The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. He eventually sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. Some VoIP(voice over IP) options required players to type in IP addresses just to connect, while other services like Skype or TeamSpeak were resource-heavy and had known security problems. This led the developers to develop a chat service that was much friendlier to use and based on more modern technology. To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb’s 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent. As of July 21, 2019, there are over 250 million unique users of the software.
Citron’s initial vision was to create a space that brings gamers together. The Wiki definition of Discord is “a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for video gaming communities, that specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel, and is available on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers.”
Today, it is pretty much, a better evolved version of itself. Unlike other social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, which are each a single large pool of users, that do very little in the way of providing safe spaces for people to be comfortable being themselves, Discord is a series of smaller communities, where people can find like-minded people to build relationships with.
Discord allows game streamers to build communities around their channel(Twitch for instance), and facilitate more interactive involvement with their viewers/fans. Twitch chat allows subs to to communicate live with streamers, and Youtube chat allows feedback from viewers, but with Discord, viewers can keep the conversation going, and actually build relationships with other viewers and even the streamers themselves. The Discord channel I frequent, is called The Math Squad, created by Adam Koebel. Adam Koebel is a Twitch streamer, game designer, GM, and photographer, and an inspiration to anyone who wants to become a streamer themselves. His channel is a safe space for anyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or religion, to be themselves and be a part of a community with others like them. The Math Squad is a reflection of Adam’s Twitch stream, with fosters the same values, and allows his viewers/subs to keep in touch with him in between streams.
The glaring drawback of a platform like Discord, is that it’s primarily for gamers, and is pretty much marketed that way, so if you’re not a gamer, there may be little to no reason to use it. There are outliers, of course, Discord communities that have little to do with gaming. Chances are though, that if you aren’t a gamer in some capacity, you aren’t going to use Discord.
Discord has had problems with hostile behaviour and abuse within chats, with some communities of chat servers being “raided” (the taking over of a server by a large number of users) by other communities. This includes flooding with controversial topics related to race, religion, politics, and pornography. Discord has stated that they have plans to implement changes that would “rid the platform of the issue”. To better protect its users and its services since these events, Discord has implemented a trust and safety team that is on call around the clock to monitor the servers and respond to reports. This includes dealing with user harassment, servers that violate Discord’s terms of service, and to protect servers from “raiding” and spamming by malicious users or bots. While they do not directly monitor messages, the trust and safety team can determine malicious activity from service use patterns and take appropriate steps, including more detailed investigation, to deal with the matter. The service plans to expand this team as they continue to gain new users.
Fane of Apocrypha 