Discord's Upcoming Features: A Throwback to MSN Messenger

Level 1: Fancy Text Is Back

Imagine you and your friends usually write notes to each other with plain pencils. It’s simple and everyone’s notes look the same, which makes them easy to read. Now picture one friend suddenly shows up with a big box of glitter pens, markers, and rainbow-colored ink. They start writing their note with all kinds of fancy letters – each word in a different color, maybe with big bold bubble letters or little sparkles around them. It looks super fun and creative, but it also makes their note a bit harder to read (and a little silly if you just wanted a normal message).

This meme is joking that Discord – a popular app where people chat mostly in plain text – is thinking about handing everyone that box of glitter pens for their messages. A long time ago, an old chat program (Windows Live Messenger) let users decorate their text messages in exactly that crazy way. People eventually stopped using all those wild styles because it became too messy and distracting. Now it seems like that old style might be coming back. It’s like an old fashion trend suddenly returning: one year everyone is wearing clean, simple outfits, and then the next year the neon clothes and sparkly accessories from decades ago are cool again. The meme finds this funny and a bit surprising. We had finally gotten used to our chats being neat and uniform, and now they might get loud and colorful all over again – just like in the old days when every message was a creative adventure!

Level 2: Colorful Chat Comeback

If you’re a newer developer or didn’t use chat apps in the 2000s, here’s the scoop: Windows Live Messenger (WLM) was a hugely popular chat program back in the day (think of it as the Slack/Discord of the early 2000s). It let users personalize their messages in all sorts of wild ways. You could pick custom text colors (lime green or neon pink, go for it), switch up fonts (many of us inflicted Comic Sans on our friends), change text size (from tiny footnotes to giant headlines), and even add goofy animations. For example, WLM had “winks” – little animated clips or emojis that would play right in the chat, and you could even “nudge” someone, which literally shook the chat window. It was fun and very extra. However, by around 2012, Microsoft retired WLM (merging it into Skype), and that whole era of super-customized chat messages largely died out. Chats moved toward a cleaner, simpler style... at least for a while.

Fast-forward to today: Discord is a modern chat app beloved by gamers, communities, and developers alike. Until now, Discord’s message formatting has been pretty minimal. It uses Markdown for basic styling – which means you type special characters around your text to format it. For instance, typing **bold** makes text bold, *italics* makes it italic, and `code` puts it in a little code block. There’s no mouse-driven menu for changing font or color; you just learn a few text tricks, or you keep things plain. This keeps the interface simple and is actually appreciated by a lot of tech-savvy users (it’s quick and keyboard-friendly). In fact, Discord’s style (much like early Slack’s) has been kind of a throwback to even older nerdy chat systems like IRC, where it’s mostly plain text with maybe some subtle formatting.

Now, according to that tweet in the meme, Discord is considering adding a bunch of new message formatting options – essentially a toolbar full of buttons for styling text. The mock-up image shows what looks like a mini word processor toolbar: an option to choose a font (“Aa” icon), a size dropdown (“Medium ▼”), buttons for Bold (B), Italics (I), Strikethrough (S with a line), list bullets, numbered list, a quote bubble, a code icon </>, an eye icon (maybe for making text hidden or “spoiler” visibility), a link (URL) icon, and an “A≡” icon which likely stands for Effects or Color. In other words, Discord might introduce a full rich-text editor right in the chat box. This kind of editor is often called WYSIWYG, short for “What You See Is What You Get,” because as you apply formatting, you see your text change style in real-time (just like in Microsoft Word or Google Docs). No more typing symbols – you’d be clicking buttons and seeing colorful text as you compose your message.

So why are developers laughing (and groaning a bit) at this idea? Because it’s a textbook example of feature creep. Feature creep means gradually loading a simple product with more and more features until it becomes complicated and bloated. And bloated software (or feature bloat) is when an app feels slow or cluttered because it’s carrying a lot of bells and whistles most people don’t need. Discord started off clean and gamer-focused, but over time it’s been adding stuff – think about all the new widgets, plugins, app store, streaming features, etc. Many people love those additions, but each one makes Discord a bit heavier. Now, adding crazy text formatting is like the ultimate full-circle moment: it’s bringing Discord closer to the old Windows Live Messenger vibe that it originally contrasted with. It’s the “back in my day, we had this, and we dropped it for a reason” kind of irony.

From a UX design perspective (UX means User eXperience, i.e. how the product feels to use), this is a big shift. There’s a trade-off in play. On one hand, giving users more formatting options can be fun and allows personal expression – you can make your message look exactly how you want. On the other hand, too many options can clutter the interface and even the messages themselves. Imagine a group chat where each person uses a different style: one posts in bright red 20pt cursive, another in small blue italics, another in green with strikethrough for some reason. The conversation would start to look like a chaotic collage rather than a clean chat – you’d have to mentally adjust to each person’s text style while reading. That’s why many modern chat tools (especially those used in workplaces, like Slack or Microsoft Teams) initially limited formatting or kept it subtle: it keeps communication straightforward. In fact, Slack for a long time only allowed formatting via Markdown and had no color or font choices, precisely to avoid the wild west of styles. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, does have a rich text toolbar (since it’s more like an email/chat hybrid for offices), and many find it a bit overkill for quick messages. Discord introducing a toolbar is thus seen as joining the “me too” club of adding everything but the kitchen sink.

