Make America Great Again Hat Discord Bot
Nigh longtime Discord users have a similar origin story. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends, so they used TeamSpeak or Skype to talk to their friends in-game. They mostly hated TeamSpeak and Skype, simply they were actually the merely options.
Eventually, a lot of those gamers realized something. They wanted to talk to their gaming friends even when they weren't in a game, and they wanted to talk about things other than games. Their gaming friends were their real friends. As luck would have it, in early 2015, a new tool called Discord showed up on the marketplace. Its tagline was not subtle: "Information technology'southward time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak." It had text chat, which was cool, but generally it did vocalisation chat meliorate than everyone else.
Early users set up private servers for their friends to play together, and a few enterprising ones set public ones, looking for new gamer buds. "I don't accept a lot of IRL friends that play games," one Discord user, who goes by Mikeyy on the platform, told me. "So when I played Overwatch, I started my first community … to play games with anyone on the internet. You'd play a couple of games with someone, and so you're like, 'Hey, cool, what's your Discord?'"
Fast-forwards a few years, and Discord is at the center of the gaming universe. It has more than than 100 million monthly active users, in millions of communities for every game and actor imaginable. Its largest servers have millions of members. Discord's slowly building a business around all that popularity, too, and is now undergoing a big pivot: Information technology's pushing to turn the platform into a communication tool non just for gamers, but for everyone from study groups to sneakerheads to gardening enthusiasts. 5 years in, Discord's just now realizing information technology may accept stumbled into something like the future of the internet. Almost by accident.
Going all in
Pivots are actually crucial to the history of Discord. It wouldn't exist without them. Before he was trying to reinvent advice, co-founder Jason Citron was just one of those kids who wanted to play games with his friends. "That was the era of, like, Battle.net," he told me (in a Discord chat, of course). "I was playing a lot of Warcraft online, dabbled in MMOs a little bit, Everquest." At one point he almost didn't stop higher cheers to also many hours spent playing World of Warcraft.
Citron learned to lawmaking because he wanted to make games, and subsequently graduating prepare out to do just that. His start visitor started as a video game studio and even launched a game on the iPhone App Shop'south first day in 2008. That petered out and eventually pivoted into a social network for gamers called OpenFeint, which Citron described as "essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones." He sold that to the Japanese gaming giant Gree, then started another company, Hammer & Chisel, in 2012 "with the idea of edifice a new kind of gaming company, more around tablets and core multiplayer games." Information technology built a game called Fates Forever, an online multiplayer game that feels a lot like League of Legends. It also built voice and text conversation into the game, so players could talk to each other while they played.
Discord co-founders Stan Vishnevskiy (left) and Jason Citron. Photos: Discord
And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his squad realized that the best thing virtually their game was the conversation feature. (Non a keen sign for the game, but you become the indicate.) This was circa 2014, when everyone was even so using TeamSpeak or Skype and everyone nonetheless hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer & Chisel team knew they could do better and decided they wanted to try.
It was a painful transition. Hammer & Chisel close down its game development team, laid off a third of the company, shifted a lot of people to new roles and spent about vi months reorienting the company and its culture. It wasn't obvious its new idea was going to work, either. "When we decided to go all in on Discord, we had mayhap 10 users," Citron said. There was i grouping playing League of Legends, i WoW guild and not much else. "We would show it to our friends, and they'd exist similar, 'This is absurd!' and and then they'd never use it."
After talking to users and seeing the data, the squad realized its trouble: Discord was better than Skype, certainly, but it still wasn't very good. Calls would fail; quality would waver. Why would people drop a tool they hated for some other tool they'd learn to hate? The Discord team ended upward completely rebuilding its voice technology 3 times in the first few months of the app's life. Around the same time, it also launched a feature that let users moderate, ban and give roles and permissions to others in their server. That was when people who tested Discord started to immediately notice it was improve. And tell their friends about it.
Discord at present claims May 13, 2015, as its launch day, because that was the twenty-four hour period strangers started really using the service. Someone posted virtually Discord in the Last Fantasy Xiv subreddit, with a link to a Discord server where they could talk most a new expansion pack. Citron and his Discord co-founder, Stan Vishnevskiy, immediately jumped into the server, hopped into phonation chat and started talking to anyone who showed up. The Redditors would go back, say "I merely talked to the developers there, they're pretty cool," and ship even more people to Discord. "That day," Citron said, "nosotros got a couple hundred registration[due south]. That kind of kicked the snowball off the top of the mountain."
