Discord has been popular for a long time. As early as 2018,
has swept the game circle and became the most popular "voice chat tool" for gamers. In the "League of Legends" US server, almost every game before the start of the game, someone will send a Discord channel link, inviting teammates to communicate through Discord instead of using the game's built-in voice tools.
Discord does not rely on any recommendation or matching algorithm, nor does it assign any tags to users. All channels are created and managed by users themselves. This is a community that grows naturally through word of mouth. Today, it has more than 100 million monthly active users.
At the same time, Discord is still "out of the circle." More and more "non-player" users come here to establish "learning groups", "origami clubs", "shoe discussion groups"...
From voice chat tools to game player communities, Discord seems to be creating a new kind of Social form of the Internet. It heralds a new future that may be more ideal than reddit and Facebook.
From "connection" to "space"
The birth of Discord is inseparable from the game.
Its co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is an avid gamer. During college, he almost failed to graduate because he was addicted to the online game "World of Warcraft". But it was precisely out of the love of games that Citron learned programming and joined the game development industry after graduating from university.
In 2012, I tried to develop a number of Citron games, which had been repeatedly frustrated. I realized that the games I developed were not very good. Instead, it was an in-game chat system, which was relatively the most valuable. He separated the chat system from the game and decided to devote himself to developing this chat software. In this way, Discord was born.
Discord co-founders Stan Vishnevskiy (left) and Jason Citron (right) | Discord
The most mainstream voice chat software on the market at the time was Skype. The core logic of Skype is to move the experience of "calling" online, and the product design revolves around the behavior of "calling". This kind of product logic is not suitable for gamers, because the core requirement of gamers is "temporary" multi-person voice, it is best to join quickly, without the need to "add friends" or "create groups" first.
So Discord established the logic of "channel-centric" very early. This is very similar to the domestic YY voice. All communication revolves around "channels", and each channel is like a room. You only need to send out the invitation link, and other people can enter the room with one click and start voice chat.
Discord has spent a lot of effort to optimize call quality and network latency. On reddit, many players said that the reason why they are willing to use Discord (rather than the in-game voice) is mainly because Discord has better call quality, better experience, and more complete functions. Most voice call software of
establishes a "connection" between users. If one party hangs up the call, the "connection" is broken. Discord is different, it creates a "space", no matter who joins or who exits, this space is always here. A mechanism like
retains users and encourages them to have more follow-up exchanges. You join the channel of other players. If you can chat, you can join this channel permanently, chat with everyone on your mobile phone, and play together next time. You can see what games other people are playing in the channel, and watch live games shared by other players.
This kind of game-based communication has extended to more complex online social relationships. The server of
Discord is a place that only invitees can enter. Users can chat with the community or friends, play games and entertain, or set up text channels to customize the server according to the things they like to discuss. Discord
Many Discord users will be bored When, jump to a voice channel with no one, which is equivalent to telling others"I am here, do you want to talk?". If others are interested, they can join in. For those who want to chat, but are "ashamed" to take the initiative to call their friends, Discord provides a simpler way to initiate communication, and they don't need to bear too much social pressure.
, including Facebook and Snapchat, most social media have designed a gamification system to try to drive or even control user behavior. Like, follow, and chat with friends for more than a week can "light up the boat for searching friendship". These things encourage users to continue to use social media to share content, comment and interact, but they put more and more pressure on users. .
Discord is completely different. Although
is born out of games, it has almost no gamification design. Here, there is no concept of "fans" and no message flow recommended by algorithms. It's like a house. When you open Discord, it's like "laying on the lazy couch at home after school and waiting for friends to come and play together."
Some players call the channel he and his friends created together as the "base".
from "tools" to "communities"
Because of the game's genes in the bones, Discord gives users the greatest freedom.
is like many games that allow players to modify game content through mods. Discord has opened up a large number of interfaces on the basis of ensuring the core experience and security, allowing developers to easily connect various services to the Discord platform. At the same time, Discord has also done a lot of relatively "complex" functions in order to meet the diverse needs of users.
Compared with other voice software, Discord is by no means the most "easy to use" one. Its product form is closer to Slack, which is a communication and collaboration software developed for professionals to meet the needs of enterprises, with a higher learning threshold and more complex functions. Discord believes that most gamers also have a similar spirit of "drilling". You give more functions and greater freedom, and they will explore the most suitable way for them.
is indeed the case. In Discord, some large channels with a large number of people have very complicated designs.
These channels have their own "welcome process", which can guide new users to different sub-channels. Different channels have different speaking rules and permissions, which can maintain the order of speaking and display appropriate information in a large number of people. Some channel managers have also designed and developed chat bots and some automation tools that can automatically respond to user questions and implement some chat applications, such as identity verification, voting, and mini games... During the
epidemic, similar software such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams mostly uses the idea of "starting from demand" to make products, focusing on providing some very specific functions. Zoom has a quiz function for online class scenarios, and a "custom video call background" function developed for home office scenarios.
But Discord is thinking about how to optimize the product from the bottom to give users more "possibility".
video chat is a new feature of Discord. It seems to be the right time to go online during such a special period. | Discord
Discord co-founder Vishnevskiy said that they have been studying technology recently, trying to allow 1,000 people to make voice calls at the same time to provide users with more Powerful tool.
If the Discord channel is a house, its many extended functions are equivalent to giving users the possibility to "decorate" the house according to their own ideas. Houses are gradually connected into a "community."
Since 2017, more and more channels based on interest tags have emerged. Including F1 racing cars, mechanical keyboards, sneaker equipment, origami, fan animations, virtual idols...
has also started to operate a fan community through Discrod, including some YouTuber video bloggers and consumer brands. The channel of digital video blogger Linus Tech Tips has nearly 90,000 members, and their average online rate per night can reach 40%. Nvidia also operates a channel of close to 40,000 people.
