Discord is a company headquartered in San Francisco and was founded in 2015. It’s grown to have 14,000,000 daily players with 315,000,000 messages being sent a day and unlike other platforms, does not generate revenue through ads or profit off of selling user data but instead relies on the venture capital funding it raises. As a third-party VOIP program, it combines parts of Reddit, Teamspeak, Vent, Slack, Google Hangouts, and Skype and is considered the best tools for text, image, video and audio communication serving as an alternative irc chat room for subreddits, becoming the default service that people go to for chat rooms, having quality voice channels where gamers can include their audio in a livestream, and including screen sharing capabilities.
Other features it offers is an activity tab that is similar to how the “home” button of your iPhone or your “desktop” and “dock” act, allowing you to quickly launch and jump directly into the game app you were playing. It even specializes in delivering news about the games you play, populates and updates the game tab, provides a list that allows you to see what your friends are playing right now or recently played, and stretches beyond gaming to see your friends' Spotify listening parties, Twitch streams, and Xbox status.
Discord arrived in a timely manner: Skype was becoming intrusive after Microsoft bought it by having issues like DDoSing (denial-of-service attack), being cluttered in ads that didn’t disappear from the taskbar, connecting to random servers or banning users from them, and claiming passwords to be invalid when they were correct; meanwhile Raidcall’s update was too confusing where the default language changed to Russian and application's text was in cyrillic. It further gained popularity by targeting gamers with advertisements on VGBC as well as being featured at Twitchcon. It was also incredibly responsive to user’s issues on on data security, privacy policy, etc. where developers replied directly to complaints.
In comparison to Mumble—“an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat communication application software that features a customizable in game overlay, application skins, conversation recording, and advanced voice activity detection”—it is more user friendly being available on multi-platforms including website, desktop, mobile phone app as well as runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux. It also has a low barrier for entry for the host and for users to join where it’s free, easy, and fast to set up a server and be connected on multiple servers. You don’t even need to have the program downloaded where you can enter under a temporary unregistered name and click on the url link to use Discord through your browser. Additionally, it’s interface design has been praised for being simple, clean, minimal.
It’s mostly been adopted however because of its community component and approach. Not only does it “offer fun communities to join and put your server in a master list for other people to jump in”, but gives users ownership over their communities and control with admin rights by allowing them to set channels with their own rules as restrictions. You can host your own server to make your own chat room and send invites to whoever you want instead of “posting into the void of Twitter or occasionally browsing Reddit”.
I think that Discord's differentiation also was helpful because it established itself as the best option in a specific niche, much like Slack has established itself as well optimized for working or club environments. Understanding the audience that it appeals to is what made it stand out from other platforms that were more general in their intention. I think it's also interesting that they make all of their revenue through venture capital funding. It seems like they might consider ways to create long term revenue - it seems like Discord has a monthly subscription for extra features that helps support the company.
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