Discord is entering its second decade of existence and is striving to become a public company. During this time, it has changed the way online communities interact, transforming groups that previously existed as forums or bulletin boards into omnichannel instant messaging servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it’s an artificial intelligence platform like Midjourney (Discord’s largest server), an international gaming community, or a school club.
But message boards still serve their purpose. Sometimes it makes sense to have more gradual, organized comments on a forum, as opposed to the fast-paced, random, real-time chats on Discord, which can overwhelm users with a huge number of unread messages and potentially hide the most useful information.
According to The Verge, Discord’s vice president of product Peter Sellis says the company is thinking about how to solve this problem. He said that Discord wants to work on features that are “more friendly to structured knowledge sharing, such as forums, which we could probably invest in better.”
Another proposed solution to this problem is to use LLMs to summarize long message threads. But the culture of Discord users is so different that the introduction of AI could simultaneously excite and anger their audience.
According to Sellis, with AI, Discord could turn a long, meandering conversation into “something that could be more easily shared and distributed across the web.” However, he said that he and his team have yet to “see a solution that we’re comfortable with.”
With a new CEO at the helm and an imminent IPO, Discord is likely to have more than a few updates in store.