The early Discord team, circa 2015. Photo: Discord
I user, who goes by Vind on Discord, was amidst Discord's earliest cohort of users. He and his Battlefield 4-playing friends ditched TeamSpeak for the app, right equally they were also starting to practise more than but talk about Battleground. "We were moving away from being purely about the game to beingness more than about a full general community." Discord let them gear up different channels for different conversations, keep some order in the anarchy, and jump in and out as they wanted. But Vind said one characteristic particularly stood out: "Being able to but jump on an empty vocalization chat, basically telling people, 'Hey, I'chiliad here, do y'all desire to join and talk?'"
Near everyone I talked to picked that same example to explain why Discord just feels different from other apps. Voice chatting in Discord isn't like setting up a call, it doesn't involve dialing or sharing a link and countersign or annihilation at all formal. Every channel has a dedicated space for voice chat, and anyone who drops in is immediately continued and talking. The better metaphor than calling is walking into a room and plopping down on the sofa: You're simply saying, I'm here, what's up?
Add that to the list of things about Discord that turned out to be unexpectedly powerful. In retrospect, of course, it feels obvious. Vishnevskiy describes information technology every bit feeling like "a neighborhood, or like a business firm where you lot can move between rooms," which is a radically different thing than most online social tools. It had no gamification systems, no follower counts, no algorithmic timelines. "It created a place on your figurer and on your phone," Citron said, "where information technology felt similar you friends were just around, and you lot could come across them and talk to them and [hang] out with them." You open Discord and see that a few of your friends are already in the voice aqueduct; you can just hop in.
The third place
From a technical perspective, none of this is easy. "It definitely requires a different manner of architecting the system," Vishnevskiy said. Discord spent a long time working on making it easy to exist in a voice aqueduct on your phone, then seamlessly switch when yous open Discord on your computer. And it continues to work on latency, the enemy of every real-time communications programmer.
More recently, the company has added video chat to the stack, believing that was the next level of high-allegiance chat Discord needed. The team wanted to build a way to screen-share during a game, basically creating a small-group or private Twitch that would let users stream games with their friends watching. Doing that in 4K, at 60 frames per second, was hard plenty. They weren't certain how to add together it, either: Should they add a separate channel for video, or would users have a hard time choosing betwixt vocalization and video? They eventually added it into the voice channel, turning information technology into an incremental stride upwards from phonation rather than a separate affair.
At that place'southward non much that Discord does that users strictly can't practice elsewhere. On one hand, it's a lot similar Slack, blending public channels with easy side-chats and plenty of ways to rope in the right people. Information technology's as well a bit like Reddit, total of ever-evolving conversations that you can either try to go on up with or just bound into when y'all log in. (In fact, a lot of popular subreddits now have dedicated Discords, for more real-fourth dimension conversation among Redditors.) It uses simple status indicators to show who's online and what they're up to. Only by putting all those things together, in a mode that felt more like hanging out than doing piece of work, Discord found something remarkable. Everybody talks about the notion of the Third Place, but nobody's come closer to replicating it online than Discord.
Beyond just making sure things work right, flexibility is key to Discord. The ladder of communications, from text to voice to video, has ever been important to get correct. Communities tin can make up one's mind who gets admission to sure tools and design their space however they desire. Simply it goes even deeper: If y'all're in a video chat, for example, you tin choose whose video yous're seeing, not just whether yours is on or not. You tin can also exist in multiple chats at one time, blending one into the groundwork while focusing on some other. "It's supposed to all work in harmony," Vishnevskiy said, "but not focus you on something specific like a Google See or a Zoom. Doing information technology passively is also a core feature." When users say Discord just feels amend, that's usually what they're talking about.
