Discord's Upcoming Features: A Throwback to MSN Messenger
Description
A screenshot of a tweet commenting on news from a 'Discord Previews' account. The main tweet text reads 'died 2012 born 2025' and 'welcome back Windows Live Messenger'. The embedded tweet from Discord Previews announces that Discord is considering adding new message formatting features like colors, fonts, sizes, and animations. Below this text is a mockup of a rich-text formatting toolbar with labeled icons for options such as 'Font', 'Size', 'Colour/Effects', 'Bold', 'Italics', 'Strikethrough', 'Bullet point', and 'URL'. The meme humorously points out that these 'new' features proposed for a modern application like Discord are reminiscent of the highly customizable, and often chaotic, chat aesthetics of Windows Live Messenger (MSN), which was discontinued around 2012. For veteran tech professionals, this is a nostalgic joke about the cyclical nature of software features, where minimalist platforms gradually re-introduce the 'bloat' of the past
Comments
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Discord is re-learning the lesson that every platform eventually evolves to support Comic Sans in flashing rainbow colors. It's the final stage of digital entropy before a complete architectural rewrite
Looks like the next Discord microservice will be a resurrected WinForms DLL named `WingdingsService`, complete with 2005-era rainbow text and bubble fonts - because what’s old is just a feature flag away from GA
After 15 years of convincing product managers that Markdown is all anyone needs, we're back to WYSIWYG editors with animation support - because nothing says 'productive team communication' like rainbow Comic Sans bouncing across your incident response channel at 3 AM
After 13 years of minimalist Markdown supremacy, Discord discovers that users actually want Comic Sans with rainbow gradients and bouncing text - proving that every generation must learn why we killed MSN Messenger the hard way. Next up: nudges, winks, and a 'what are you listening to?' status that auto-updates from Spotify. The wheel isn't just being reinvented; it's being bedazzled
We replaced MSN’s dancing text with Markdown so incident threads were grepable; now fonts and animations translate to non‑diffable ADRs and vendor lock‑in - with sparkles
Wake me when the 3am incident channel ships confetti animations, smart quotes in curl commands, and a SOC2‑compliant plain‑text export - Windows Live Messenger, enterprise edition
Because nothing screams 'cloud-native scalability' like resurrecting a 2005 toolbar for your Kubernetes-orchestrated standups
welcome back ICQ Comment deleted
Was Icq really that advanced? Comment deleted
Yes... People keep rediscovering old free tech and making it paid and bad. Stupid electron apps eating ram and cpu for what could be done with IRC back in the 90s and early 2000s... Comment deleted
But there must be the reason why people choose discord over irc tho Comment deleted
Marketing :) Comment deleted
Irc supports voice chats and screen sharing? Comment deleted
Mumble + something, but there are hacks for those 🙈 Comment deleted
I mean yeah, but afaik mumble is just voice chat ^^" Comment deleted
Discord's not even bad because it's an electron app. It's tiers of shit above that. Projects like openasar show that with a tiny bit of care and giving a shit, discord could make the app 3 times faster and 200 times smaller, while still being an electron app! Discord just sucks at building things Comment deleted
The latest big update (the UI one) is so shitty that it now takes me 5 whole seconds just to connect to a voice channel. It is unnerving that they still ban 3rd party clients when their app is this bad...⚰ Comment deleted
Yuppp, the ban on any third party clients is mad. Definitely feels like protectionism when they can't make a good app to save their life Comment deleted
It recently got so bad that I am literally considering just getting myself a throw-away account to try some 3rd party clients for myself Comment deleted
Recently gallery-dl added discord support, and so I've been using that to forward art channels from discord to telegram, which takes away most my need to use the discord app Comment deleted
Meh, I use discord for messaging. It is quite well structured in general, the issue I have with it is mainly the new "shop and customisation" bullshit. As well as animated graphics, which are definitely a no-go in my books ☠ Comment deleted
Well discord was VC funded and needed to bring in revenue. Too many freeloaders without nitro that they needed to subsidize them with micro transactions for nitro users Comment deleted
And there are not any real competitors. The alternatives suck too. Comment deleted
Matrix is not user friendly, XMPP and IRC are an extension shitshow with no good clients Comment deleted
obligatory self-advertising https://aminda.eu/matrix/# Comment deleted
(but you have to buy each text decoration in the shop (you already have nitro)) Comment deleted
Damn Comment deleted
"zoomers rediscovered the basic functions of the 2000s"? Comment deleted
Not zoomers, but large megacorps Comment deleted
No their devs finally understood what those random buttons were, then they took 2 decades to understand which hieroglyph has what meaning to replicate it Comment deleted
Discord made servers worldwide, super optimized backend for messages, and bundled chat + voice + video in one thing Comment deleted
I'm a Discord library developer and this is the first time I've heard anything about this. Components V2 just unlocked and the docs aren't even ready yet. For them to start expanding messages, I don't think the groundwork has been laid yet. Comment deleted
Instant Messenger E-Mail Comment deleted