Discord

Based on Wikipedia: Discord

In 2015, a failed video game company pivoted to build a chat app, hoping a few thousand gamers might use it. A decade later, that app hosts 150 million monthly users, has been valued at fifteen billion dollars, and played a role in one of the largest intelligence leaks in American history.

This is the story of Discord.

Born from a Failed Game

Jason Citron had already made his fortune before Discord existed. He founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile phones, and sold it in 2011 for one hundred and four million dollars. With that money, he started a game development studio called Hammer & Chisel.

Their first game was called Fates Forever. Citron believed it would become the first successful multiplayer online battle arena game on mobile devices. These games, often called MOBAs, pit teams of players against each other in strategic combat. League of Legends and Dota 2 had proven the format wildly popular on computers. Citron wanted to bring that experience to phones and tablets.

Fates Forever flopped.

But something interesting happened during development. Citron noticed his team struggled to coordinate while playing other games together, titles like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends. The existing voice chat software was clunky, resource-heavy, and frustrating to use. TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, the dominant options at the time, felt like relics from an earlier internet era.

So Hammer & Chisel built something new. They wanted voice chat that was easy to use, didn't slow down your computer, and just worked. They called it Discord.

The name came from a simple logic. It sounded cool. It related to talking. It was easy to say, spell, and remember. And crucially, the domain name and trademark were available. But there was also a deeper meaning: Citron wanted to solve the problem of discord in gaming communities—the friction, the difficulty of getting everyone on the same page.

Growth Without Marketing

Discord launched publicly in May 2015. The company made no deliberate effort to target any specific audience.

It didn't matter.

Gaming communities on Reddit began replacing their Internet Relay Chat links with Discord links almost immediately. IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, had been the standard for real-time group communication since 1988. It was powerful but arcane, requiring users to understand commands and protocols that felt increasingly alien to people raised on modern apps. Discord offered the same always-on group chat experience but wrapped in a friendly interface.

Esports players and tournament organizers adopted Discord rapidly. The company built relationships with Twitch streamers and moderators of popular gaming communities. Subreddits dedicated to games like Diablo and World of Warcraft became evangelists.

By January 2016, Discord had attracted enough attention to raise twenty million dollars in funding. WarnerMedia, the entertainment giant that would later merge with AT&T, participated in that round. Over the following years, the investment rounds grew larger: one hundred fifty million dollars in 2018, another hundred million in 2020, five hundred million more in 2021.

The valuations climbed accordingly. Two billion dollars. Ten billion. Fifteen billion.

How Discord Actually Works

Understanding Discord requires grasping one central concept: the server.

A Discord server is not actually a physical computer server. The company's own developers call them "guilds" internally to avoid confusion. A server is really just a collection of chat rooms and voice channels organized under a single name, accessible through invitation links.

Think of it like a private club. Someone creates a server, gives it a name, and invites people to join. Inside, they can create different rooms for different purposes. A gaming clan might have separate text channels for general chat, strategy discussion, and sharing memes. They might have voice channels for different games or different squads.

Server creators have extensive control. They can set visibility—public or private. They can create roles that determine what different members can see and do. A moderation team might have permissions to kick troublemakers while regular members can only read and post messages.

Most servers are limited to two hundred fifty thousand members, though Discord will raise this limit for servers that need more capacity. The largest known server belongs to Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generation company, with over fifteen million members. That's more people than live in many countries.

Beyond Voice Chat

Discord started as a voice communication tool, but it evolved into something much broader.

Video calling arrived in 2017, initially limited to ten participants. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and people suddenly needed ways to see each other remotely, Discord raised that limit to fifty.

Screen sharing came next. Users could broadcast their entire computer display or just a specific application to others in a voice channel. This made Discord useful for collaboration, tutorials, and watching friends play games. While this mimicked some features of streaming platforms like Twitch, Discord explicitly stated they weren't trying to compete. These features were designed for small groups, not public broadcasts.

In 2021, Discord introduced Stage Channels, inspired by the audio app Clubhouse. These are moderated spaces for live discussions, similar to a panel at a conference. Speakers take turns while an audience listens. Access can be limited to invited or ticketed guests.

Threads appeared later that year—temporary text channels that automatically disappear after a period of inactivity. Forum Channels followed in 2022, bringing a more traditional internet forum experience where users can start distinct topics that persist over time. Media Channels launched in 2023, restricted to sharing only images and videos.

Each addition transformed Discord from a simple voice chat app into something harder to categorize. Part Slack, part Reddit, part telephone, part television.

The Great Pivot

For its first five years, Discord was explicitly a gaming platform. The branding featured gaming references. The interface used gaming terminology. The company's identity was inseparable from video game culture.

In June 2020, that changed.

Discord announced it was shifting focus from gaming specifically to general communication. The new slogan was simple: "Your place to talk." The company planned to reduce gaming in-jokes throughout the application, improve the experience for new users unfamiliar with gaming culture, and increase server capacity and reliability.

One hundred million dollars in new investment supported this transformation.

