Cracks appear in Discord’s corporate culture

Discord, the instant messaging and chat platform that originated in the gamer community, says it is to allow video-game related advertising, for the moment through reasonably non-intrusive format, and with opt-out features.

To me this sounds like déjà vu all over again, the slippery slope, the thin end of the wedge. And so it begins: a company decides to increase its revenue by “offering” its users something they hadn’t asked for.

There is no such thing as “good advertising.” By definition, ads interrupt what we’re doing. And let’s be clear, for many in the industry, the more so the better. For a company like Discord, which said not long ago that it believed it was capable of creating products that made its service more fun and that people would therefore pay for it, allowing ads means giving up a whole philosophy, principles and a corporate culture that put the user front and center. This is no longer the case, and if users need to be interrupted, so be it. It’s the quarterly results that are front and center now.

Restricting ads initially to game related companies is just the start. As soon as Discord’s management team get a taste for advertising revenue, they will introduce new formats, new themes and whatever else is needed to rake more money in. We all know where this is leading, and what happens when sites and…