[datenyan]

Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.

Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.

[1] https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...

[esafak]

The solution to the growth problem is incubating complementary products.

[TeMPOraL]

For regular growth, maybe, but not for investment-fueled hyper-growth.

[esafak]

Every big, lasting company has a product portfolio: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft... A single product will leave you vulnerable to disruption, and the aforementioned problem.

[TeMPOraL]

Correct. However, I feel the specific companies you mention didn't aim for hyper-growth, and had space to diversify their product portfolio. Discord, much like Reddit, is a one-trick pony. The weird thing to me is, Reddit feels like it should've been in the Google/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft bucket - yet somehow, through all these years, it failed to diversify.