As Discord forces in more adverts and paid customization towards becoming a public company the CEO and Co-Founder, Jason Citron, has announced they're stepping down as CEO.
Citron will be moving to become a member of the Board of Directors and Advisor to the CEO. The new CEO, starting from Monday April 28th, will be Humam Sakhnini who worked at Activision Blizzard as Chief Strategy Officer and later King (developer of Candy Crush Saga).
There's been a lot of mixed reports on Discord's plan to become a public company, with this now actually being directly confirmed by Citron in the announcement blog post noting that Sakhnini was hired to "lead Discord through our next chapter of growth and someday becoming a public company".
From the separate press release:
“Building Discord over the last decade has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. From the very beginning, our mission has been about bringing people together around games. It’s a mission I’ve dedicated my career to, and I'm confident that passing the torch to Humam is the right evolution for Discord's future. His deep gaming industry expertise and proven track record of scaling businesses while fostering genuine friendships through play and shared experiences positions us perfectly for our next phase of growth. I believe this transition will accelerate our momentum and unlock even greater possibilities for Discord, our consumers, partners, and the overall gaming ecosystem in the years ahead.” — Jason Citron, Discord Co-Founder
"I want to express my sincere gratitude to Jason Citron as he moves into a new role on the Board of Directors. We’ve worked together closely for more than a decade, and Discord is the product of his incredible vision for a new company that could redefine how gamers connect. The fact that the company has scaled to reach and delight millions and millions of people is a testament to the power of that vision. I’ve known our incoming CEO Humam Sakhnini for many years as well, and I’ve long admired his work and strategic thinking. I believe he is the ideal leader for this new phase of Discord’s history, with his deep understanding of the game business generally, and particularly the nuances of customer acquisition and modern revenue creation which are so important in today’s game business. I am looking forward to working with him to help realize Discord’s long-term potential.” — Mitch Lasky, Discord Board of Directors
“I'm incredibly excited to join Discord at such a pivotal moment. Discord stands as a massive, foundational part of the gaming ecosystem that millions of players, developers, and publishers rely on every day. What Jason and Discord co-founder and CTO Stan Vishnevskiy have built is truly remarkable — a platform with an undeniable product-market fit where hundreds of millions of people connect around their passion for gaming and shared interests. I look forward to working with Stan and Discord's talented team to scale our business while staying true to the company's core mission and the special connection it has with player communities. We're still at the beginning of gaming's impact on entertainment and culture, and Discord is perfectly positioned to play a central role in that future.” — Humam Sakhnini, Incoming Discord CEO
We all know how going public goes right? Let the enshittification commence (er — continue?). For now, Discord at least still works quite well, but I have a lot of concerns about how their work towards going public will ruin Discord as we know it.
What happens if it really does go bad? Where does everyone go for chat then? There's not exactly many other actually good (and modern feeling) options that have the range of services Discord provides.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
pb 8 hours ago
I didn't know Activision was a monarchy. ;-)
Liam Dawe 8 hours ago
Analog 7 hours ago
Julius 7 hours ago
Ehvis 7 hours ago
At least I've been running discord in full isolation on my system. It has no access to any of my files, it can't read the process list and it can't even see what games I have installed on Steam, so all that it got from me was what I typed into the client directly.
Maybe it's time to set up some bogus "servers" with nonsense conversation. Poisoning the well before they start training an AI on it.
Mohandevir 6 hours ago
For my part, It's all becoming Anti-social medias...
Last edited by Mohandevir on 24 Apr 2025 at 2:05 pm UTC
TightRope 6 hours ago
“I'm confident that passing the torch to Humam is the right evolution for Discord's future.” LOL
Salvatos 5 hours ago
The only thing that I really lost was access to the communities that exclusively operate inside of a Discord server and it is a little awkward when I tell people "I cannot use Discord". My hope is that this move pushes more people out of the Discord only mindset as they get fed up with the anti consumer stuff we are going to see happen.
I think I am a minority case with Discord, but for what I used it for (Voice communication and messaging small groups of close friends), I have found Signal to be an excellent replacement, and I recommend folks give it a try.
