How Discord Has Become a Messenger for Everyone

LAN MESSENGER

Jason Citron thought Discord would become a popular messenger for gamers. However, he was surprised to find that a third of its users are not related to games. Discord is now reorienting from gamers to the mass market: the site has been redesigned, and the number of users is growing rapidly. Its audience has grown by more than half compared to last year and amounted to about 100 million monthly active users – this is about a third of the audience of Twitter or Snapchat. At first, Citron did not even think about creating a messenger – he dreamed of writing a computer game. How Discord became a messenger for everyone?

 

The Emergence of Discord

When Jason Citron was 12-13 years old, a friend taught him how to program in Qbasic. Friends created an adventure video game overnight. The first brainchild of his startup Aurora Feint was a single-user game for the iPhone, released in early 2008. 

In 2011, the Japanese gaming giant GREE bought Citron’s brainchild OpenFeint for $104 million. Citron spent some time at GREE and quit, but his passion for games led him to start the next startup in 2012 – Hammer & Chisel. The startup has released a multiplayer game called Fates Forever, very similar to League of Legends. Text and voice chats were built into it.

In 2014, the developers realized that the best thing about their game was a side function, that is, chat. So, Citron made the hardest decision of his life: fired five game designers and focused on developing a chat called Discord.

 

The Evolution of Discord

Discord was developed by gamers for gamers and took into account everything players need to the smallest detail. The day of its launch is May 13, 2015. The application was available for everyone to use before. But in May, someone posted about it on the popular Reddit site in the Final Fantasy XIV fan section. During the day, several hundred new users created accounts on Discord.

While Citron and Vishnevsky made the messenger user-friendly for gamers, something strange was happening. Popular bloggers from YouTube and Instagram began to use it to communicate with their audience. 

Citron and Vishnevsky conducted a large-scale survey of users and found that about 30% of them are not related to games. For example, Discord had a large community of Formula 1 fans. On Discord, the Boy Scouts discussed organizational matters, knitting-lovers shared patterns, origami fans taught online classes. The pandemic helped the service as well: from February to June 2020, the number of users increased by 47%, and some schools have chosen Discord as a service for online lessons.