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-game. They hated TeamSpeak and Skype, but they were indeed the only options.
Eventually, many gamers realized something. Even when they are not in-game, they want to chat with their gaming friends; they want to discuss things outside of gaming. Their friends are their real luck, and 2015 was the year they made Skype their slogan and prepared to showcase this tool. But mainly the tool was time to give up its chat practice for something better.
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 online. 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.
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 time, 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 on the very first day of the iPhone App Store in 2008. It then 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, “with the idea of building a new game company more around tablets and core multiplayer games.” It produced 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. It was also unclear whether its new idea would work. “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 fluctuate. Why would people give up a tool they hated for another tool they would hate? The Discord team ultimately rebuilt its voice technology from scratch 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, testers of Discord began to notice that 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 discuss 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 chatted with 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 and switched to 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, keeping 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 tells 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 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 and starts talking as soon as anyone enters. A better analogy than 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 describes 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 standpoint, 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 games, like creating a small group or private Twitch where users can play games under the watch of friends. Doing this at 4K and 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’s 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 in the right people. 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 preferences. But it goes even deeper. For example, if you’re in a video chat, you can choose whose video you’re watching, not just whether your video is on. You can also participate in multiple chats simultaneously, blending one chat into the background while focusing on another. “It should be able to work in coordination,” Stan Vishnevskiy said, “but not make your attention focus 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 teleconferencing 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 heavily in things like GPU integration, very deeply. Voice solved the scaling problem long 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 teleconference.” However, it turns out its importance goes far beyond gaming.
As Discord has evolved, some of its communities have also developed. Soon, many of them began to have lives outside of gaming. Vind discovered that he was running a fairly large community about everything F1 racing shortly after joining Discord. “I wasn’t actually the creator of it,” 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 complete control of it, only to find that it was a completely disengaged Discord user. Vind eventually found him on Reddit and asked for management permissions 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 even necessarily around racing. “I wanted to create 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. The history of the internet shows that groups of this size 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 still relatively normal. Discord’s moderation bot, called 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 had epic troubles with problematic content, and there is ample documentation. It has at times become a home for 4chan and 8chan users; some “Kool Kids Klub” servers were merely disguised KKK; 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-privacy and group nature make it harder to regulate. The challenges are greater due to Discord’s younger user base.
Discord employees now admit they noticed this too late. Issues with problematic content on the platform only became an urgent issue after the deadly Charlottesville protests; long before the incident, discussions and plans had already been publicly organized on Discord. Before that, Discord did not have a Trust and Safety team; the leader of that team, Sean Li, 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 according to 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 framework set by the platform. This hasn’t existed for long. Now, Discord is trying to simply and forcefully clarify 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 emphasis 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 regarding 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 enjoy Ultimate Team mode). Mikeyy and his team of moderators and admins run 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, and others—but it hasn’t made a penny there 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 curated selection of games and purchase plans. After beating TeamSpeak and Skype, Discord aimed for Steam. This 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 a very enlightening moment for Discord. It led to another turning point: Discord should not be about video games but now about relationships between 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 some uncoordinated non-gaming things—up to 30% of servers are about other things—but they started focusing on them from the beginning. Since last year, they have started paying attention to them. These are, “What’s the biggest thing about discussions?” What are players’ prepared answers?” People wanting to build their own study groups/fitness clubs/origami/sneaker shopping groups in Discord classes easily get hooked on the project’s alien logo and all the quirky applications of TeamSpeak.
In early 2020, Discord underwent deeper design and real-life changes to help attract its popular time increase in users, as all of Discord’s beginnings discovered millions of discoveries: there are places and they are together 74 months of applications, and Discord works better than the application’s usage effects.
6, Discord’s brand upgrade is perfect. At that time,” Citron and Vishnevskiy wrote in a blog post released earlier this year about the heavy design, [“It’s clear that,
In the future, with more communities and today, Discord still has a lot of work to develop, especially to continue to provide tools and permissions on its platform in the way the company wants. As it increases its features—eventually, the emergence of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality and many other situations will be the same as all realizations for everyone 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.