How Discord, born from a little-known game, became a social hub for young people

In 2015, Jason Lemon, a programmer, had a hard time making his way into the video game industry. The new multiplayer title that he had created with his development studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not catching on.

Therefore, Citron made an abrupt radical change. He fired his company’s game developers, turned the game’s chat feature into his only product, and gave it a mysterious name: Discord.

“I think we had about six users at the time,” Citron said. “I wasn’t sure it would work.”

In the beginning, Discord was only popular with other gamers. Yet more than six years later, in part due to the pandemic, it has come to captivate the general public. As adults working from home flocked to Zoom, their children were downloading Discord to socialize with other young people through text messages, audio and video calls in groups known as servers.

Every month, the platform has more than 150 million active users – up from 56 million in 2019 – and nearly 80 percent connect from outside of North America. It has expanded from gamers to music fans, students, and crypto enthusiasts.

In September, San Francisco-based Discord announced that it was raising $ 500 million in financing and that it valued the company at $ 14.7 billion, according to PitchBook, a market data provider. In 2021, its workforce more than doubled, to about 650 people.

Discord’s evolution into a popular tool has been an unexpected turn in Citron’s career.The 37-year-old, who said he grew up playing video games on Long Island, narrowly missed a degree from Full Sail University in Florida because he spent too much time playing “World of Warcraft” and his first date with his future wife was in a living room. Video game machines.

“A lot of my best memories come from those experiences, so my entire career has been focused on giving other people the power to create those kinds of moments in their lives,” Citron said.

Before Discord, Citron directed the video game social network, OpenFeint, which it sold in 2011 to a Japanese video game company GREE for $ 104 million. For others in the video game community, Citron was considered innovative because he had tried to capture the attention of gamers through social interactions with his friends, a new strategy in the nascent mobile video game market.

“At least he’s trying to bring something new to the market,” said Serkan Toto, a video game analyst in Japan, adding that Citron had a reputation for being “nerdy, but in a good way.”

Now, Citron is running a prominent communications platform, a twist that he described as “surprising, wonderful and humbling.”

Discord is divided into servers — in essence, a series of chat rooms similar to the business messaging app Slack — that facilitate casual, fluid conversations about video games, music, memes, and everyday life. Some servers are large and open to the public; others require invitation.

The service has no ads. Earn money through a subscription service that gives users access to features like custom emojis for $ 5 and $ 10 a month. In December, Discord also began experimenting with allowing some users to charge up to $ 100 a month for access to its servers, of which the company takes a 10 percent cut.

Last year, Discord made more than $ 100 million in revenue, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances who was not allowed to speak about them in public, but company representatives did not say whether it was profitable.

The most radical turn of the company occurred at the beginning of the pandemic. In June 2020, Citron and its co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote a blog post acknowledging that Discord had moved away from video games and was working to be more accessible to everyone. Months earlier, the company had changed its slogan from “Chat for Gamers” to “A new way to converse with your communities and friends,” a nod to its larger audience.

That transition has brought some growing pains. Discord has faced the same thorny questions as other social media companies about regulating speech., protection against harassment and the safety of young people.

Discord allows people to chat using fake names and the task of ensuring that people adhere to the standards of their community rests largely with the organizers of individual Discord servers. This makes the platform feel a bit like “Lord of the Flies” as there are groups of young people who form societies online and decide their own rules.

In 2017, a group of white nationalists met on far-right Discord servers to plan the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Discord executives, despite being aware that there were white nationalists on the platform, did not veto them until after the rally took place, according to a report in The New York Times.

After the incident, the company took the content moderation. Citron noted that 15 percent of the company’s employees work in confidence and security. In 2019, the company began publishing biannual transparency reports and prohibits users under the age of 13 from accessing Discord.

In your most recent report. Discord mentioned that it had received more than 400,000 reports of misconduct between January and June, of which about a third was related to harassment, and that it had banned more than 470,000 accounts and 43,000 servers.

Clement Leveau, 21, has a lot of power on Discord: He owns Kanye, a server where more than 58,000 members debate the eponymous artist, music, pop culture and other topics.

Leveau, a college student from New York City, is the highest authority, having the power to appoint moderators and incarcerate people who break community rules in a channel of solitary confinement known as jail. Leveau said he tries to “let people talk nonsense, have a place to relax,” but does not tolerate hate speech or intimidation. Due to the isolation caused by the pandemic, the bonds people have formed on Discord have become crucial, according to Leveau.

Earlier this year, Discord held negotiations with Microsoft about an acquisition that may have exceeded $ 10 billion, according to people with information about the conversations who were not authorized to speak about them in public. The deal did not close (Microsoft declined to comment).

Citron repeatedly declined to comment on conversations with other companies, only arguing that Discord generates “a lot of interest.” Citron did not say whether it was considering taking the company to the public markets, but commented: “These types of issues have a limited range of results.” (I)