My friends know to never call me on the phone. If I had my way, I’d delete the phone off my smartphone altogether.
Texting is where it’s at. Asynchronous, in writing, easily searched and archived. What’s not to love?
Well, leave it to teenagers to tell me that texting is now old-fashioned. When I ask whether they got an email, I might as well have asked them whether they received a telegram. Now the trusty SMS is falling out of favor.
Keeping track of how my kids communicate is an anthropological hobby of mine. One is a heavy user of Instagram messaging who has never posted a single photo. Another followed friends from Snapchat to WhatsApp to Signal to Telegram in the course of one month.
So when I saw the same chat app installed on all three kids’ devices, I took notice. They were all using Discord.
Discord is a messaging app that grew up alongside the massive online gaming world. Discord has been around for five years and has amassed over 250 million users.
In the last year, the makers of Discord have broadened their scope beyond video games, and pitch their app as simply “your place to talk.” And with the pandemic pushing most conversations online, it has found an eager audience.
Gamers still love Discord, to be sure. But college instructors at the University of Hawaii are hosting discussions on Discord as well. Discord fan clubs for artists and creators are everywhere. My daughter turned to a political group on Discord for solace and camaraderie during this interminable election season.
A Discord server can be launched for any topic or group. And within a server you can create channels for subtopics. Imagine a foodie Discord server with channels, like chat rooms, for different cuisines.
Discord channels can host text chats, or voice and video chats. And in addition to these open conversations, you can message with other users in groups or one-on-one.
It’s a lot like Slack, the business “email killer” I wrote about last year (bit.ly/3ksEL7l). But it’s also not.
One of the biggest differences comes down to aesthetics. Slack (and its Microsoft clone, Teams) is aimed at businesses and projects and getting things done. Slack lets its hair down a little with custom emoji, but it is definitely more stiff and staid.
Discord is clearly more whimsical, colorful and casual. Like Slack, Discord has “bots” and other automations and integrations to bring in extra features, but instead of “quickly schedule a meeting in Outlook,” the most popular Discord bots let you play music, or collect Pokemon, or manage a virtual taco shop.
An upside to this more casual approach is that creating, joining and leaving Discord servers is no big deal. Setting up a Slack instance feels like what it is, building communications infrastructure for a defined community. With Discord you can launch a server (or fire up a stand-alone group chat) to plan a birthday party, drop it when it’s done and seamlessly move among other servers or groups and message friends afterward.
In fact, interface-wise, there’s little friction between interacting on one topical server versus another, in a group chat or one-on-one with a friend. This blending of communities and contacts sounds messy but is surprisingly natural because your personal networks also overlap and change in real life.
For better or worse, Discord allows you to use one account across the entire Discord universe. While this is more convenient than having different accounts for Slack instances, it also means you might want to pick your Discord username carefully. (Not that there’s anything wrong with joining a knitting server as “CerealKilla808.”)
Discord also gives for free what Slack charges for: a searchable archive of message history, rather than a rolling limit of 10,000 messages.
How does Discord make money? It offers users a premium membership tier called Nitro with special features like custom emoji (which they can bring with them to any server), larger file uploads and high-definition video.
The people I’ve met who spend all day logged into Discord all gladly pay $99 a year for Nitro, and gleefully show off their carefully curated favorite emoji and GIFs.
I admit, I have more of a Slack personality, but having spent more time in Discord, I can see why it’s immensely popular. And if an old-school techie like me can find my way around, there’s still hope for geeks of a certain age to catch up and dive in.
Ryan Ozawa is communications director for local tech company Hawaii Information Service. Since he created HawaiiSlack.com, he now hosts HawaiiDiscord.com, too.
