Discord’s back to basics approach is serving as an antidote to Facebook
Even before most people had personal computers, when the internet was the domain of hobbyists and researchers, they used it to chat.
Invented in 1988, Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, was a primitive technology for sending messages.
It allowed people to talk in real time, sending short bursts of conversation to a group. Online communication services like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger followed, but in the mid-2000s, something changed.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram emerged as dominant players. Suddenly, we were encouraged to present updates to as big an audience as possible. Now, even as a record 1.8 billion people log into Facebook every day, the backlash against social media is intensifying. A ban on president Trump and social media’s role spreading disinformation is fuelling an exodus of users seeking alternatives.
Some believe the future of social media may look something like Discord. A 300-person company founded in 2015, with no algorithmic feeds, likes or advertisements, Discord would be instantly recognisable to those early users of IRC. Rather than posting from public profiles, users chat in community groups known as servers, sharing a cascade of jokes, discussions and emojis. They can switch between voice, video and text chat instantly.
Major public servers include people trading items in Animal Crossing, or learning Korean, but most are private. A group of friends that play video games online, for example, or a school homework class. Use has exploded during the pandemic with over 140m people using Discord every month, up from 100m in June. Last month, Discord raised US$100m (NZ$138m), valuing the company at US$7 billion. A stock market float may be next. Jason Citron, chief executive, describes Discord as a ‘‘digital third place’’. If the office runs on email, the home on
Facebook, Discord is the social club, the pub. ‘‘Your third place is somewhere you go with your community,’’ he says.
Citron, 35, says Discord’s appeal is ‘‘hard to explain’’. If Facebook and Twitter are the town square, he says Discord is a collection of rooms, each arranged according to its purpose, with its own rules, and requiring permission to enter.
Contrasts to today’s social media giants are deliberate, he says: ‘‘It’s not like a performance. People come to Discord to be with friends and their community, and they relax. You feel comfortable because you’re not trying to game algorithms. It’s an invite-only place, so you have comfort and safety.’’
Citron was not always seeking to create the antidote to Facebook. A life-long video games fan, he attempted to create a game studio after selling his first company OpenFeint for US$104m in 2011. While it proved unfruitful, Citron was inspired to develop a way for people playing online games such as to hold group
League of Legends voice calls online.
Discord was born. Since its launch, it has become a popular hub for gamers to trade items and discuss tactics. It was only last year that Citron’s ambitions extended further.
As the pandemic forced millions into lockdown, its tagline shifted from ‘‘chat for gamers’’ to ‘‘your place to talk’’.
Although games remain a prevalent theme, there are Discord servers for making bread and investing. It all carries a whiff of the subject-oriented internet message boards that gradually emptied out as the social media giants rose. Social networks based around communities, rather than public profiles, is not a unique idea. Mark Zuckerberg has bet Facebook’s future on online groups, partly in response to a succession of scandals.
It has raised concerns that by allowing groups to set their own rules, as Discord does, online companies are abdicating responsibility, allowing harassment, or encouraging dangerous fringes to congregate.
Citron is well aware of what can go wrong. Discord, once labelled ‘‘the web’s new cesspool of abuse’’, was notoriously used by white supremacists to help organise a farRight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that ended with the killing of a counter-protestor. Discord users celebrated the deaths in private groups, and because the company does not monitor private messages, they were only shut down after being alerted by others. ‘‘That was a wake-up call for us,’’ says Citron. ‘‘We had built a lot of this privacy tooling into the product, but didn’t realise: technology is neither good nor evil, it’s just a tool, and people will use it for what they want to use it for.
‘‘The ethos in Silicon Valley for a long time has been free speech, libertarian stuff. I don’t really think that’s right because that means you’re allowing these things to flourish. We took a very hard stance and said Nazi ideology is not allowed. Discord is hostile to bad actors.’’
It says teams working on ‘‘trust and safety’’ make up 15 per cent of its staff. The problem is far from solved. Only last week, Discord banned a server associated with an online Trump forum that it said was used to ‘‘incite violence and plan an armed insurrection’’. But Citron has another challenge: how to make money. Discord has sworn off Facebook-style advertising, fearing invasive data gathering.
Instead, he wants to find ways of having users pay the company directly. ‘‘I would rather spend energy trying to figure out how to make the experience more fun for folks, that they would pay us, than how to get advertisers to show ads that likely distract from what they actually want.’’