Subtitle: The founders of Discord just wanted to create a way for gamers to communicate with friends, but they created something greater.
Original text: An article on the protocol website How Discord (Surprisingly) Invented the Future of the Internet
Long-time users of Discord have similar stories about using friends. They love playing video games and enjoy playing together, using TeamSpeak or Skype to chat with friends in the game. They hated TeamSpeak and Skype, but they were indeed the only options.
Eventually, many gamers realized something. Even when they are not in the game, they want to chat with their gaming friends; they want to discuss things outside of gaming. Their friends are their real luck, and in 2015, that was their Skype slogan, preparing to showcase and demonstrate this tool. But mainly the tool was time to give up its chat practice that was better than all.
Early public users had their own servers for friends to play together, and some enterprising users built servers to find new gamers. A Discord user named Mikeyy on the platform told me, “So when I was playing Overwatch... (Overwatch), I started looking forward to my first community and playing games with people on the internet. You would play a few games, and then you’d say, 'Hey, cool, what’s your Discord?'
Years later, Discord has become the center of the gaming world. It has over 100 million monthly active users, serving every game and player in millions of communities. Its largest servers have millions of members. Discord is also slowly building a business around these popularities and is now undergoing a significant transformation: it is pushing to turn the platform into a communication tool and a communication tool for everyone, from study groups to sneaker enthusiasts to gardening lovers. For five years, Discord has just realized that it may have stumbled into the future of the internet. It was almost accidental.
Going All In#
The transformation is actually crucial to Discord's history. Before Discord co-founder Jason Citron attempted to reshape communication, he was just one of those kids who wanted to play games with his friends. “It was a time similar to Battle.net,” he told me. "I often played World of Warcraft online, occasionally dabbling in MMOs and Everquest." For a while, he barely completed his college studies because he spent too much time playing World of Warcraft.
Jason Citron learned to code because he wanted to make games and started making games after graduation. His first company was a video game studio that launched a game even on the first day of the iPhone App Store in 2008. After that, it went silent and eventually pivoted to a gamer social network called OpenFeint, which Jason Citron described as “essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones.” He sold it to Japanese gaming giant Gree and then founded another company in 2012, Hammer & Chisel, “the idea was to build a new game company more around tablets and core multiplayer games.” It made a game called Fates Forever, a multiplayer online game that felt a lot like League of Legends. It also added voice and text chat in the game so players could talk to each other while playing.
Then, the extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best part of their game was the chat feature. It was around 2014 when everyone was still using TeamSpeak or Skype, and everyone still hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer & Chisel team knew they could do better and decided to give it a try.
It was a painful transition. Hammer & Chisel shut down the game development team, laid off a third of the company’s employees, moved many people to new positions, and spent about six months repositioning the company and its culture. Whether its new idea would work was also not obvious. “When we decided to go all in on Discord, we probably had 10 users,” Citron said. There was a small group playing League of Legends, a World of Warcraft guild, and not much else. “We would show it to our friends, and they would say, ‘That’s cool!’ and then they would never use it."
After talking to users and seeing the data, the team realized their problem: Discord was certainly better than Skype, but it still wasn’t great. Calls would drop; quality would waver. Why would people abandon a tool they hated to use another tool they would hate? The Discord team ultimately rebuilt its voice technology three times in the first few months after the app was born. Meanwhile, it also launched a feature that allowed users to manage, ban, and grant roles and permissions to others on their servers. At that time, those testing Discord began to notice it was better immediately. And they told their friends.
Discord now claims May 13, 2015, as its launch date because that was the day strangers began to really use the service. Someone posted about Discord on the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit, along with a link to a Discord server where they could talk about a new expansion. Citron and his Discord co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy immediately jumped into the server, entered voice chat, and started chatting with anyone who showed up. Redditors returned to the subreddit saying, “I just talked to the developers there, and they’re cool,” and then more people came to Discord. “That day,” Citron said, “we got hundreds of sign-ups. It was like kicking a snowball down a hill.”
A user named “Vind” was one of the earliest users of Discord. He and his friends who played Battlefield 4 abandoned TeamSpeak for this app because they also started doing more than just talking about games. “We were moving from pure gaming to a broader community.” Discord allowed them to create different channels for different conversations, maintaining some order in the chaos and jumping in and out as they pleased. But Vind said one feature stood out: “The ability to jump into an empty voice chat, basically telling people, ‘Hey, I’m here, do you want to join the chat?’"
