Discord

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2015 · Hammer & Chisel, a small San Francisco games studio; first adopted by gaming communities on Reddit · Also known as discordapp; Discord server

What it is

Discord is a free chat app. People join "servers", which are invite-only clubhouses run by ordinary users. Each server has text rooms called channels, where messages stay up permanently, and voice channels, where anyone can drop in and talk live, like walking into a room where friends are already chatting. It runs on computers and phones. A server could be five school friends or a fan community of hundreds of thousands. The company made money mainly from an optional paid upgrade called Nitro.

Where it came from

It was made by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy at Hammer & Chisel, a studio whose mobile game, Fates Forever, had flopped. Citron said his team struggled to plan tactics in online games because the voice software of the time was clunky and slowed computers down. Discord launched in May 2015. Gaming forums on Reddit soon swapped their old IRC chat links for Discord invites, and streamers who broadcast themselves playing games live started sending their audiences to their own servers. During the 2020 pandemic, with people stuck at home, usage roughly doubled and the company dropped its gaming focus, rebranding as a general place to talk.

How people used it

Friends left a voice channel open all evening while they played games, watched films together or just did homework with company. Fan groups, study groups, crypto projects and hobby clubs built servers with dozens of channels and ranked members using coloured "roles". Volunteer moderators enforced rules and banned troublemakers. Automated programs called bots played music, ran games and greeted newcomers. Streamers and online creators ended videos with "join my Discord", and a server invite became the usual next step after meeting someone online. Messages were often fast, in-joke heavy and only made sense to people inside the server.

Why it mattered

For many young people it replaced the phone call and the forum at once. Talk moved out of public view into closed servers that search engines couldn't read, which made communities feel private and close. It also made them hard to watch. Organisers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville used Discord servers, and in 2023 classified US military documents first leaked in a small Discord server. The company also tried rebrands that users disliked, such as the 2021 slogan "imagine a place", and in 2023 it scrapped the four-digit number tags in usernames, which many people grumbled about.

The jokes around it

• "Discord mod": a stereotype of the self-important, power-hungry volunteer moderator, usually drawn as unwashed and never leaving the house.
• "Join my Discord": the standard closing line of streamers and online creators.
• The Discord notification ping, so recognisable that people checked their own phones when they heard it in someone else's video.
• "Discord kitten": slang for someone who gets gifts such as Nitro in return for attention and company in voice calls.
• Old usernames with a four-digit tag, like Name#1234, which people remembered fondly once Discord removed them in 2023.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Once public social media felt crowded and hostile, people retreated into small invite-only rooms where they could talk live with people they knew, and they handed the job of keeping order to unpaid volunteers from their own group.

What noah is not sure of

The 200 million monthly users figure comes from the specimen text and the company's own claims. The claim that pandemic usage roughly doubled relies on reported figures of about 140 million monthly users in 2020. The exact meaning of "Discord kitten" varied between groups.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.