#2 - Discord and the Creator Economy

While Mark Zuckerberg believes he is best placed to homestead the metaverse, he may be surprised to find a thriving, indigenous species has already taken hold: Discord. More than any other business, the company is truly “metaverse native,” unwittingly built for the future. First designed for gamers — the metaverse’s pioneers — time has allowed it t... See more

Fast-forward a few years, and Discord is at the center of the gaming universe. It has more than 100 million monthly active users, in millions of communities for every game and player imaginable.

But for most creators, it will likely be a challenge to build an individual community around their singular presence... most fans would probably prefer to join a community around multiple artists, rather than to have separate Discord channels and low-liquidity tokens for each of the 500 creators they love.

Discord’s Jason Citron mentioned that Discord has 19 million (!) active servers. Each is the living, breathing nucleus of a community. Jack Conte of Patreon framed it this way: you may think your interests are niche—maybe only 1 in 1,000 people like the same things as you—but with 4 billion people online, that’s 4 million people who share your inte... See more

Because Discord is a chat, not a feed, it’s also free of the algorithms that creators so often bemoan. If influencers want to announce that they have a new video out, or promote a merch sale, they can post a message to everyone in the #announcements channel of their Discord server instead of posting about it on Instagram and hoping the post gets se... See more