Almost everyone I spoke to chose the same example to explain why Discord feels different from other apps. Voice chat in Discord is not like making a phone call; it doesn’t require dialing or sharing links and passwords or anything formal. Each channel has a dedicated voice chat space that connects immediately as soon as someone enters. A better metaphor than making a phone call is walking into a room and plopping down on the couch: you just say, I’m here, what’s up?
Adding this to Discord turned out to be unexpectedly powerful. Of course, in hindsight, it seems obvious. Stan Vishnevskiy described it as “feeling like a community or like a house where you can move between rooms,” which is completely different from most online social tools. It has no gamification system, no follower counts, no algorithmic timelines. “It creates a space on your computer and phone,” Citron said, “where you feel like your friends are nearby, and you can bump into them, chat with them, and play with them.” You open Discord and see that some of your friends are already in a voice channel, and you can just jump in.
The Third Place#
From a technical perspective, these are not easy tasks. “It definitely required a different way of architecting the system,” Stan Vishnevskiy said. Discord took a long time to make it easy for you to jump into a voice channel on your phone and then seamlessly switch when you opened Discord on your computer. And it continues to work on solving latency issues, which are the enemy of every real-time communication developer.
Recently, the company also added video chat features, which they believe is the next level of high-fidelity conversation that Discord needs. The team hopes to create a way to share screens during gameplay, like creating a small group or private Twitch, allowing users to play games while friends watch. Doing this at 4K, 60 frames per second is already challenging. They also didn’t know how to add it: should they add a separate channel for video, or would it be difficult for users to choose between voice and video? They ultimately added it to the voice channel, making it a progressive step for voice rather than a separate thing.
Strictly speaking, there is nothing Discord does that users can’t do elsewhere. On one hand, it’s a lot like Slack, combining public channels and simple chat, with many ways to pull the right people together. It’s also a bit like Reddit, filled with evolving conversations that you can try to keep up with or jump into directly when you log in. (In fact, many popular subreddits now have dedicated Discords to make chatting between Redditors more real-time.) It uses simple status indicators to show who is online and what they are doing. But by putting all these things together, it feels more like hanging out than working, and Discord has found something unusual. Everyone talks about the concept of the “Third Place,” but nothing comes closer to replicating it online than Discord.
In addition to ensuring things run smoothly, flexibility is key for Discord. The ladder of communication, from text to voice to video, has always been very important. Communities can decide who can use certain tools and design spaces according to their wishes. But it goes even deeper. For example, if you are in a video chat, you can choose whose video you are watching, not just whether your video is on. You can also participate in multiple chats at the same time, blending one chat into the background while focusing on another chat. “It should be able to work in coordination,” Stan Vishnevskiy said, “but not force your attention on a specific thing, like Google Meet or Zoom. Being passive is also a core feature.” When users say Discord just feels better, this is often what they mean.
While Zoom, Teams, and other products focus on building conferencing features (breakout rooms, Q&A, integration with work tools, meeting notes, etc.), Discord continues to drill down on quality and latency. Stan Vishnevskiy said, “We’ve invested a lot in things like GPU integration, very heavily. Voice solved the scaling problem a long time ago, but we want to solve the problem of 1,000 people talking in a voice channel... they can all talk with sub-millisecond latency. That doesn’t matter for people on a conference call.” However, it turns out its importance goes far beyond gaming.
As Discord has grown, some of its communities have also evolved. Soon, many of them began to have lives outside of gaming. Vind discovered shortly after joining Discord that he was running a fairly large community about everything F1 racing. “I’m not actually its creator,” he said. “Someone created it and basically abandoned it immediately.” Vind joined in 2016 when there were only about 50 people on the server. He checked the server’s owner and gained full control of it, only to find that it was a completely disengaged Discord user. Vind eventually found him on Reddit and asked for management rights so he could add some new features. “Then he gave me ownership,” Vind explained. This guy was focused on creating an F1 racing group on Kik, which he thought would be a better platform.
Vind’s goal was to build a large community, but not around any specific game. Not necessarily even around racing. “I wanted to build a more general community where people felt welcome to just share their interest in F1 racing.”
The F1 racing server now has over 5,700 users. History on the internet shows that groups of this scale almost inevitably fall into some sort of chaos, making moderation and community building hard to keep up with. Vind said there are certainly challenges, but for the most part, things are running smoothly. Discord’s moderation bot, named CarlBot, does a pretty good job of automatically deleting problematic messages and alerting moderators. “If that happens, we ban them,” Vind said. “We don’t want anyone using that kind of language in the community.” These are the rules. When users join the F1 racing server, they must read and agree to these rules before they are allowed to post.