"A country of 100 million inhabitants"
However, as the size of the community continues to expand, Discord's pressure on content management is also increasing.
traditional communication software is mostly private, and the user's speech in the communication process is private, not spreading, and does not require management. But Discord is different. The channel is public by default when it is created. Anyone can join through the link, which has natural spread and growth. As for those big channels that gather tens of thousands of people, they are more like a kind of "public place." Communication between users is extremely prone to disagreements and even disputes.
When you put a certain scale of users in a space, communication will become argument, and eventually become chaos, breeding hatred. And because there are a large number of young gamers in Discord's user base, the related risks have increased exponentially.
Around 2017, many racists from the anonymous forum 4chan established a series of channels advocating extreme racism on Discord. They will use names like "Kool Kids Klub" to disguise themselves. The name reads literally "Cool Kids Club", but it actually implies the KKK, which advocated segregation and white supremacy in the United States in the 1960s. In the early days of
, Discord was unwilling to over-manage user speech. After all, this is a communication tool with semi-private attributes. As long as you do not actively join those servers, you will not see those comments. But from 2017, Discord began to see itself more as a public platform. It has formed a dedicated "trust and security team", delineated a series of clearer speaking rules, and increased its investment in content security management.
Although Discord has added more rules to restrict users than before, it still needs a large number of auditors to review and control sensitive information and content | Discord
, the team leader Sean Li, said, “Discord is like a country with 100 million inhabitants. , There will be different states and towns below. What we do is mainly to formulate rules on a large scale to manage this society. At the same time, we must provide channel administrators with more tools to help them establish more specific rules. And to ensure that it can be implemented." The
management system was quickly established. Today, most Discord channels will display detailed speaking rules in prominent positions, which generally include "no citations or hate speech" and "no spam advertisements." Some channels will even state what language is mainly used here to prevent a large influx of users from foreign languages and disrupt the original normal discussion.
Discord also provides channel managers with many tools to counter negative information. For example, Discord allows anonymous registration, but the channel manager can set it to speak after verifying the phone. Discord has also developed some automated management tools that can automatically filter speeches with suspicious keywords, accept user reports, and then aggregate this information for administrator review to deal with users who violate the rules. The administrator can mute them for a period of time, or completely kick them out of the channel. The realization of
, and the more distant future
The public opinion storm has gradually subsided, and a bigger problem is also emerging-how Discord is realized.
Although Discord is still in a period of rapid growth and has just received 100 million US dollars in financing this summer, with a valuation of 3.5 billion, the pressure on operating costs has gradually emerged. It is not cheap to provide high-quality voice and video calls and live games for 100 million users. Both co-founders of
said that they will not follow the example of most social media and profit by selling user data and advertising. Discord's current main source of income is Nitro, a member value-added service. Users pay a monthly fee of $10 to get a series of "privileges": including support for animated avatars, use of more emoji packages, 1080P live broadcast, and upload of larger-sized files. However, the attractiveness of these functions to most ordinary users is relatively limited.
Before this, Discord also tried game publishing. In 2018, Discord launched a gameThe Discord Store, a play store, sold PC games, but the response was mediocre and closed after a few months. Afterwards, Discord also tried to use subscription-based Nitro Games. Like Netflix, users can play games in the entire game library for a fixed monthly fee, and it didn't last long.
Currently Discord has launched Nitro membership value-added services, but these features seem to be quite limited to ordinary users. Discord
Although Discord's own road to monetization is full of hardships, some users have already made a pot of gold on Discord. Some paid content communities began to appear on
Discord, covering a wide range of areas, including game strategies, investment and financial strategies, school courses, and paid fan groups derived from social media.
Many content creators choose to develop audiences on YouTube and Twitch, expand their influence, and then realize their profits on Discord. Discord has all the product features they need: this is a semi-private community that can easily manage the membership of paying users; it can set up different channels for different members; it supports almost all media formats: text, voice, and shared files , Live broadcast...
Because Discord is fully functional and open enough, many people choose to use it to build fan communities and clubs. But also because of this openness, it is difficult for Discord to intervene in these businesses, and most people collect payments through Paypal. Discord and paid content platform Patreon have functional integration. Creators can connect their Patreon members to Discord, but this does not bring any revenue to Discord. During the
epidemic, Discord also ushered in good growth. From February to July, the number of users increased by 47%. This number obviously cannot be compared with the growth of mainstream voice software such as Zoom, but it must also be considered that before this, Discord has been positioned in the vertical field of games, and the home page contains a large number of complex function introductions and a large number of game "stalks".
So Discord also followed the trend and undertook a brand transformation during the epidemic. A brand new slogan was launched: "Your place to talk and hang out." (Your place to talk and hang out).
This is already how users use Discord. During the epidemic, some students moved their entire school life to Discord: use Discord to take online classes, set up study discussion groups, and play games with friends after class...
Throughout the development of Discord, every time it evolves, it’s not The result of intentional design. Most of the time, this company is optimizing the underlying technology, giving the product possibilities to users, allowing users to explore their own methods of use.
It has built an Internet space that is very close to the real society, where people can interact in the most natural way. You don’t have to feel anxious about fans and likes, and your attention won’t be controlled by algorithms.
It is difficult for you to describe what Discord is in one word. It can be instant messaging software, voice call tool, interest community, paid community... It is the sum of all of these, and it is creating a new Internet social form.
At the end of June, after redesigning the homepage to target a wider audience, the two co-founders of Discord published an article saying: “Obviously, people are spending more and more time online. They want to be in cyberspace. Find a sense of belonging and true humanity here." Z1z
editor in charge: Yu Benyi
Title picture source: Discord
This article was originally published by GeekPark. For reprinting, please add geekparker on WeChat.
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