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by nerdponx 1764 days ago
The arrogance of these corporate reps is incredible. They clearly do not care about supporting bot devs.

Perhaps the goal is to kill the bot dev community in order to centralize it around Discord corporate, and then start putting more bot-related features behind Nitro and other subscription paywalls.

Seems like a nasty way to go about it, but I can't imagine any other reason to behave this way towards a community of unpaid volunteers who add tremendous value to your platform.

I think there's a lot of potential for a VC-funded startup to pour some cash into Matrix and then swoop in when the Discord ecosystem eventually starts falling apart.

1 comments

Discord is likely burning a lot of money on servers & payroll. I would be surprised if they broke even in 2020 given their revenue numbers[0]. Why any VC would back an open source, modifiable project like Matrix just to compete with Discord's existing stranglehold on the market is beyond me.

0: > Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled.

0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game...

With somewhere in the thousand plus range of employees they'd have to be spending a hundred million on servers. I'd sure hope costs aren't that high. I'm pretty sure I could host every discord server I'm on for the price of a nitro subscription.

Edit: I mean, imgur has an estimated revenue of twelve million. Staple a hundred IRC servers on the side and you have most of discord's functionality accounted for. Unless the voice calls are really tough, and they're actually a streaming company by majority of expenses, where would the costs come from?