The Society We Want to See#
Not everyone has it this good. Discord has faced epic troubles with problematic content, and there is ample record of it. It has at times become a home for users of 4chan and 8chan; some “Kool Kids Klub” servers were merely disguised Ku Klux Klan; and there are countless examples of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other vile behavior. It’s everywhere. What happens on this platform is no different from what happens on Reddit or Facebook, but experts say they are more concerned about Discord because its semi-private and group nature makes it harder to regulate. The challenges are greater because Discord’s user base skews younger.
Discord employees now admit they noticed this too late. The issues with problematic content on the platform only became an urgent issue after the deadly Charlottesville protests; long before that event, there had already been open planning and discussions on Discord. Before that, Discord did not have a Trust and Safety team; Sean Li, who leads that team, joined the company about a month before the Charlottesville incident. For a long time, the company thought its job was just to block the worst stuff—pornography, racial slurs, overtly illegal content—from the platform. It turned a blind eye to the rest of the content, thinking, what harm could there be since it’s not a public space? As long as you don’t join a server, no one can bother you.
Now they have a different perspective. “Discord is like a country with 100 million residents living in different states and towns,” Sean Li said. “We create rules that help shape the entire society and empower server moderators and admins to help us implement and expand those rules based on the needs of their communities.” He wants to help moderators create any type of community they want, and Discord is also better providing moderators with tools and knowledge, but only within the broader platform setting. This hasn’t existed for long. Now, Discord is trying to simply make clear and strong statements about what is acceptable and what is not, and enforce those rules. It is investing in bots and other automated moderation tools, but the Trust and Safety team now makes up over 15% of Discord’s workforce. While there is still a lot of bad stuff on the platform, progress seems strong.
Meanwhile, Discord has to figure out another thing: how to make money. This is a noticeably less urgent issue: the company has raised nearly $400 million, including $100 million this summer, giving the company a valuation of $3.5 billion. Forbes estimates its revenue this year exceeds $120 million. The focus is that Discord has a lot of runway. But for a massive communication platform, there often isn’t a clean exit path, and this platform has a less-than-stellar reputation in moderation (think Twitter and Reddit). Ultimately, the company will have to make real money. Citron and Vishnevskiy firmly state that they do not want to sell ads or user data.
Users have long turned Discords into businesses. For example, Mikeyy eventually transitioned from playing Overwatch to running large servers for players who play FIFA (especially those who love playing Ultimate Team mode). Mikeyy and his team of moderators and admins operate a VIP server within the large community, where they offer exclusive trading tips, guides, etc., for $13.99 a month. However, everything is done through PayPal and similar services, and Discord doesn’t see a dime. Over the past few years, Discord has become a place for many streamers, influencers, and others to chat more directly with fans—Discord has official integrations with Twitch, Patreon, etc.—but it hasn’t seen a penny from that either.
Discord’s main revenue service is Nitro, but it’s a premium version at $10 a month that allows for username changes, more user sources, and slightly better video and audio. Discord has had this since its launch in 2018, and it launched the Discord Store, which only had a selection of games and purchase plans. After beating TeamSpeak and Skype, Discord was coming for Steam. And it successfully challenged Discord games, not to find games or play games with friends, but simply because users had not been playing. Now it’s very much like Xbox games. The service—didn’t last long either.
The failure of the Discord Store was an enlightening moment for Discord. It led to another turning point: Discord should not be about video games but now about relationships among people. It’s Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, and other eras, where gathering is far more important than activities on the screen.
Your Place to Talk#
From the early days of the service, people have used it for some uncoordinated non-gaming things—up to 30% of servers are for other things—but they started paying attention to them from the beginning. Last year, they began to focus on them. They conducted these are, “What’s the biggest thing about discussion?” What are players’ prepared answers?” People wanting to build their own study groups/fitness clubs/origami/sneaker shopping groups in Discord classes easily became enamored with the project’s alien logo and all the quirky applications of TeamSpeak jokes.
In early 2020, Discord underwent a deeper design and real-life overhaul to help attract its popular time increase in users, when all Discords began discovering millions of discoveries.: There are places to hang out with them, and Discord works better than the app for the use of non-harmonious applications.
6, Discord’s brand upgrade was perfect. At that time,” Citron (Jason Citron) and Vishnevskiy (Stan Vishnevskiy) wrote in a blog post released earlier this year, “it was clear that, **”
In the future, with more communities and today, Discord still has a lot of work to develop, especially continuing to provide tools and permissions on its platform in the way the company hopes. As it increases its features—eventually, the emergence of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality and many other situations will be just like everyone’s realization in gaming—it should not be complicated.
It’s coming, the highlights, but not owning some phones. ski (Stan Vishnevskiy) and their team have what they now have different wonderful meetings.