The meme text, “welcome back Windows Live Messenger,” is basically a tongue-in-cheek way of saying: “Hey Discord, you’re becoming just like that old chat app we all used to use!” It’s a mix of nostalgia and critique. For older folks who actually used MSN/Windows Live Messenger, there’s a nostalgic chuckle: the image of a modern Discord message box stuffed with font and color options immediately brings back memories of customizing profiles and text on a long-gone platform. For younger users who didn’t experience that: imagine an app that lets everyone format messages as crazily as a MySpace page — that’s what our chats looked like back then! We eventually moved away from that because it was, frankly, a bit much. Now in 2025, seeing Discord hint at those ideas again feels like fashion cycling back around. Just as 90s clothes or retro tech come back in style, here come the retro chat customization features returning to a cutting-edge app. It’s funny because it shows how the tech industry often goes in circles. One moment, minimalist design is the gospel; the next moment, someone’s adding sparkles and unicorn fonts because users miss “personal touch.” To sum it up, the meme is highlighting that irony: today’s sleek collaboration tool is poised to become a lot more like yesterday’s overdecorated messenger. And everyone who’s been around a while finds that equal parts humorous and face-palm inducing.

Level 3: Reinventing WordPad

The meme playfully suggests that Discord might be repeating the feature creep cycle of its ancestors. It’s a tech history déjà vu. In the early 2000s, chat clients like MSN Messenger (later Windows Live Messenger) turned messaging into a rainbow-colored playground. You could send texts in neon colors, funky fonts (Comic Sans, anyone?), huge sizes, and even sprinkle in goofy animations. As the meme’s caption jokes, “died 2012, born 2025,” implying that the over-the-top formatting which died with Messenger in 2012 is being resurrected by Discord in 2025. Seasoned developers immediately recognize the ghost of Windows Live Messenger bloat here. There’s a running joke that every chat platform eventually reinvents WordPad. In other words, today’s sleek messaging apps inevitably accumulate so many formatting features that they start to look like mini word processors.

The tweet from Discord Previews confirms our senior suspicions: Discord is considering a full WYSIWYG text editor for chats – complete with font pickers, color palettes, size selectors, and wild text effects. To an experienced eye, this screams feature bloat. We’ve seen this movie before. Adding unlimited formatting freedom creates a playful, yet chaotic user experience. Remember the chat rooms of yesteryear where one friend’s messages appeared in bold bright-green italics and another’s in hot-pink 28pt Comic Sans? Nostalgic, yes, but also a readability nightmare. This meme’s humor comes from that “oh no, here we go again” sentiment. It highlights a classic UX/UI cycle: a tool that started out clean and minimalist is now piling on options to satisfy ever-growing demands (or hype). The result? What was once a simple communication app edges closer to a cluttered design palette. It’s the perennial tension between lightweight markdown styling and full-blown rich text editing – a cycle the industry just can’t seem to escape.

Behind the scenes, veteran developers also know that supporting all these frills isn’t trivial. From a Developer Experience (DX) viewpoint, every new formatting feature (be it colored text or animated emojis) adds complexity to the codebase. Parsing and rendering messages becomes harder – one user’s fun rainbow text might be another developer’s 3 AM debugging incident when some combination of styles breaks the layout. We saw a hint of this when Slack introduced a WYSIWYG message editor: many power-users (mostly developers) grumbled at the change, and Slack had to provide an opt-out to keep its core audience happy. In Discord’s case, implementing a rich-text editor means grappling with consistency across platforms, ensuring markdown still works alongside, and avoiding turning message rendering into a sluggish, memory-gobbling process. (The joke about “reinventing WordPad” isn’t just about looks – it’s also a wink at how much heavier the app might become.)

In essence, the meme strikes a chord with experienced folks because it captures an Industry Trend coming full circle. It combines equal parts nostalgia and irony. Discord, which gained popularity as a sleek, gamer-friendly app with markdown and no-nonsense design, is now seemingly headed down the same path as the old giants it once upstaged. The phrase “welcome back Windows Live Messenger” drips with irony: it’s like welcoming back a retired rock band for a reunion tour nobody expected. For those who remember the gaudy yet beloved MSN era, it’s both amusing and a tiny bit exasperating to watch a modern platform converge toward the very feature sprawl we thought we left behind. History, as it turns out, loves to repeat itself in tech – and every developer in on the joke is nodding along, half in laughter and half in knowing dread.