Idk why but this visual made me giggle. I totally agree though, and have a hard time conversing with people who don't believe Discord is accumulating one of those most valuable, granular, personalized datasets in existence.
Valuable? To whom? To whoever wants to spy on millions of 14 years olds cursing each other over the most insignificant petty squabbles one can imagine?
Sure there are good communities in there but I don't imagine they are distributing illegal things or want their existence be secret?
But I can see a lot of value in the existence of the mountain of metadata, sure.
To imply that the user base is mostly 14 year olds taking part in petty squabbles is a direct contradiction to their stated revenue model which requires a credit card and money. I doubt that a majority of their nitro purchases are from 14 year olds who stole their mom's credit card. Are you being deliberately obtuse?
A server doesn't have to be communicating secret or illegal information for their data to be valuable.
What makes it valuable? You have millions of users age 20-40. They are conversing about their tastes, interests, and other personal identifying information through text and voice. Text is easy to parse. Voice isn't much harder. Just identify keywords and then start transcribing voice conversations. Now it's in text form. Run analysis for marketing purposes, sell to literally any company that does market analytics.
Certainly not. I am being dismissive because that's what I mostly have seen Discord being used for -- game coordination.
I don't dismiss there's some valuable data there, I am just very skeptical that most companies are even able to capitalize on it the way you say they might. That requires competence, and time, and budget resourcing, and most companies suck super badly in that.
I know several people that use discord as their primary chat client. Aside from that lots of college kids use it for comms about classes, there are tons of discord groups for interests and hobbies. It seems like everyone I meet has a discord account nowadays. Anyhow, just wanted to point out that it’s not limited to game related chat.
1. Accumulate a large volume of data where its value is based on sheer size. Their "revenue model" could be a red herring for a later acquisition based on the monetary value of their datasets.
2. Analyze the data in-house and sell predictions, not the data itself which could skirt some privacy laws