While Zoom, Teams and others focused on building teleconferencing features — breakout rooms, Q&A, integration with piece of work tools, transcripts, that sort of matter — Discord has connected drilling down on quality and latency. "Nosotros invested a lot in integration with GPUs and stuff like that, really securely," Vishnevskiy said. "Voice was solved long ago at scale, only we wanted to solve it with 1,000 people in a voice channel … and they could be all talking at sub-millisecond latency. That's not of import for people on a teleconference call." Turns out, though, it was important for a lot more than gaming.
Video conversation is 1 of Discord's more recent features, and it seems to fit correct in. Prototype: Discord
As Discord grew, so besides did some of its communities. And pretty speedily, many of them took on lives outside of games. Vind found himself running a pretty large customs, virtually all things Formula 1 racing, not long afterward he joined Discord. "I was actually not the creator of it," he said. "Someone else created it and then basically abased it immediately." Vind joined at the very beginning, in 2016, when there were only 50 or so people on the server. He checked to see who endemic the server — and thus had consummate control over information technology — and found it was a totally uninvolved Discord user. Vind eventually tracked him down on Reddit, and asked him for admin privileges and then he could add some new features. "And then he only gave me ownership," Vind explained. The guy was focused on creating a Formula i grouping on Kik, which he thought was going to be the ameliorate platform. (Whoops.)
Vind'southward goal was to build a big community, but non effectually any particular game. Or even necessarily around racing. "I wanted to build something that was more of a full general community, where people feel welcome and just share the interest of Formula 1."
The Formula ane server now has more than 5,700 users. The history of the internet says that groups of that size about inevitably devolve into some kind of messy chaos, making moderation and community-building hard to keep up with. Vind said there have been challenges, certain, but for the virtually part things have worked OK. Discord's moderation bot, named CarlBot, does a pretty good chore of automatically deleting problematic messaging and alerting the mods. "And so if that happens, we ban them," Vind said. "We don't want anyone who uses that kind of linguistic communication in the customs." Those are the rules. When users bring together the Formula 1 server, they take to read and agree to those rules earlier they're immune to post.
'The club we want to see'
Not everyone has it so good. Discord's troubles with problematic content are ballsy and well-documented. It has at various times been a home to members of the 4chan and 8chan crowd; a number of "Kool Kids Klub" servers that are only barely disguised KKK groups; and endless examples of online bullying, hate speech communication and other kinds of atrocious behavior. It pops upward everywhere. What happens on the platform isn't necessarily meaningfully unlike from, say, what happens on Reddit or Facebook, only experts have said they worry well-nigh Discord because its semi-individual nature and small team make it harder to law. Since Discord's users skew immature, at that place are even more challenges.
Discord employees now admit they noticed this as well late. The problematic content on the platform but became an urgent issue afterward the deadly protests in Charlottesville in 2017, which had been planned and discussed openly on Discord for a long time earlier the event. Before that, there was no Trust and Safety team at Discord; Sean Li, who leads that team, joined the visitor near a month earlier Charlottesville. And for likewise long, the company thought its job was just to keep the worst stuff — the porn, the racial slurs, the flagrantly illegal content — off the platform. It turned a blind middle to the rest, figuring that because it wasn't a public space, what was the harm? Just don't join the server, and nobody can come after yous.
Now they see it differently. "Discord is like a country with 100 one thousand thousand inhabitants, living in different states and towns," Li said. "We make the rules on what is allowed to help shape the guild at large, and we empower server moderators and admins to help us enforce and expand upon them based on the needs of their communities." He wants to help moderators create whatever kind of community they want, and Discord's also getting better at giving moderators the tools and knowhow to practice and so, just merely within the boundaries set by the broader platform. Those didn't exist for too many years. Now, Discord's trying simply to be clear and forceful about what'due south acceptable and what isn't, and to enforce those rules consistently. It'southward investing in bots and other automated mod tools, but the Trust and Safety squad at present makes up more than fifteen% of Discord'southward staff. While there's withal plenty of bad stuff on the platform, progress seems to be strong.
Discord has more than rules than before, but information technology all the same leaves much in the hands of moderators. Photograph: Discord
Meanwhile, the other thing Discord has had to figure out is how to make coin. This is a significantly less urgent problem: The company has raised virtually $400 million, including $100 1000000 this by summer that valued the visitor at $3.5 billion. Forbes estimated its revenue at over $120 million this twelvemonth. Point is, Discord has plenty of runway. Merely at that place's not often a clean go out path for a huge communications platform with a spotty reputation for moderation (just ask Twitter and Reddit). Eventually, the company'southward going to have to make real money. And Citron and Vishnevskiy both adamantly say they don't want to sell ads or user data.
