It has been a long time since I have come on here and crapped on someone who did something bad— possibly weeks! I was having a “something something ai” conversation with a good friend of mine recently. Yes, the very same gentleman with whom I got into a heated online fisticuffs match over Unity download fees a few years ago. We exchanged “How Dare You?”s, and “Good Day Sir!”s. We went back to being friends again. The power of the internet, you know?
Does anyone remember Midjourney? And I don’t mean “mid” Journey, like the band’s first album, but Midjourney, the image-generating tool from a few years ago. It started off its business doing something novel… They put the UI for their product into Discord. Oh, now you remember. It was horrible as a user experience.
Or was it?
A lot of the game-playing community is on the edge of their seat right now because an Activision C-level person from the Bobby Kotick and Brimstone Era of Activision is now CEO over there. I actually met Humam at one point, and I thought he was a nice and smart individual. If anyone is going to stab me with a red, burning hot pitchfork and toss my dying carcass into the pits of hell, I will think “well, the nice man is just doing his job” before I start screaming in agony and falling for all eternity.
So what is everyone nervous about? Something something IPO. Something something advertising. It is honestly a refreshing change from people clutching their pearls over AI. It is nice to see a different level of outrage for once. Talking to people who hate AI is like playing one of those coin-operated whack-a-mole games, but it is almost out of batteries, so the little moles are moving REALLY SLOW.
Let’s get back to IRC. I mean ICQ. I mean Discord. You might not have seen what I just did. While Discord, which started as a second company from someone who loves to spell MMO, is preparing for a community-based IPO, everyone here has seen this pattern before. The community shows up, the community gets happy, the community gets monetized, and the community moves on.
We are in the latter half of that conversation. After the investors in Discord git payed, the company will join the public markets and join the mad rush of preparing quarterly income statements every year. “Number goes up” is the only thing that matters to the new Discord owners, and they will start to iterate on product ideas. Eventually, they will put a check box beside every possible revenue-generating feature except “Audience Eyeballs” except perhaps “Audience internal organs.”
Just because we haven’t seen the last one implemented does not mean a public company CEO hasn’t thought about it. I just got done telling you that even the nice C-level people I met do Daddy D’s work from downstairs from time to time, and they are still home in time for dinner.
Now that I have set the stage, I want to talk a little more about Midjourney and Discord again.
I think that Midjourney’s launch on Discord was Discord’s biggest failure.
If you remember attempting to get an image out of Midjourney back in the day, it was like trying to take your clean underwear out of the laundry during the spin cycle. Sometimes you get a sock, sometimes you get someone else’s sweater. The process was fast-moving, filled with other people’s stuff, and very painful. It was almost at an MVP level.
Almost.
If you go ask the internet how many people suffered this atrocious experience, as one does, the internet will give you this mind-blowing stat:
At its peak on Discord, the Midjourney server reached over 20.9 million total members by September 2024, making it the largest server on the platform. Daily active users fluctuated between 1.2 million and 2.5 million, with over 1 million concurrent users online at peak times
That is the size of Canada, and way more people than that started using NCSA Mosaic when fax machines still ruled the earth.
I don’t know how many product managers and engineers it would take to have made that a good experience, but if I was the CEO of Discord, I would have went full Gary Oldman on that.
With twenty million interested users, Discord at that moment could have transformed the front door of the internet and taken a shot at replacing browsing the internet with Discording the internet.
“But wait,” you say. “That would be expensive,” you say. Uh-huh, sure. And there would be a line out the door longer than a Taylor Swift concert inside an Apple iPhone launch of VCs from Sand Hill Road, ready to drop nine figures of cash on it.
This was a catastrophically huge strategic failure on the part of Discord. The resulting slap fight between “the community” and “Q4 profits will be micenuts without Walter Goggin’s Goggle Glasses ads for GoDaddy” is essentially well earned. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Gj9BufAqo)
That might sound loony tunes to you, but a few things:
First, that Walter Goggin’s guy’s face is all over my YouTube music. (No, I don’t pay for it. Yes, I think I am getting better music than my Spotify free account.) I love him as an actor, but it’s wearing me down slowly.
Second, my World of Warcraft guild (recruiting ranged dps! Contact me for details!) has already started conversations about where we will migrate to after the IPO if Humam decides to drag the excretions of an ad sales force across our eyeballs for the sake of their quarterly financial reporting.
I don’t think it is an if. I think it is a when.
Considering that they already didn’t take their best shot to win all the marbles?
I hardly care.
