Author: peterjang73

Discord has become a central artery for gaming. It’s the default place for companies to build communities around their games and for the people who play them to hang out with one another, coordinate gaming sessions, or just shoot the shit about whatever’s going on in life. It’s one of the least shitty social media platforms out there right now, but it might not stay that way for long.

The New York Times reports that Discord’s founders are meeting with investment bankers in preparation for a possible IPO as early as this year. While plans can always change, what that means right now is that the meeting place for 200 million monthly users, over 90 percent of whom use it for gaming, is exploring going from a private company to a public one ruled by the founding principle of the stock market: number must go up.

“We understand there is a lot of interest around Discord’s future plans, but we do not comment on rumors or speculation,” a spokesperson for the company told The New York Times. “Our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for our users and building a strong, sustainable business.”

Discord was released in 2015 by founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy. After shipping a MOBA royale on iPad called Fates Forever in 2014 that never took off, they pivoted to making communications platform for online gamers. Online games were exploding at the time and the tools for communicating in them were pretty bad. Discord filled the void when it came to coordinating raids in Final Fantasy XIV or ganks in Dota 2.

It eventually became a one-stop shop for gaming conversations online, offering an alternative to boring, stilted workplace productivity tools like Skype and Slack, as well as archaic gaming forums, and fire-hose social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Discord is now fully-integrated on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and serves as a better solution to Nintendo Switch’s terrible voice chat app, and the frustrating hiccups of cross-platform party chat. Powering this takeover has been the fact 1) Discord works and 2) the majority of its features are entirely free.

Going public could change all of that. We’ve seen the playbook before. Tech company woos hundreds of millions of users with a great product that’s practically free, and then once they’re locked into the platform through history, network effects, or just old habit, squeezes as much financial value out of the thing by making it worse in almost every way possible. If this were A Christmas Carol and Discord was Ebenezer Scrooge then Facebook would be the Jacob Marley shaking its chains in the chat app’s face.

This is what the author Cory Doctorow has dubbed enshittification. Online products and services get worse over time as the companies behind them are forced to extract more and more value no matter the long-terms costs. Being private doesn’t make a company immune from this, but going public certainly has the potential to be like throwing TNT into a dumpster fire. This shift was already evident in Discord—see its embrace of online advertising just last year—but seems only likely to worsen with a potential IPO payout looming overhead. Look no farther then Reddit’s road to going public, paved with generative-AI deals and API price hikes.

The increasing enshittification of Discord is even more worrying. It’s now the defacto town square for many of the biggest games around, from Marvel Rivals to Helldivers 2. Rockstar Games just launched its own Discord channel in preparation for Grand Theft Auto VI, likely to be the biggest game launch ever when it arrives later this year. The price of exiting the platform if features get worse or locked behind a paywall is only going up. And any communities that do leave will have to leave their pasts behind, sealed off like The Cask of Amontillado from the rest of the internet. Discord’s separation from that crumbling infrastructure has long been one of its greatest virtues, making it feel like a relative safe heaven from SEO spam and algorithmic churn. It could one day make it feel more like a tomb.

High on a pandemic-fueled influx of new users, Discord once flirted with growing beyond its gaming roots. There was talk of it supplanting Slack and of Microsoft buying it for a potential $6.5 billion. Then last year it promised it was getting back to basics and doubling down on its original core mission. “We believe Discord can play a uniquely important role in the future of gaming,” Citron wrote at the time. “We’re going to focus on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing—and we’ll help developers of those games bring their creativity to life.”

We’ll see if that remains the case.

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The problem: You don’t read physical books through to completion. The solution? According to the two developers behind it, it is a bookmark that helps you pick up where you left off. The AI-powered Mark does not yet exist but is suddenly available for pre-order with one objective: to help you remember what you just read.

Mark is a bookmark you place into a book when you are finished reading to mark your spot. Once you close the book, the gadget does the hefty lifting. It sends a summary of the pages you just read to your smartphone and then concocts a generalized summary based on information already associated with that title. The idea is that when you come back to it later, your brain will catch up with the breadcrumbs left behind.

For $130, Mark hopes to address those who feel like their attention is constantly “fragmented” and the books they’re reading remain “underutilized.” Specifically, this product is for “Americans who prefer physical books to e-readers and tablets,” or at least that’s what it claims in its manifesto.

“Just like Strava keeps you motivated in fitness, Mark keeps you inspired in reading,” says the Mark Twitter/X account. This refers to the social media element of the bookmark, which lets your friends know you’ve made a dent in your reading once you’ve shut the book. Mark will measure your reading pace and summarize key themes as you progress. A “Mark Wrapped” feature even keeps track of what you read, similar to services like Goodreads.

As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, I’m a millennial, which means I’m of the generation that got through school essays with the help of CliffsNotes. Eventually, they were replaced by Wikipedia summaries. I don’t see Mark offering groundbreaking technology, especially since I’m not sure how it does what it purports to do. While I appreciate the idea of being caught up on what I was reading before I abandoned the story, this whole practice is taking the onus off of the reader to keep track of what they’re reading.

I get the premise of being an inconsistent reader. I switched to audiobooks because they were easier to pick up and catch on with the plot, even if it was weeks before I could get to it. But $130 to pick up reading where you last left is a grotesque amount for something that doesn’t perform other functions. It is much cheaper to buy a packet of sticky notes and stay engaged with your reading instead of relying on the computer to do the heavy lifting.

You can sign up for the waitlist if you’re morbidly curious about Mark. I did because I wanted to know what the heck was going on here.

Last year, an employee at Citigroup accidentally initiated a fund transfer to a customer’s account that would have made them the wealthiest person in the history of human existence. The incident, which took place last April, credited a client’s account with a whopping $81 trillion instead of the intended amount (a mere $280), the Financial Times first reported.

Citigroup itself only has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, and the entire U.S. GDP is only worth about $27 trillion. The GDP of the European Union is some $17 trillion. The GDP of China is close to $18 trillion. So, to be clear, the transfer amount would have been more money than most of the economies of the developed world combined. It’s not clear where the bank planned to get the money, and, unfortunately, the customer in question did not get to keep the funds (not that they ever existed).

It’s also unclear whether the person who initiated the transfer got to keep their job. In communications with the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Citi referred to the incident as a “near miss” which, you know, is probably an understatement. No funds ever left the bank, the FT reports.

Actually, “near misses” seem to happen quite a lot and are a formal category of screwup in the banking industry. The said category applies to incidents that do not qualify for regulatory scrutiny, according to FT reporting:

A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but is ultimately able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events. Near misses do not need to be reported to regulators, meaning there is no comprehensive public data on how often these incidents occur across the sector. Several former regulators and bank risk managers said near misses of greater than $1bn were unusual across the US bank industry.

Ultimately, automated systems at the bank were responsible for halting the impossibly massive transfer, while two human employees initially missed the gargantuan outflow of money.  A third employee finally caught wind that something was amiss approximately 90 minutes after the transfer was initiated, the FT writes. “Despite the fact that a payment of this size could not actually have been executed, our detective controls promptly identified the inputting error between two Citi ledger accounts and we reversed the entry,” the company told the New York Times.

The Times notes that Citi has made some massive fuckups before. Some two years ago, an accounting error for a trade inspired a huge selloff of stocks in Europe that ultimately obliterated some $322 billion in value. For having caused such significant economic chaos, Citigroup was fined $79 million.

Gizmodo reached out to Citigroup for comment and will update this story if it responds.