The timing was strategic. The pandemic had already pushed people toward Discord for reasons having nothing to do with games. Study groups used it. Remote workers used it. Hobbyist communities of all kinds discovered that Discord's combination of persistent chat rooms and drop-in voice channels suited their needs perfectly.

Discord's user base doubled during 2020, reaching roughly one hundred forty million monthly active users.

The pivot continued in 2021 with a visual rebrand. Discord changed its logo—a stylized game controller nicknamed "Clyde"—and made its color palette more saturated and "bold and playful." The slogan shifted again, from "your place to talk" to "imagine a place."

Users hated it.

The backlash was fierce and immediate. Long-time users felt Discord was abandoning its roots, sanitizing its personality to appeal to a broader market. But the company pressed forward. Growth was the priority.

The Microsoft Courtship

In March 2021, reports emerged that Microsoft was in talks to acquire Discord for an estimated ten billion dollars.

The deal made logical sense. Microsoft owned Xbox and had been building its gaming ecosystem for years. The company had previously acquired Minecraft, LinkedIn, and GitHub. Discord would fit neatly into a strategy of controlling the social infrastructure around gaming.

Discord walked away from the negotiations.

Instead, the company raised more money and brought on new investors. Sony Interactive Entertainment participated in this round, announcing plans to integrate Discord with the PlayStation Network. Discord would remain independent, playing all sides of the gaming industry rather than belonging to any single platform holder.

The decision to reject Microsoft kept options open. Jason Citron had previously said he wasn't considering taking the company public. But in March 2021, Discord hired its first chief financial officer—a classic preparation step for an initial public offering. Inside sources described this as moving toward going public, even as Citron publicly denied it.

That ambiguity persisted for years until April 2025, when Citron announced he was stepping down as CEO while remaining on the board. His replacement was Humam Sakhnini, a former executive at Activision Blizzard. Citron explicitly stated the move anticipated making Discord a publicly traded company.

The Dark Side

Discord's success brought problems that its founders never anticipated.

The platform's combination of features—easy server creation, voice chat, private channels, ephemeral messages—made it ideal for communities that wanted to operate outside mainstream internet spaces. Some of these communities were harmless hobbyists. Others were not.

In early 2023, classified United States government documents appeared on Discord. A young Air National Guardsman had photographed top-secret intelligence assessments and posted them to a Discord server originally created for discussing the video game Minecraft.

The leaked documents detailed the state of the Russo-Ukrainian war, American surveillance of both allied and adversarial nations, and internal tensions within international alliances. It became one of the most significant intelligence breaches in recent American history, and it happened on a platform designed for gamers to coordinate raids in World of Warcraft.

Discord wasn't directly responsible for the leak—the guardsman violated his security clearances and the law—but the incident highlighted how the platform's privacy features could enable serious harm.

Other controversies accumulated. In 2022, the French data protection authority CNIL fined Discord eight hundred thousand euros for violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, often abbreviated as GDPR. The violations were almost absurdly mundane: the application continued running in the background after users closed it, failed to disconnect users from voice chats, and allowed passwords as short as six characters.

In September 2025, Discord's customer service systems, operated through a company called Zendesk, suffered a data breach. The stolen data included images of government-issued identification that users had submitted when appealing age verification decisions. Your driver's license photo, uploaded to prove you were old enough to use certain features, was now in the hands of hackers.

Moderation at Scale

Running a platform with one hundred fifty million users means confronting questions about what those users are allowed to say and do.

Discord approached this partly through technology and partly through delegation. Individual servers are moderated by their own creators and appointed moderators, not by Discord employees. This distributed model scales efficiently—Discord doesn't need to monitor every conversation across millions of servers—but it means moderation quality varies wildly.

The company has taken some centralized actions. In 2021, Discord acquired Sentropy, a company specializing in internet moderation technology. The goal was improving Discord's ability to detect harmful content at scale.

Some moderation decisions proved contentious. In 2021, Google sent cease and desist notices to developers of two popular Discord bots—Groovy and Rythm—that allowed users to play music from YouTube in voice channels. The bots were used on an estimated thirty-six million servers. They pulled songs from YouTube without advertisements, essentially creating a free music streaming service.

Two weeks after Google killed those bots, Discord announced a partnership with YouTube for a "Watch Together" feature, allowing users to watch YouTube videos together legally within Discord. The cynical interpretation: Discord sacrificed beloved community tools to build a relationship with Google. The generous interpretation: Discord was always operating in a legal gray area and found a way to preserve some functionality while respecting copyright.

The Cryptocurrency Question

In November 2021, Jason Citron posted mockup images showing Discord integrated with Web3 technologies—cryptocurrency wallets, blockchain verification, non-fungible tokens.

The reaction was immediate and negative.

Discord's user base, despite being technology-forward in many ways, was largely hostile to cryptocurrency. They associated it with speculation, environmental damage, and scams. The mockups suggested Discord might force users to interact with blockchain technology they wanted nothing to do with.

Citron backtracked quickly. "We have no plans to ship it at this time," he clarified. The mockups had been exploratory, not announcements.

This episode revealed something important about Discord's relationship with its users. The platform had grown because communities chose to adopt it. Those communities had opinions about how Discord should evolve, and they were willing to express those opinions loudly when they disagreed with the company's direction.

