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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

The reason for this should be obvious - discord has no profit model right now and wants to make sure they can monetize down the road.

I've heard them say they may introduce premium features that require payment. If you make a client that can replicate these features (like custom emojis or whatever), they might lose money.

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They already have Discord Turbo. I agree that it's likely because their profit model is on shaky grounds, which makes me wonder: why do it in the first place?

What other avenues do that have for monetization? Could they potentially be collecting user data, chat logs, or voice recordings to potentially monetize off of down the road? Might they decide to start automatically injecting targeted ad content into chat sessions?

As with most of these "lose money now, make money later" startups, I think Discord's longterm goal is to get bought out.

I don't see any way they can turn a profit. If they charge for hosting servers, they'll lose a large number of servers (people will just consolidate). If they charge for quality, users will start leaving for the oldguard services (Teamspeak/Mumble).

Persistent text chat is definitely a plus, but all it would take is for one of the slack clones to have a mumble client built in for there to be a free/easy alternative. Or people to just go back to a groupme/whatsapp and a voice service.

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