Bad. It’s always bad for the user. It’s good for the people at the top, but the reason for going public is never ever for the benefit of the consumer.
The reason is that even if the initial buy-in helps fund innovation, that will inevitably be replaced by enshittification as the board of investors demand “line must go up.” You can’t be consumer focused and chase profits; they are mutually exclusive.
Isn’t discord already profitable?
Legit question: when has any company’s IPO led to improved anything for end users?
Discprd sucks, but there is no good alternative.
This just pointedly isn’t true. There are good alternatives, there’s just not a single drop-in replacement for the role that Discord fills.
For the most obvious drop-in replacement, you have Stoat, previously called Revolt. It’s basically Discord but self-hosted. For text and voice chat you have things like Matrix or Signal, both having the added bonus of being end-to-end encrypted so your shit is private. There’s also the old-school options like Mumble and IRC.
For forums there’s Discourse, or if you want to go traditional phpbb is still around.
The big problem is that not all your friends are gathered on a single platform. This was always the case before Discord, and will be the case again after Discord. Be the change. Encourage people to switch away, and move your communities. Prune those that you don’t need any more.
