Discord Might Sell Data, But For Other Reasons. Possibly.
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Of course this is par for the course for a development company. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and many, many others do. But my problem with Discord doing this is they lie about it. No, they do NOT lie about collecting it in the first place. They admit that.
What they DO is “lie about is selling the data.” — Things people say on the internet.
This is probably for false assurance. Now some people say it is for gaining profit they lose from being a free site. The math doesn’t add up. Well let’s say 80 workers work for Discord. Let’s say they work 8 hour days each (all of them for the sake of simple mathematics). And for the sake of keeping things simple 1.5% of Discord users use Nitro. The pay is not said yet as we will see in the end. Well with Discord Nitro being $50 a year. $ 112,500,000 in profit (as a low, conservative estimate). And an estimate of $1,406,250 in loss if they work 24/7/365. We have not timed the fact of 8 hour days yet, but I think that point is very mute but I will do it anyways. $ 117,187 per month (estimated 30 days a month, every month), $ 3,906 a day (of 24 hours), $ 162 an hour, $1,296 for 8 hours of work. To be honest not bad. I would work for Discord if I got that pay. But, let’s continue the math for one more minute. $1,296 a day (of 8 hours), multiplied by the 80 estimated workers is $103,680 in loss per day (of 8 hours), $ 3,110,400 per month, $37,324,800 per year which is still a MASSIVE $75,175,200 per year in PROFIT. We haven’t even gotten to selling data yet. We have LEGITIMATE evidence on why Discord isn’t selling data for profit. But what for then? Greed? Probably not. Discord isn’t like that. (Also per year 1 Discord worker makes $939,690 (estimated))
“Why on EARTH would Discord do this then? They have a profit.” You might say. Well here is something fun. Discord doesn’t do it for gain, rather to help the internet world grow. They give out data to help you find something. I post memes, and math, and science. Which one I am not so good at (mathematics) but I do talk about it on Discord… and Discord alone. Sure it might be from YouTube or Google (from my searches). But they do collect cookies. Which comes from the browser, and so sell it to advertising companies to sell you products you might need. I am not saying Discord is doing it for profit. That’d be silly. They make well over $75 MILLION which is enough to sustain Discord and any payment we cannot account for here. With that said even Facebook makes $12,000,000,000 A YEAR (from statistics https://biso.ga/WashingtonPostFBProfit) and Facebook is very well known for selling data! This does not include servers which let’s say about $30 million is used for servers (really just G-Suite to be honest) That is $45,175,200 in profit STILL. So yeah, server space is not an issue
I DID NOT do this to say:
Discord is a scummy company that only want’s money. This was just a debunk to YouTube videos that say Discord does this to make money, or that Discord sells data to not fall behind. With an estimate of 1.5% of users paying, and 150,000,000 users. And the amount of employees at Discord is from their own website. https://discordapp.com/jobs (I did recount, it is 40 employees, but then the math still proves my point, and who knows if they hit 80 employees then this math would be almost perfect. What I care about is debunking. Which my math (although too high actual profit) STILL MASSIVELY bashes the stupid people on YouTube. But there is more than selling data.
Also we never accounted for the $30 million that Discord earned in funding.
Virus Alert
No, Discord it self is NOT a virus. But what is sent over it is. 315,000,000 messages sent a DAY. Let say about only 13% are links (for the sake of math). And also 5% are files (not including pictures, memes, music). Combined that is 18% of all messages. Very small number in my opinion. So that is 56,700,000 of links and malware combined. In part those are 15,750,000 malware files (including Zip and what not) and 40,950,000 are links to external sites. now let’s say only 2% of each actually do anything horrible. 315,000 dangerous files 819,000 virus links 1,134,000 as an estimate. Now lets say the click rate for these are 5% each 56,700 messages with damage is done a day. Now let’s randomly estimate that there are 10,000,000 servers on Discord (for the sake of math). Let’s say each hold 15,000 average users per server (for sake of simplicity). 2,645,502 links clicked if it was in all servers. So there is that, which is all estimated. High estimates too as a low estimate is bad for this kind of number.
And there are far too many hackers for me to really do justice to with mathematics. https://medium.com/@IsNotAWriter/is-discord-safe-be3973bc055 does a little to talk about it.
Conclusion:
Although they aren’t really in the need to sell data. They could. And also it might be the users, and hackers. To be safe have BOTH SMS and 2Auth activated on your account. Make your password a little complex (EX: P45sW0r|) ) or something like that. Not exactly that. Other than hackers, Discord is a pretty safe place.
Also here is an update:
“Discord actually has over 120 employees, I haven’t updated this article in awhile.
As towards your article, Discord makes almost break-even with Nitro and their employee costs. I have run the numbers using the estimates I have, given I help run one of the largest bots on Discord and work with a few other large developers who helped me put together some data.
Realistically? Discord could function for 5–10 years without making profit beyond their current nitro target, and they plan to expand that through their game store release (Don’t forget they’re VC-backed).
As for stuff transmitted on their platform? it’s up to you what you click. Just don’t click stuff from users you don’t trust and keep a secure password, that’s all it takes to stay safe.
Discord isn’t the bad guy, but they do need to work on their Trust and Safety policies a little bit… which takes time.”
This was sent to me by @IsNotAWriter go read his articles they are amazing. I will update the math in a new article.
