The Coming Enshittification of Discord

March 18, 2025

The news that Discord is considering going public has me and many other people worried that they will enshittify. With good reason: they are the main platform I use to talk with my internet friends, and I know that is a common situation.

But it’s also obvious that their current business model is unsustainable if you think about it at all. There’s no way enough people have nitro to cover the bandwidth costs of what they offer on the free tier. I’m part of the problem; I have used Discord just to transfer pictures from my phone to my PC when I’ve been in a lazy mood.

“Enshittification,” as originally coined by Cory Doctorow was a specific process where a company uses its position in the market to increase its power and profits by abusing both its suppliers and customers—and deliberately maneuvers itself into such a position. But the word has escaped containment and come to mean, simply, when things get worse for the sake of profit. That certainly is a process deserving of it’s own word. But it also implies a deliberateness that is not always applicable.

I said it in my recent post, but I think it bears repeating. I think we need to rethink our expectations of internet services as free by default. In our current society, making money is not optional. And yet we (by “we” I mean “I”) so often expect products and platforms to make enough money to operate from other sources, by other means. This is not usually based on an evaluation if that is reasonable or not.

Once again, in the world we live in, you must make money to survive. Therefore, anything that exists must either be profitable or die. I don’t have any access to Discord’s financial information, but find it difficult to imagine they are profitable. And so the next step, IPO or not, is inevitable. That is independent of what anybody at Discord thinks or wants.

So enjoy Discord while you can. I will. Because it won’t be so free and easy forever¹.