Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created

Discord is entering its second decade as a company and is seeking to go public. Along the way, it’s changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an AI platform like Midjourney (Discord’s largest server), an international gaming community, or a school club.

But message boards still serve their purpose. Sometimes, there’s value in more incremental, organized commentary in a forum, as opposed to the rapidity of real-time, casual chats on Discord, which can flood users with an overwhelming number of unread messages and potentially obscure the most useful information.

According to The Verge, Discord’s SVP of product, Peter Sellis, says that the company is thinking about how to solve this issue. He said that Discord wants to work on features that are “more amicable to structured knowledge sharing, like forums, that we could probably do a better job of investing in.”

Another proposed solution to this clutter is to use an LLM to summarize long streams of messages. But culture among Discord users varies so widely that the embrace of AI could simultaneously excite and enrage its audience.

With LLMs, Sellis said, Discord could take a long, meandering conversation and turn it into “something that could be more sharable and syndicated across the web.” However, he said that he and his team hadn’t “seen a solution that we feel great about yet.”

With a new CEO at its helm and an imminent IPO, Discord is probably in for more than a few updates.