Users accept long made businesses out of Discords. Mikeyy, for case, somewhen graduated from playing Overwatch to running a large server for people who play FIFA, and particularly those who like to play its addictive Ultimate Squad mode. Mikeyy and his team of moderators and admins run a VIP server inside the larger community, where for $13.99 a month they offer exclusive trading tips, guides and more. Everything runs through PayPal and similar services, though, and Discord doesn't see a dime. Over the last couple of years, Discord has become a identify where lots of streamers, influencers and others chat more than directly with their fans — Discord has official integrations with Twitch, Patreon and more — but it doesn't get a cutting there either.
So far, Discord's chief source of income has been Nitro, its $10-a-month premium service that lets users change their username, utilize more emoji and get both video and vox in slightly college quality. Only Discord always had bigger plans. I program seemed obvious: Sell games to gamers! In 2018 Discord launched the Discord Shop, with a hand-selected gear up of games bachelor for purchase. Done with beating TeamSpeak and Skype, Discord was coming for Steam. Except that didn't work. Users didn't come to Discord to notice games, they came to hang out with their friends. The Store only lasted a few months, and Nitro Games, a Netflix-for-games service that sounds a lot like Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation At present, didn't last much longer.
The Discord Store'southward failure was an eye-opening moment within Discord. And it caused another pivot: Discord had to exist less nearly video games and more well-nigh becoming the identify for people to hang out with their friends. Information technology was now in the era of Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox and so many other games where existence together was far more than important than the action on the screen.
'Your identify to talk'
People had used Discord for non-gaming things from the early days of the service — as many as 30% of servers were about something else — but the team had never paid them much attention. Starting last year, they did. They ran focus groups and user studies, trying to figure out how millions of people were using Discord. One question they asked was, "What's the biggest misconception nigh Discord?" The overwhelming reply: "It'due south for gamers." People who wanted to accept their study group/knitting club/origami lessons/sneaker-shopping crew in Discord were having trouble getting others hooked into this kooky app with the alien logo and all the in-jokes about TeamSpeak.
In early on 2020, as Discord was embarking on a big redesign and rebranding exercise designed to aid it appeal more than broadly, COVID happened. Suddenly, stuck at home, everyone'southward social life turned to the net. Discord's user numbers increased past 47% from Feb to July, and all those newbies discovered what millions of gamers already knew: that having a place to hang out with their friends is a powerful affair, and that Discord did information technology better than anyone. Study groups started using Discord; teachers used it for class; friends used information technology to hang the way they unremarkably would subsequently school or on the weekend.
At the stop of June, Discord'due south rebrand was complete. Its new tagline was "Your place to talk," and its homepage was generally free of gaming jargon or confusing instructions. (Though the nods to gaming do persist, from the controller-alien logo to the .gg at the stop of every Discord server's URL.) "Every bit nosotros look back at the concluding few months," Citron and Vishnevskiy wrote in a blog postal service announcing the redesign, "it'due south clear that as people spend more and more than time online, they desire online spaces where they can find real humanity and belonging."
In the months and years to come up, Discord has plenty of work to practice, particularly on continuing to better moderation tools and make sure the communities on its platform operate the way the company hopes. And every bit information technology keeps adding more features — eventually, VR and AR and so many others will exist on gamers' and anybody'southward wish lists — it'll have to figure out how to do it all without adding the kind of complexity it has and so far avoided.
Only five years in, it'south clear that Discord has done something remarkable. It'southward built a space that feels unlike any other on the internet. It's not quite group conversation, it'southward non quite forums, it'south not quite briefing calling. It's all of those things and none of them. Information technology turns out, in that messy heart, is a place that mirrors what it'southward like to be human, and interact with other humans, more closely than only nearly anything else on the cyberspace. (For better, and sometimes for worse.) That's not what Citron, Vishnevskiy and their squad were going for, but it's what they have now. And they're non pivoting anymore.
Source: https://www.protocol.com/discord
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