News

Microsoft Wants To Purchase Discord And We Know Why

Published

5 years ago

March 29, 2021

microsoft wants to purchase discord and we know why

According to multiple independent reports, Microsoft is interested in acquiring Discord, an instant messaging and digital distribution platform that’s especially popular among Gen Z gamers.

While the two companies are still far away from striking a deal, Microsoft seems to be the only potential buyer at the moment, and the software giant is willing to pay up to $10 billion to add Discord to its portfolio.

But why is one of the largest companies in the world interested in spending so much money to buy what was once the alt-right’s favorite chat app? The answer may surprise you: Microsoft isn’t really interested in the platform itself; it’s interested in the community of around 150 million monthly active users.

“Creation, creation, creation — the next 10 years is going to be as much about creation as it is about consumption and about the community around it, so it’s not creating alone,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “If the last 10 years has been about consumption — we’re shopping more, we’re browsing more, we’re binge-watching more — there is creation behind every one of those.”

Discord

Discord is a huge community of content creators, and many of its users play video games on Microsoft’s video game consoles. In the past, Microsoft had attempted to create a place for gamers to “come together to talk about games, watch games, watch others play games,” as Xbox chief Phil Spencer put it, by purchasing live streaming platform Beam and renaming it Mixer, but that effort turned out to be a failure.

The difference between mixer and Discord is that the latter platform is already loved by its target audience, so Microsoft wouldn’t face an uphill struggle and could simply focus on tightening the integration between Xbox, PC, and Discord.

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“There’s a big opportunity to bundle Discord’s premium offering, Nitro, into the Game Pass service to drive more subscriptions from the last reported 18 million,” pointed out Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst Matthew Kanterman.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft has been looking for its next big acquisition for quite some time now. The company attempted to purchase both TikTok and Pinterest but failed each time. It will be interesting to see if things will work out on the third try.

News

Instagram Redraws Its Wordmark And The Internet Reads “Instagzam”

Instagram’s first wordmark refresh in a decade arrives with new fonts, a restrained gradient — and a Reddit verdict of sidegrade.

Published

4 days ago

August 14, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Although Instagram’s famous camera icon hasn’t changed, the company has refreshed the handwritten wordmark at the top of its app. This is the first redesign we’ve seen in ten years, and one the internet promptly set about renaming.

“The wordmark at the top of the app hasn’t changed in 10 years, so it was time for a refresh,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote in a post on August 13, describing the new version as “cleaner and more modern” while keeping references to the original design.

Instagram says its team explored hundreds of options — all-caps lettering, camera-inspired concepts, even literal handwriting — before returning to script. “Script reflects individuality, so referencing that felt right,” Instagram director of product design Jasmine Probst said in Meta’s announcement. “The new wordmark is bolder and simpler, with touches of unexpectedness. It cues individual expression, a personal voice, both of which have always been core to Instagram”.

The wordmark is part of a broader brand overhaul: an updated Instagram Sans typeface, two new fonts — the hand-drawn Instagram Pen and Instagram Mono — plus refreshed motion and layouts, and more restrained use of the signature gradient. The wordmark is rolling out globally now, with the rest arriving throughout 2026 and beyond.

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The design mixes cursive and print lettering, some characters connected and others floating free. That hybrid approach, combined with unusually shaped “s” and “r” characters, led some users to conclude the logo actually reads “Instagzam”. On the r/logodesign subreddit, one user said the wordmark looked “fan-made,” like something built in Canva; another called it “an unsettling mix of manuscript and cursive”; a third summarized it as a “sidegrade” — or, inevitably, a “zidegrade”.

Not everyone was hostile to the new look. Some found the half-cursive design stylish and surprisingly readable, while others called it an improvement on its predecessor, and one commenter argued Instagram was simply adopting minimalist branding later than everyone else. Either way, the platform now has a refreshed identity, three updated fonts, and an unofficial new pronunciation.