What is Discord and Why Should You Use it?

 by James Heppell

Discord is a bit like Whatsapp and Zoom combined, with support for loads of people, and is in my opinion the best social media app in existence. 

If you’ve ever voice called someone while playing a PC game recently chances are you used Discord. However unlike on Xbox or Playstation, on PC there was never a single de facto voice call platform until recently. Sure Xbox game bar is built into Windows, but pretty much nobody uses it. Nowadays though Discord is that universal platform, and part of the way it got there was its cross platform-ness. It has native apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and even a fully functional website1, which can be used on any modern web browser. That’s a pretty incredible level of support, and it’s only with that support that an app can become the default for something. I’m sure you’ve heard of FaceTime, or iMessage. Yeah they’re pretty good, very easy to set up, but only being on Apple platforms is a tiny bit of a hindrance in becoming a massive social media app.

Anyway the way Discord works is you have Direct Messages with people. Gifs, text effects, custom statuses, file sending (photos), voice calls with optional video/screen sharing, Spotify invites etc etc you name it. You can also create group chats, which are, well, DMs but with > 2 people. But then there’s servers, the thing which really makes Discord unique. Servers are like group chats, but they can have many more people. Millions in fact. I’m in the official Rocket League server, which as of writing has 550k members. In order to manage all those people there’s channels, text channels and voice channels2. Different channels are for different topics, eg announcements or general. Then there’s roles. Different roles have different permissions, ranging from promoting people to seeing/editing certain channels to being able to create server invites. Because not all servers are public like the Rocket League one. Many servers are just for friends, or even school classes (yes some schools use Discord!).

The strange thing about Discord, apart from how quickly it’s grown over the past few years, is who owns it. Just a couple of guys who don’t make anything else and who haven’t sold Discord to a big tech company. Just think of the most popular Social Media apps out there; Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Tiktok. Discord, like Twitter and Snapchat, are one of the rare few which haven’t been bought. What’s also strange is that there are no adverts, and no data collection. For quite a while Discord didn’t have any source of revenue. They experimented with selling games but quickly gave up on that, and nowadays they offer a subscription service (because who doesn’t want another one of those!) called Discord Nitro, which unlocks nice to have features. I’ve never bought it, but apparently a lot of people are and Discord are actually making some money - good for them. Nitro lets you stream above 720p 30 FPS, send bigger files than 8 MB3, use custom emojis from any of your servers and stuff like that. Nothing fundamental to the Discord experience but useful features nonetheless. In my opinion having a few features behind a paywall is a fair price to pay for privacy.

1Technically the website isn’t fully functional because there’s no background noise suppression…

2In case you’re wondering, voice calls in servers can also send video and screen share as well. They’re just called voice channels because 90% of the time that’s all they’re used for. Voice channels are good because anyone (with permission) can leave and join when they want, you don’t have to ring people like traditional calling. 

3I normally overcome this by sending links to the original file, in Google Photos / Drive. But being able to send files > 8 megabytes within Discord would definitely be useful. 

A feature of Discord is pinging (@). This can be useful for getting the attention of people in big servers where lots of messages are sent. Eg @Everyone is often used when a new update comes out for a game.