'That was the era of, like, ,' he told me (in a Discord chat, of course). Before he was trying to reinvent communication, co-founder Jason Citron was just one of those kids who wanted to play games with his friends. Pivots are actually crucial to the history of Discord. Five years in, Discord's just now realizing it may have stumbled into something like the future of the internet. Discord's slowly building a business around all that popularity, too, and is now undergoing a big pivot: It's pushing to turn the platform into a communication tool not just for gamers, but for everyone from study groups to sneakerheads to gardening enthusiasts. Its largest servers have millions of members. It has more than 100 million monthly active users, in millions of communities for every game and player imaginable. You'd play a couple of games with someone, and then you're like, 'Hey, cool, what's your Discord?''įast-forward a few years, and Discord is at the center of the gaming universe. 'So when I played Overwatch, I started my first community … to play games with anyone on the internet. 'I don't have a lot of IRL friends that play games,' one Discord user, who goes by Mikeyy on the platform, told me. Its tagline was not subtle: 'It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak.' It had text chat, which was cool, but mostly it did voice chat better than anybody else.Įarly users set up private servers for their friends to play together, and a few enterprising ones set up public ones, looking for new gamer buds. As luck would have it, in early 2015, a new tool called Discord showed up on the market. Their gaming friends were their real friends. They wanted to talk to their gaming friends even when they weren't in a game, and they wanted to talk about things other than games.

They mostly hated TeamSpeak and Skype, but they were really the only options.Įventually, a lot of those gamers realized something. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends, so they used TeamSpeak or Skype to talk to their friends in-game.

Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story.

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