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Title: Discord's CTO Is Just As Worried About Enshittification As You Are

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/05/2057234/d...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Discord co-founder and CTO
Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know he thinks a lot about
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. "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. "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.
"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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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