As for what happened with Discord, the short of it is that when I changed my email they flagged my account erroneously as a compromised account which forced it to require a phone attached for verification. I spent almost two months trying to work with their service team to resolve the problem before I finally gave up. I should note I have become a bit of a privacy advocate over the years and do not believe Discord needs my number to operate (after all, it didn't for over a decade), and they have blocks for VOIP numbers. Also, in the process they managed to mark my phone as invalid, so even if I wanted to I would have to buy and activate another phone to comply. Needless to say, the experience was so awful that even if stuff worked out I would have used my access to the account to tell everyone farewell and then delete my user data anyway.
spacemonkey 4 hours ago
(Edit)
My guess is that Steam Chat will be it for most people
Last edited by spacemonkey on 24 Apr 2025 at 4:17 pm UTC
sonic2kk 4 hours ago
I don't use Discord servers or voice/video chat. I actively avoid servers and voice/video chat on all platforms. The only thing I might miss is Screenshare, which it seems [Signal already supports](https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5369688043418-Screen-Sharing-with-Signal-Desktop-Calls).
Farewell, Discord. I stopped enjoying the experience in 2018, now I have a good excuse to leave.
ertuqueque 4 hours ago
The developers are rewriting the whole thing and it seems like they're making good progress, check the latest version highlights in Github: https://github.com/revoltchat/frontend/releases
I also heard some sort of controversial things about their developers, but no proof or evidence of it (https://alternativeto.net/software/revolt-chat/about/#post-146274)...
I'd like to know people's opinions here.
Last edited by ertuqueque on 24 Apr 2025 at 4:14 pm UTC
Kimyrielle 3 hours ago
R Daneel Olivaw 3 hours ago
Pyrate 2 hours ago
I've been looking into alternatives to Discord before it became cool, since at least 3 or 4 years ago, when I learned the app records literally every single click you make in it, as well as god knows what else it collects from the PC (we do know at least it monitors every foreground app including its usage time). I just hope this new development of them going public will finally make users wake up.
Becauae that's What keeps baffling me every time, and I'm sure I brought this up in one of the older articles, is how it feels like allll the tech/privacy conscious people just completely give up when it comes to Discord. Like, I can successfully replace nearly every service I use for something free and open source, but not Discord, and everyone just continues to use it, as if it doesn't have these issues, or that they don't literally break the GDPR by refusing to remove your messages from their servers when you decide to leave the service. I'm not making this last part up.
I've looked at every alternative out there, and I keep following how they develop over time. Other than TS6 which I already mentioned, Matrix looks like the best bet, if going strictly for open source. It still lacks in the screen sharing department and I read voice calls aren't super good either, but it's a good candidate for if TeamSpeak fumbles this golden ooportunity of capturing a good userbase from Discord migrants.
Mumble doesn't have screensharing or video calling at all, and the UI isn't something my friend group will appreciate. Arguably the best voice comms though, even better than TeamSpeak's probably.
I also looked at the Slack/Slack-like services and none of them meet my criteria (I just want something for my group of 10-12 people to hang out, with voice chat and proper screen sharing, I don't care about the social "communities" part one bit).
Revolt looked promising but I don't like that it's literally Discord but open source, like it's a carbon copy to the point I can see Discord taking them to court for copypasting everything. Besides, the project doesn't seem to have a lot of manpower and it's been the most stagnant out of all the others I mentioned.
Edit: I saw it mentioned in the comments above but I didn't write about it. Steam chat, I have also tried. The good part is that voice comms are surprisingly very good, I remember I was in a call with a friend on Discord and during the call we switched to Steam Chat, and the differnece in audio quality was significant when put face to face like that. The bad part is that although it exists, screen sharing is separate from Steam Chat and trying to stream your game on Steam in general is convoluted and appeared to actually be broken on Linux, at list it looked like it the last time I tried it. If Steam Chat gets just a little more attention from Valve, I can see them easily taking over Discord for some people. The idea of having voice communications through the same Steam overlay shortcut and not a separate program is fantastic.
Last edited by Pyrate on 24 Apr 2025 at 5:56 pm UTC
chickenb00 2 hours ago
Given the amount of users I see nearly daily say things like "I'll pay money for beta access to this mod", "I will pay $100 to someone to help me solve/navigate this SteamOS issue", "who do I have to pay to get help around here", or the increasingly common "I just want to donate money to [alleviate weird American-sensibility that everything has to have a dollar cost]", it seems to me that many Discord users will be happy to pay $10/m for Discord access. That will freeze out users like me who are unwilling to pay sub fees for server access, or other users unhappy with shitty corporate policies designed to encourage LineGoUp revenue behaviors.
The enshittification train is battling towards us and there are no brakes.
Eike 52 minutes ago
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