Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

Discord is all about lively community engagement. It bridges content gaps by giving an “always-on” chat where fans may get a chance to interact with creators, but critically, it allows members of the community to carry on a continuous, fun conversation with each other outside the context of a creator’s content. This is valuable for creators as it 1... See more

On its face, Discord looks a lot like Slack. It’s organized into Servers -- each community’s space -- and within each server, there are Channels, including Voice Channels, in which users can also choose to turn on video for up to 25 people. Voice channels can be always on, and users can drop in and drop out casually, like hopping onto a couch with ... See more

The easiest way to onboard your first community members is to create a Telegram or a Geneva group. Discord and Slack are also reasonable solutions but are more useful at a later stage when you need to create different channels around different subjects.

Roberto Blake, an Atlanta-based YouTuber, compared Discord not to Slack but to “chat rooms from the 1990s.” But, he told me, “they made that experience mobile and way more robust and sophisticated.” In a social-media landscape organized around reverse-chronological feeds, profile pages, default public content, and follower counts, Discord is palpab... See more

Discord confronted the challenge head-on. The team paid for Reddit ads (another “no-no” for early consumer companies) that directly called out incumbents TeamSpeak and Skype. Risky? Maybe. But it got gamers’ attention, generating spirited arguments about the pros and cons of each product.