screenshots and text from the other four:
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
Look, I’ve no problem with Discord as a place to create your own corner on the web. It’s in a similar boat3 as Mastodon in that regard:
https://brologue.net/2024/03/19/you-create-something-like-inward-tooting
The problem is that when you’ve locked in your end users enough that information about a certain topic is kept mostly confined to a guild, it’s kept in a place where it cannot be indexed by search engines. Not only that, but as of last year, external links pointing towards Discord have been set to rot to avoid excess bandwidth. Imagine if wikis disappeared overnight, and turned up on Discord after it rolled out a new wiki feature. That’s kinda the state of gaming communities right now.
I’m struggling to form a confident argument that Discord is in the late stages of enshittification, but I’ve seen enough things to make a point of saying that it’s getting there. For all it writes about how much it supports communities, its security and privacy track record shows me it’s too big to care. Until then, the best thing I can do is to keep the conversation going.4
- Not end-to-end encryption – it’s taken Discord NINE YEARS to consider implementing E2E, and even then, it’s only for voice/video calls:
https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-discord
Their idea of privacy is being able to read all of your DMs in transit, as per this response from a member of staff on its own subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8nzb5d/comment/e001lr1/
This is coming from the same platform that facilitated the organisation of the Charlottesville race riots by doing absolutely nothing. What’s being said here? “We’re not implementing E2EE because it only helps extremists, pedophiles and general sick fucks?” Bullshit.
↩︎ - This is another pet peeve of mine: There is no such thing as a Discord ‘server,’ like there are, say, Minecraft servers. No-one’s running their own servers based off of hardware they own or are renting. Every ‘server’ you join is hosted by Google, on devices owned by Google – not by Discord. Those old enough to remember the early days of Twitter may recall that said platform was in a similar boat. Even Discord’s own API documentation goes to some length to disperse this misnomer.
↩︎ - ‘Similar,’ because Discord is like 98% of most platforms available today in that it is the only intermediary between your messages and those who want to read them; it’s not federated.
↩︎ - The second best thing I can do is persuade you to bridge your guild to Matrix. It is quite literally better than Discord in almost every way (certain lacking features notwithstanding):
https://joinmatrix.org/guide/matrix-vs-discord/
If a catalyst event causes people to start pivoting en masse to Matrix, Discord WILL respond by rate limiting the fuck out of bridges. That’s how you’ll know it’s in terminal enshittification. ↩︎