• Discord is cutting 170 jobs — about 17% of its workforce — The Verge reported.
  • CEO Jason Citron blamed the job cuts on the company’s rapid growth and head count increases.
  • It comes after major tech firms, including Google and Amazon, made hundreds of layoffs this week.

Discord is laying off 170 employees, which equates to about 17% of its workforce.

The messaging app told workers about the cuts in an all-hands meeting and memo, which The Verge obtained. CEO Jason Citron blamed the layoffs on the company growing too fast.

Citron reportedly told staff in the memo: “We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020.” He added, “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.”

The privately held company cut 4% of its headcount in August. Cofounded by Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy in 2015, Discord was valued at $15 billion in 2021, CNBC reported.

The announcement comes after major tech firms made sweeping layoffs this week.

Google is laying off hundreds of staff working on Google Assistant and members of its devices and services team, Semafor and 9to5Google first reported.

Amazon is also cutting several hundreds of workers across Prime Video and MGM Studios, a memo obtained by Business Insider showed. And 500 employees — more than a third of the workforce — are also being laid off at Amazon’s Twitch, per a 6:00 a.m. memo sent by Twitch’s CEO that BI also obtained.

The e-commerce giant slashed 27,000 jobs last year, including 18,000 in January alone, as a wave of major tech companies rectified their head counts following a hiring spree during the pandemic.

Data from job cuts tracker Layoffs.fyi showed that 35 companies have laid off a total of 5,586 tech workers so far this year.

Discord didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside of normal working hours.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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    10 months ago

    99% chance that this hits support, trust and safety among other teams that are the main teams responsible for reducing reactionary shit on the platform.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I know someone on one of those teams. She’s safe (for now) but said a lot of great folks she’s been working with have been laid off

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      It really is so ass. If a mod or modpacks requires joining the discord to understand it I’m much more likely to not play it to begin with.

      This goes double for mods hosted on discord, or really anywhere but curseforge for Minecraft and nexus for everything else (unless it’s a stupidly important mod like Vanilla UI+ for New Vegas).

      “Muh intellectual property!! Archiving my unofficial modifications of an existing work is doing terrorism on me!!” Yeah ok buddy ligma-2

      • Lemmygraduate_Catgirl [she/her, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        i will never understand the existence for mod/development discord servers, especially them hosting downloads. forums are a better place for this kind of stuff.

        discord can literally nuke your server anytime they want and boom goes any useful info and downloads if there wasn’t an archival person/bot around (which usually there isn’t)

        • RION [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I would think it started organically, with mod authors making servers as development/collaborative spaces. Then people join in just to chat about the mod development, then people want download links for testing, then before you know it people have gotten used to it and there’s too much critical mas

    • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Discord is only useful for getting friends together and voice chats, it’s awful for any kind of discussion. Newest messages are read first, there’s no way to skip to the start of a discussion… Actually I don’t need to explain why a forum is a better format for anything technical, it’s just obvious

  • Feinsteins_Ghost [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    …as a wave of major tech companies rectified their head counts

    as though they were just some old mismatched drinking glasses or something else that needed disposing of.

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    porky-happy capitalists deserve profit because they risk bankruptcy when engaging in enterprise!

    but the workers risk getting fired and starving to death just by working for you marx-joker

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      LMAO, I finally worked up the courage to go back to college in order to become “employable” too.

      I really do have Looney Tunes antagonist tier bad luck.

      • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Yup. Basically the same boat.

        Aw well fuck it. My life just gonna be downhill from here. Gonna be renting a room from my mom forever. Never going to have a serious partner again, always going to be in debt and broke, forget ever having my own place or traveling much. Maybe I should start drinking and smoking again 🤔

    • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      ehh, they’ll be back to hiring once interest rates start dropping again. it might take a year or two but the industry is extremely dependent on interest rates because everything is financed by VC loans.

          • Great_Leader_Is_Dead [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            I just want to get out of the miserable service industry and make enough that my narcissistic mom can’t keep guilt tripping me about how much she “supports” my broke 30 year old ass cuz she rents me part of a crappy house for slightly below market value, while also crashing there every time she and her boyfriend are on the rocks (which is like half the time) and having a bunch of annoying rules about what I can and can’t do there that no regular landlord would.

            I just want some fucking autonomy but there’s no chance of that in this miserable world I was pulled into against my will.

  • tribut@infosec.pub
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    10 months ago

    So management now has to sit out on bonuses and take severe pay cuts for wrongfully hireing that many people… right?

  • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    Not that it would meaningfully affect them, but it’s so wacky that the people responsible for actually making the decisions just shrug their shoulders a torch hundreds of people’s livelihoods.

    • ped_xing [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      This is fine. M4A, though, you’d better have a plan to re-employ each and every person who used to work for the Torment Nexus.

    • Kaplya [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Mass layoffs is austerity. They do this periodically. When the capitalists think workers are getting too much wages, it’s time to lay them off and starve them to the point that they will accept being re-hired at lower wages and shitter working conditions and benefits. After all, where else are they going to go?

      Some leftists still think that capitalists need workers to function. But the key here is wage relations. As long as the capitalists preserve the wage relations, workers will always need to work for the capitalists to survive.

      This is why the core components of socialism involve dismantling private property ownership and wage relations, while the capitalists will do everything to maintain that order, even if it means losing billions of dollars of profit in the short term. Without understanding how capitalism works, and without a strategy and organization informed by theory, labor actions are futile against the capitalist class.

  • M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    IRC gang. It’s all up to the clients and servers. Want to run that shit on a VIC-20? We won’t stop you. Got a refrigerator-sized PDP-11 rack setup laying around? Yeah, you can connect with it. Third party clients allowed? Hell, there aren’t any first-party clients.