Sentropy x Discord: A Safer Tomorrow
For the Sentropy team, today is a big day. For the Sentropy mission, today is a monumental day. Three years after starting this company with Michele, Ethan, and Taylor, I’m thrilled to announce that we’re joining Discord to continue fighting against hate and abuse on the internet.
We are deeply grateful to our customers, investors, advisors, and, of course, our team for the key roles you have played in our journey to make the internet safer. Today would not be possible without the support and trust you’ve given us along the way.
Why we’re joining Discord
When you start a company, you do so with a vision for what the future could look like and how you are going to play your part in creating it. For me, my co-founders, and our team, we dream of a safer, more inclusive society and chose to focus on improving the world — both digital and physical — by addressing the growing challenge of online hate and abuse. While we anticipated a decade-long company-building journey, we were presented with the opportunity to instantly alter the scale of our impact and we could not be more excited by the fact that Discord represents a monumental leap forward for us. When we first met with Discord’s founders, Jason and Stan, we quickly recognized a shared vision of what the future of social interaction could be and we believe that together, we have a better chance of making that vision a reality.
Discord is one of the most exciting platforms on the internet today and our missions are deeply complementary. They have 150M MAUs, a metric that continues to grow at a meteoric rate. This growth is largely due to the expansion of their vision and mission beyond gaming: they want to be the platform that enables users to find and create belonging across any community, topic, or interest group. This requires connecting people with new content and new users in secure, reliable ways. Sentropy has built world-class technology and products that protect communities online. Together, we can create belonging safely.
As we have gotten to know Discord, we have been impressed by their deep commitment to safety — a commitment that extends beyond their own communities to the broader internet. One of the hard-and-fast requirements Sentropy had as we discussed working together was that our future home allows us to keep our focus on improving the internet as a whole, not just improving the Trust and Safety (T&S) capabilities of the company. Our team’s focus will be on helping Discord expand and evolve its T&S capabilities; we are also inspired by Discord’s commitment to knowledge-sharing and capability-building in the content moderation space, as exemplified by their Moderator Academy. We are excited to help Discord decide how we can most effectively share with the rest of the Internet the best practices, technology, and tools that we’ve developed to protect our own communities.
Discord represents the next generation of social companies — a generation where users are not the product to be sold, but the engine of connectivity, creativity, and growth. In this model, user privacy and user safety are essential product features, not an afterthought. The success of this model depends upon building next-generation Trust and Safety into every product. We don’t take this responsibility lightly and are humbled to work at the scale of Discord and with Discord’s resources to increase the depth of our impact.
To say we are excited about joining forces with the Discord team would be an understatement!
What does this mean for our customers?
While we’ve already started reaching out to all of our valued customers, we know you might have questions and would like to share important points about our wind down:
- For enterprise customers of our Detect and Defend products, we’ll continue offering those services through September 30, 2021.
- For Protect users, Protect was shut down as of July 1 as a result of this transition.
- We’ll be here to support you during this transition and to help you consider other approaches to protecting your communities and yourselves.
A safer tomorrow
Even as our company name changes, the sense of responsibility we feel to use our skills and experience to make the internet better for everyone will not. T&S tech and processes should not be used as a competitive advantage. We all deserve digital and physical safety, and moderators deserve better tooling to help them do one of the hardest jobs online more effectively and with fewer harmful impacts. We are excited to have the opportunity to build world-class Trust and Safety products and teams while collaborating with like-minded companies who want to fight against abuse online.
We want to thank everyone who has stood by our side as we have built this company. While this is the end of our Sentropy chapter, it is definitely not the end of our story. As Discord, we’re still building the internet we deserve — where everyone belongs.
For a safer tomorrow!
John Redgrave (CEO and Co-Founder) on behalf of and with gratitude to the Sentropy team
