Original post by adrian wheeler on September 20, 2019
One of the most transformative aspects of mobile culture for me in the last few years has been Discrod and its unintentional evolution from a gamer-friendly VOIP (voice over IP) app to a hub for community. While Discord advertises itself as a “free voice and text chat for gamers” its users have leveraged the combination of VOIP software and Slack-like collaboration tools to turn it into much more than the developers had intended. Discord, much like slack is separated into servers. These are spaces dedicated to a specific group of people and can be either private, or open to the public. These servers can be anything from a small group of friends to a massive global community. In many ways this mirrors the old Forums or BBS pages that enabled online communities to grow and flourish. Discord takes that model and updates it for a more connected, mobile first world. Rather than static forum posts that operate like a community message board, Discord servers separate topics into channels with real time text and audio chat functionality. This interface is similar to iMessage or facebook messenger and allows users to build closer relationships by engaging in real time conversation rather than waiting for forum posts. Unlike messaging apps however, Discrod servers support much larger groups and the channel structure enables those huge communities to engage in smaller conversations. Members are free to jump in and out of whichever channels they are interested in or direct message one another to have a private discussion. Bringing this functionality to a mobile application allows communities to maintain a constant connection and gives individuals a much stronger sense of membership. Interestingly Discrod themselves don’t tend to advertise the community side of their application, however there is a dedicated webpage that helps users find communities called discord.me. Through this site one can find communities for everything from Anime to Religion. Finally if you are interested in Discrod itself you can find it on your favorite app store or directly at their website here.
I’ve also been using Discord for quite a while and it has surprising complexity built in to it.It certainly is a hub of learning and collaboration, and while it is used on mobile I would guess that most of its users are on desktop. I did a quick search without finding a user OS breakdown.
I was introduced to Discord by a classmate just last term and I was immediately drawn into its unique team chat style. For course group work and work projects I have used Slack, Google Hangouts, Mattermost, Skype for Business and more recently Microsoft Teams. These are robust platforms that lean towards workspace creation and collaboration and this is very useful but I have found them cumbersome on mobile devises. Discord stops itself at just being a communications tool but perhaps unintentionally became a community building tool that might serve as the gold standard model for future dedicated communication platforms on mobile devises. Also Discord is free at every level of service!
Original reply Derrick Cheung @dmcheung on September 21, 2019
One of the aspects of Discord that cannot be understated is how different of an experience it is from other VOIP/messaging services like Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger, and how these differences allow it to flourish as a community-building tool. Individuals can join user-created servers, which are communities for people to gather and discuss a common topic. Within these servers, moderators can create a number of different channels, which focus conversation into specific goals/purposes, and allows off-topic or casual conversation to not muddy any important discussions, questions, planning, etc. Members of a server can choose which channels to enter and participate in, allowing participants to ignore channels (and therefore content/conversations) they feel are unimportant without requiring endless scrolling through messages. This separation of content is what makes Discord allow for communities to exceed 10,000 members without feeling too cluttered, overcrowded, or full of unnecessary chatter, a feeling that Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger fails to do even in groups as little as 12 people.