Since 2015, the social media platform Discord has been substantially rising in popularity and is currently in talks with investment bankers to explore an Initial Public Offering (IPO). To those unfamiliar, an IPO is when a private company begins to sell shares of its stock to the public, thus permitting potential investors to buy into the company’s future growth opportunities, effectively changing the company from private to public.
To that end, Discord’s upper management has been working with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase on this IPO. This is the second time Discord has considered going public since 2021, when the company was originally approached by Microsoft for a buyout. According to Charles Rollet writing for TechCrunch, “This isn’t the first time Discord has mulled over an IPO. The San Francisco-based startup walked away from a $10 billion purchase by Microsoft in 2021 as it considered staying independent and going public. Discord was last valued at $14.7 billion in a 2021 fundraise for $500 million.” Discord’s efforts to pursue this IPO have been progressing steadily, with some sources even claiming the social media platform, popular among gamers, could be hitting the stock exchanges well before the year is out.
According to an article from Bloomberg’s Katie Roof, Ryan Gould and Cecilia D’Anastasio, “‘The company could seek a stock market listing as soon as this year,’ said the people […] ‘Discord’s plans for an IPO, including the timing, could still change. The company could also add other advisers as its plans evolve.’”
However, despite Discord’s ambitions to become a publicly traded company, some of the approximately two-hundred million daily users that utilize Discord have expressed their displeasure or skepticism. In the eyes of these particular users, they fear the popular social media platform is “chasing unsustainable growth,” or undergoing “enshittification,” a neologism first used by Canadian-British Blogger Cory Doctorow in 2022, defined as when digital platforms start out by offering high-quality services, but then degrade in quality over time thereby driving away active-users for the sake of pleasing business customers and/or shareholders. These skeptical and aggravated users have taken to voicing their displeasure on other social media platforms such as Reddit, where they have accused Discord’s leadership of “selling out.”
Discord has been under suspicion recently concerning the layoff of 17 percent of their workforce early last year, which the social media platform’s CEO, Jason Citron, defended as keeping the company focused on improvement. According to Alex Heath writing for The Verge: “‘We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020,’ Citron wrote. ‘As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.’” Although it is true that Discord’s number of employees grew around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s profits also grew significantly, with almost a billion dollars in revenue in 2024 alone.
On top of this, Discord has also irked some of its userbase with the decision to include third-party advertisements as part of its platform. As of 2025, the company has unveiled what it calls “Video Quests,” which will reward users for watching advertisements with decorations for their avatars. Although not as invasive as advertising seen on other platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook, the decision to include advertising has bothered some of Discord’s userbase, nonetheless.
With Discord’s plans for an IPO underway with JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, only time will tell whether or not this risky step will pay off for the social media platform to overcome a critical misstep.
Kelly Baker is an alumnus of West Chester University of Pennsylvania.