Free and Open Source Software

The author of this post seems to not be super aware of what he is talking about.

As of 2021 discord has received a TOTAL of $980 million in VC money. Ok that seems like a lot until you look at their year over year revenue:

From ONLY nitro subscriptions: Year Revenue ($mm) 2016 5 2017 10 2018 30 2019 45 2020 130 2021 200+

So as of 2021 discord has created $420 million in revenue.

This isn't counting anything from 2022 or 2023, because now server boosts are a thing and also discords version of Patreon rewards that server owners can implement (discord takes 30%).

So while discord isn't out of the VC hole yet, it's on a meteoric rise and making more and more money every year.

Data retention: I never have seen a discord official policy that they don't delete data ever. I specifically remember a blog post where they outlined deleting data from servers when it reaches a certain age. This was the blog post where they were detailing a database move. I cannot remember specifics. I did some searching about discord policies on deleting attachments and came up with nothing. To my knowledge discord has no policy stating that your attachments will live forever. That said, storage is cheap. Storage is very cheap.

Morally lazy: Honestly easily when someone says something like this I tend to think that they are probably a blithering idiot who has no idea what they are talking about (in a lot of cases this is true, and usually someone with a chip on their shoulder). In this case after reading the post I have come to some conclusions...

The author does not use discord much The author does not nor has he ever paid for nitro The author does not nor has ever run a server with actual people on it The author is someone who thinks that matrix is in any way feature comparable with discord (it's not, not even remotely close)

The author is weirdly offended by discord referring to servers as "servers". Because ackshully "a server is, generally speaking, a piece of compute that operates some software that serves users in some way. Each server is isolated from each other server, and they may run a mariad of difference pieces of software. They may be based in different countries."

This is the dumbest and most pretentious point possible, and the fact that it's passed off as a supporting point to the post makes it impossible for me to take the author seriously.

And then there's this gem: "Discord is not a financially feasible company. Let us examine some very conservative projected operating costs:

• 500 SF employees * $150,000/year
• 50000sqft SF office space
• 15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average"

So all employees of discord make 150k a year? I'd love to see some supporting evidence there.

50000sqft office space Do we know how much rent discord is paying? Not to my knowledge

15 billion messages per month * 12 * 830 bytes per message on average" Storage is cheap.

A company making upwards of 200 million a year. "Not financially feasible“? In my mind this points to the contrary.