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The co-founder of Discord and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wants you to know that he is thinking a lot hindrance. With reports from a To come and the news of its co-founder, Jason Lemon, Recently resigning To put the company’s leadership to Humam Sakhnini, a former manager of Activision Blizzard, many discord users rightly fear that the platform is on the verge of becoming, well, shit.
“I understand anxiety and concern,” Vishnevskiy told Agadget during a recent call. “I think things that people are afraid are what separates a large business focused on any other company.” According to Vishnevskiy, the concern that Discord may not do the good of its users or losing your way is a subject of regular discussion in the company.
“I am definitely the one who constantly evokes an inventory,” he said about internal discord meetings. “It is not a bad thing to create a strong business and monetize a product. This is how we can reinvest and continue to improve things. But we must be extremely reflected on the way we do this.”
The way Vishnevskiy says it, Discord has already had an identity crisis and came out of this moment with a stronger sense of what his product means for people. You may remember the company briefly operated an organized game shop. Discord launched the window in 2018 only for Stop it less than a year later in 2019. Vishnevskiy describes this as a calculation period in discord.
“We call him embracing brutal facts internally,” he said about the episode. When Vishnevskiy and Lemon started, they planned a platform that would not only be to chat with friends, but which would also serve as a game distribution center. “We spent a year building this component of our company and then, frankly, we quickly knew that it was not well.”
From this failure, Discord decided to focus on his Nitro subscription and to embrace all those who used the application to organize communities outside the games. Since its introduction in 2017, the service has evolved to include some different advantages, but in its heart, Nitro has always been a way for discord users to make the most of the application and support their favorite servers. For example, the basic level of $ 3 per month allows people to use emoji and personalized stickers on any server and download files up to 50 MB. The regular level, which costs $ 10 per month, includes 4K streaming, downloads of 500 MB and more. They are all pleasant, but the basic functions remain free.
Vishnevskiy describes Nitro as a “phenomenal enterprise”, but the decision to look beyond the game created a different set of problems. “It was not clear for whom we were building, because now Discord was a community product for everyone, and that has resulted in a lot of distractions,” he said.
This feeling of mission drift was still exacerbated by the growth explosive Disord saw during the pandemic, while even more new users turned to the platform to stay in touch with friends during locking. “It has covered all the things that we have not fully clarified about how we want to approach things,” said Vishnevskiy. “We came out stronger. Many people were presented to Discord, and it is their house now, but that is probably part of what was more time to realize that some of the decisions we made at the time did not go.”
One of them was a brief flirt with the web3 craze of 2021. In November, lemon tweeted a screenshot An unprecedented discord construction with integrations for two cryptographic portfolio applications. The message sparked an intense backlash, users threatening to cancel their Nitro subscriptions if the company joined the press release. Two days later, Citron published a statement saying that Discord would not be integration.
“We were not trying to hunt technology. It was a question of allowing people to use discord in a certain way, and it came with many drawbacks. We were trying to make integrations to limit certain scams, and really do good by users and make people safer,” said Vishnevskiy. “But we have really underestimated the sensitivity that the general user base had about the NFT, and we did not do a very good job to explain what we were trying to do.”
According to Report of this periodDiscord employees were partly responsible for the overthrow. An internal server made up of workers and representatives of the game studio would have broken out on the proposed implementation.
With hindsight, Vishnevskiy attributes to company employees, some of whom have been with discord for a decade, to lead leadership in the right direction over the years. He says there have been situations where the employees of the company came to him and lemon to ask him “Why are we doing that?” He adds: “Sometimes they pushed us to do things [Jason and I] I didn’t think we should do. I think it’s an incredible asset to have. This product is built by people who love and use it. “”
Leaving the pandemic, Discord announced last year refocus on the game. In the immediate future, this change of strategy will see the company focus on “simple things” such as applications and usability compared to “construction of new features”. In March, users had a taste of this new approach, the company releasing a Redesign of his superposition PC This made less likely to trigger anti-triche systems like Battleeye. In turn, it made the superposition compatible with a larger number of games most played on Discord. In this same version, Discord has added three new density user interface options to give users more control over the appearance of the application.
To move forward, an area where the company wants to be particularly thoughtful is around AI. Discord deployed technology in a few areas – for example, he has teamed up with Krisp ai In 2019, to add a noise cancellation to calls – but it also has declining experiences that did not work. “What we have found is that many of these things did not work well enough to be in the product,” said Vishnevskiy, pointing features like Automod.
The tool currently exists in Discord. Moderators can use it to filter for specific words and sentences. But when the company presented the functionality for the first time, it envisaged an AI component which would help administrators to manage large unruly servers, and even built a version that worked on a large language model. The company has not yet shipped the functionality because “it made too many mistakes”. Discord also briefly experienced with an integrated chatbot called Clyde which exploited the technology of OPENAIBut kept it less than a year later. At the time, the company did not give a reason for the closure, but the occasional screenshots published on the Subdreddit Discord showed that Clyde could, often not abundant, Say dubious things.
“We constantly try some of these ideas with modern models. [AI] Because everyone does. “”
Looking towards the future, Vishnevskiy says that Discord focuses on helping game developers, especially with regard to discovery. The majority of the most popular games on Discord are the same people who were popular on the platform 10 years ago. This is where Vishnevskiy says that the new application Currency orbs Come, that people can win by looking at interactive advertisements, playing a game or by broadcasting their gameplay to friends on Discord. Yes, it is a way for Discord to increase its income, but Vishnevskiy thinks that the system aligns the interests of players with the interests of developers by giving disk users something in exchange for their time and their attention.
At least that’s the idea. I was able to try the system after my interview with Vishnevskiy, and even if it is friendly for users, I would like to see how Discord plans to do something smaller than game studios can exploit. Currently, many of the publishers with whom the company has partnerships are advertising versions that already have a lot of word of mouth. I’m sure fans of Marvel Rivals I would love the possibility of winning an Avatar Ultron decoration for their discord, but a game with 147,000 simultaneous players on Steam does not be struggling exactly.
Vishnevskiy would not discuss the details of when and if the company provides for the IPO, but has offered a final insurance to users. “Discord is something that is supposed to be a sustainable business that has a significant impact on people’s lives, not only now, but also in 10 years,” he said. “This is the journey that Humam has joined and also registered. We are concentrated in the long term. Our investors are concentrated in the long term.”
If it may be true that the veterans employees of Vishnevskiy and Discord have learned a lot about the sometimes turbulent history of the company, it is not clear how a culture of experimentation and dissent could change with more shareholders to appease. The test will be whether Discord can remain faithful to itself and its many fans.
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