Political Power

By 2025, Discord had become infrastructure for political organizing.

During what became known as the Gen Z protests of 2025, many demonstrations across various countries were coordinated through Discord servers. In Nepal, protesters used Discord to help elect a new prime minister despite the platform being officially banned in the country. The Moroccan protests that September also originated on Discord, with organizers using the platform for coordination and public statements.

This political significance brought Discord into congressional scrutiny. After a suspect in a high-profile assassination confessed to the killing on Discord, CEO Humam Sakhnini was called to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The hearing focused on the radicalization of online forum users and instances of open incitement to political violence.

Discord had become serious in ways its founders never imagined when they were building a chat app for gamers.

The Username Wars

One of Discord's original clever features was its username system. Unlike most platforms that required unique usernames—forcing people into awkward constructions like "john_smith_47829"—Discord allowed duplicate usernames differentiated by a four-digit number called a discriminator.

So you could be "Alex#1234" while someone else was "Alex#5678." The system meant common names weren't locked up by early adopters, and users could choose whatever name they wanted.

In May 2023, Discord abandoned this system.

The new approach required globally unique handles, like most other social platforms. Users selected their new usernames in priority order: early registrants got first pick, then paid Nitro subscribers, then owners of partner and verified servers, then everyone else.

The change created predictable chaos. Users who had been "Alex#1234" for years now had to compete for the handle "alex" against every other Alex on the platform. Many ended up with their second or third choice. Some ended up with handles nothing like their original usernames.

Critics pointed out a security concern: if someone else claimed your previous username, they could potentially impersonate you to your friends. The old system had made such impersonation difficult because the discriminator was hard to guess. The new system made it trivial.

What Discord Is Now

As of 2024, Discord hosts about one hundred fifty million monthly active users across nineteen million weekly active servers. It ranks as the thirtieth most visited website in the world, with nearly a quarter of its traffic coming from the United States.

The company has grown to employ hundreds of people globally, though that number has fluctuated. After expanding fivefold between 2020 and 2024, Discord laid off seventeen percent of its workforce—one hundred seventy people—in January 2024. A smaller round of layoffs had already cut forty employees in August 2023.

Gaming remains Discord's largest use case, but no longer its only one. Study groups coordinate homework through Discord. Cryptocurrency traders share tips. Artists build communities around their work. Political organizers plan protests. Remote workers maintain social connections with colleagues.

The platform runs on essentially every device: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and web browsers. This ubiquity is part of its appeal. Discord is wherever you are.

The Business of Free

Discord makes money primarily through its subscription service, Discord Nitro.

The free version of Discord is fully functional. You can join servers, chat, voice call, video call, and do essentially everything the platform offers. Nitro adds conveniences: animated avatars, custom profile banners, higher quality video streaming, larger file upload limits, and server boosting—the ability to give perks to servers you're a member of.

For a period, Nitro included access to free games. Discord launched a games storefront in 2018, curating titles and taking a cut of sales. Nitro subscribers could play selected games as part of their subscription. When the Epic Games Store launched and began challenging Steam by taking only a twelve percent revenue cut, Discord responded by reducing its own cut to ten percent.

The games store experiment has been largely deemphasized. Discord's core business remains the subscription model plus various partnership and platform integrations.

The company has never been profitable in the traditional sense. Like many technology platforms, Discord has prioritized growth over profit, subsidizing operations with venture capital while building a user base large enough to eventually monetize more aggressively. The planned initial public offering will test whether public market investors believe that eventual profitability will materialize.

From Discord to Discord

There's something poetic about Discord's name.

Jason Citron chose it because he wanted to solve the problem of discord—disagreement, disharmony—in gaming communities. The application would bring people together, help them coordinate, reduce friction.

Ten years later, Discord has done all of that. But it has also become a vector for some of the most divisive forces in modern society: leaked intelligence, political radicalization, coordinated harassment, and the general chaos that emerges when you give millions of people tools to organize outside traditional institutions.

Discord didn't cause these problems. They existed before Discord and would exist without it. But Discord made certain kinds of organizing easier—for better and for worse.

What started as a voice chat app for gamers frustrated with TeamSpeak became something unprecedented: a parallel social infrastructure, owned by a private company, used by tens of millions of people for purposes ranging from homework help to international political movements.

The question now is what happens when that company goes public. Will shareholder pressure push Discord toward more aggressive monetization? Will regulatory scrutiny force changes to the platform's privacy features? Will competition from newer platforms erode Discord's user base?

Nobody knows. But whatever happens, Discord has already changed how the internet works. The idea of the "server"—a private, managed community space with voice and text communication—has become a standard pattern replicated across dozens of platforms. Even if Discord itself faded tomorrow, the model it popularized would persist.

That's the strange legacy of a failed mobile game. Sometimes the side project becomes the main project. Sometimes the tool you build to solve your own problem becomes the tool that reshapes how millions of people connect.

Discord was supposed to reduce discord. Instead, it became a mirror for everything the internet is—collaborative and chaotic, creative and destructive, essential and dangerous, all at once.