Discord shakes up landscape as a social hub for the young
In 2015, Jason Citron, a computer programmer, was struggling to break through in the video game industry. The new multiplayer game he had created with his development studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not catching on.
So Citron laid off his company’s game developers, turned the game’s chatting feature into its sole product and gave it a mysterious name — Discord.
“I think at the time we had maybe six users,” Citron said. “It wasn’t clear that it was going to work.”
At first, Discord was only popular with other gamers. But more than six years later, driven in part by the pandemic, it has exploded into the mainstream. While adults working from home flocked to Zoom, their children were downloading Discord to socialize.
The platform has more than 150 million active users each month — up from 56 million in 2019 — with nearly 80% logging in from outside North America.
In September, San Francisco-based Discord said it was raising $500 million in funding, valuing the company at $14.7 billion, according to Pitchbook, a market data provider. It more than doubled its workforce in 2021, to about 650 people.
Before Discord, Citron ran a social gaming network, Openfeint, which he sold in 2011 to a Japanese gaming company GREE for $104 million. He was considered by others in the gaming community to be innovative because he tried to keep gamers’ attentions through social interactions with their friends, a new strategy in the nascent mobile gaming market.
Now, Citron, 37, finds himself running a prominent communications platform, a shift that he described as “surprising and wonderful and humbling.”
Discord is split into servers — essentially chat rooms similar to the workplace tool Slack — which facilitate casual, free-flowing conversations. Some servers are large and open to the public; others are invitation-only.
The service doesn’t have ads. It makes money through a subscription service that gives users access to features like custom emoji for $5 or $10 per month. Discord also began experimenting in December with allowing some users to charge for access to their server, up to $100 a month, of which the company takes a 10% cut.
Discord made more than $100 million in revenue last year, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances, but company officials would not say whether it was profitable.
In June 2020, Citron and his co-founder and chief technology officer, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, wrote a blog post acknowledging that Discord was working to become more accessible to all.
That transition has come with growing pains. Discord has faced the same thorny questions as other social media companies about regulating speech, safeguarding against harassment and keeping young people safe.
Discord allows people to chat using fake names, and the task of ensuring that people follow its community standards is largely left up to the organizers of individual Discord servers.
In 2017, white nationalists gathered in far-right Discord servers to plan the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Discord executives, aware that white nationalists were on the platform, did not ban them until after the rally, according to New York Times reporting.
In the aftermath, the company got more serious about content moderation. Citron said about 15% of the company’s employees work on trust and safety. The company began publishing biannual transparency reports in 2019 and bars those younger than 13 from Discord.