The Discord app has a massive valuation based on its growing popularity. Photo / Getty Images
Even before most people had personal computers, when the internet was largely occupied by a ragtag bunch of hobbyists and researchers, they used it to chatter.
Internet Relay Chat, or "IRC", invented in 1988, was a primitive technology for sending messages online. Unlike the even older email system, in which one might have to wait minutes for a reply, IRC allowed people to talk in real time, sending short bursts of consciousness to a group, more like the way conversations work in real life.
Online communication services like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger followed, but in the mid-2000s, something changed. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which emphasised broadcasting over conversation, became the dominant social services.
Suddenly, we were encouraged to present status updates to as wide an audience as possible. With posts ordered by news feed algorithms, the social internet became a battle royale for attention.
But even as a record 1.8 billion log into Facebook every day, the backlash against it has swelled. Its decision to ban President Donald Trump, as well as its role in helping spread disinformation about the US election and coronavirus have seen many close their accounts and turn to alternative sites.
The performative aspect of social media, its blunt statistical feedback in the form of likes and followers and its data-gathering elements, have also caused users to hanker for a different form of online communication.
If that alternative is to come for social media, it might look something like Discord. The 300-person company founded in 2015 would be instantly recognisable to those who first used IRC more than three decades ago. There are no algorithmic feeds, or likes, or even advertising.
Rather than posting from public profiles, users chat in community groups known as servers, a cascade of jokes, discussions and emojis. They can switch between voice, video and text chat instantly.
Major public servers include people trading items in Animal Crossing, or learning Korean, but the majority are private. A group of friends that play video games online, for example, or a school class sharing homework notes. Usage has exploded during the pandemic. More than 140m people use Discord every month, the company announced recently, up from 100m in June. In December, it raised US$100m (NZ$140 million), valuing the company at $7bn (NZ$9.8 billion). A stock market float is rumoured to be a prospect late this year.
Jason Citron, Discord's chief executive, describes the service as a "digital third place". If the office runs on email, the home on Facebook, Discord is the social club, the sports team, the pub. "Your first place is your home, your second place is your work and your third place is somewhere you go with your community," he says.
Citron, 35, uses a lot of offline analogies to describe Discord, in part because by his own admission its appeal is "hard to explain". If Facebook and Twitter are the town square, shared and public, Citron says Discord is a collection of rooms, each arranged according to its purpose, with its own rules, and requiring permission to enter.
Contrasts to today's social media giants are deliberate, he says. "It's not like a performance, or showing off, people come to Discord to be with their friends and their community, and they relax. You get to feel comfortable in that space because you're not trying to game algorithms. It's not this open forum that you might have on other social media, it's an invite-only place, so you have some comfort and safety."
In other words, you can discuss your love for jazz-fusion without annoying the aunt who visits your profile to see baby photos.
Citron was not always aiming to create the antidote to Facebook. A lifelong video games enthusiast who received his first Nintendo console aged five, he attempted to create a game studio after selling his first social gaming company OpenFeint to a Japanese game maker for US$104m in 2011. While it proved unfruitful, Citron was inspired to develop a way for people playing online games such as League of Legends to hold group voice calls online. Discord (the name has no real significance, but was chosen for being short and not trademarked) was born.
Since its launch in 2015, Discord became a popular hub for gamers, an already internet-literate demographic, to trade items and discuss tactics. But it was not until last year that Citron's ambitions extended beyond those boundaries.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept the world and locked down hundreds of millions of households, its tagline has shifted from "chat for gamers" to "your place to talk". "Our goal was to build an amazing way for people who play games with their friends to spend time together and talk. It just so happened that this same set of communication features actually enabled all this other awesome stuff," says Citron.
To that end, although games easily remain Discord's biggest area, there are servers for making bread, horror stories, and investing. It all carries a whiff of the subject-oriented internet message boards that gradually emptied out as the social media giants rose.
Social networks based around communities, rather than public profiles, is not a unique idea. Mark Zuckerberg has bet Facebook's future on online groups, partly in response to many of the scandals that have enveloped the company in recent years. It has also led to concerns that by allowing each group to set their own rules, as Discord does, online companies are abdicating responsibility, allowing harassment, or encouraging dangerous fringes of the internet to congregate in a way that both distorts reality and mobilises dispersed individuals into armies.
Citron is all too aware of what can go wrong by allowing self-policing groups to gather online. Discord, once labelled "the web's new cesspool of abuse", was notoriously used by white supremacists to help organise a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that ended with the killing of a counterprotestor.
Discord users celebrated the deaths in private groups, and because the company does not monitor private messages, they were only shut down after being alerted by others. "That was definitely a wake-up call for us," says Citron. "We had built a lot of this privacy tooling into the product, but didn't realise: technology is neither good nor evil, it's just a tool, and people will use it for what they want to use it for.
"The ethos in Silicon Valley for a long time has been free speech, open, let people be libertarian stuff. I don't really think that's what is right because that means you're allowing these things to flourish. We took a very hard stance and said Nazi ideology is not allowed on Discord. I do believe that Discord is generally quite hostile to bad actors." The company says teams working on "trust and safety" make up 15pc of its staff and has invested in automation to improve how it polices the service.
The problem is far from solved. Only last week, Discord banned a server associated with an online Trump forum that it said was used to "incite violence and plan an armed insurrection" (this interview was conducted before the events in Washington DC).
But Citron has another challenge: how to make money. Discord has sworn off Facebook-style advertising, fearing that this would encourage invasive data gathering. "We're seeing the results of those decisions play out in ways that are not great," Citron says.
Instead, he wants to find ways of having users pay the company directly. "I would rather spend energy trying to figure out how to make the product experience more fun for folks, that they would pay us, than how to get advertisers to show ads that likely distract from what they actually want." Discord aborted an attempt to sell video games in 2019 due to a lack of usage.
Today, the service is free, but users can pay up to US$10 a month for upgrades such as better quality video calls and the ability to make custom emojis. If such cosmetic upgrades seem frivolous, consider that games such as Fortnite make billions through selling outfits and add-ons that have no practical benefit, but provide online street cred.
Citron says the model is doing "incredibly well", but that the company is just scratching the surface. "There's a lot more to come." Discord's US$7bn valuation, from Silicon Valley backers including Greenoaks Capital and Greylock, indicates a confidence that Citron can deliver, or perhaps alternatively, be snapped up by a bigger fish.
Microsoft, which failed to buy TikTok as part of a push into social gaming, is seen as one potential acquirer. Amazon, which could combine the service with its game-streaming app Twitch, is another. As for Facebook, competition concerns would block any deal, meaning Zuckerberg would be more likely to try crushing or cloning Discord than buying it.
Citron seems relaxed about this possibility at least. "Obviously we pay attention to competition. And they are in that set. [But] big companies have many different competing priorities. The truth is that we have one. And that's why start-ups get to exist." That might have been true so far. But the bigger Discord gets, the more attention it will attract from its competitors.
- Telegraph Media Group
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