A Brief History of Discord

   

                                                                                 

With so many free methods of communication today, such as Whatsapp, Messenger and Telegram, it's hard to think that a new app would pop out of nowhere and revolutionize the gaming, messaging and calling industry. That app is Discord. 

Early Beginnings: 

Discord was invented by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevsky, on May 13 2015.   (6 years ago!) Both Jason and Stanislav were skilled software designers and they went on to found Hammer and Chisel Inc, a game development company. Hammer and Chisel launched their first game on July 3 2014 called Fates Forever. After a while, both Jason and Stanislav found that they wanted to chat with people/friends outside of gaming So Discord was born. 

The Big Switch: 

At first, Discord was just a side project started by Jason and Stanislav for enjoyment but they recognized the potential of the idea after they realised that the Fates Forever chat function was starting to be even more fun/useful to work with than the actual game itself. (not a very good read for the game but eh) So, in 2014 Hammer and Chisel shut down its game development team and laid off a third of the company. In addition, they also changed a lot of roles and spent around half a year changing the companies image and culture. 

Fun Fact: Did you know that when the big switch happened, Discord only had around 10 users? 

The Void

A few months passed and Discord was still making no money and no users were actively using it and there was just one League of Legends group and one World of Warcraft group. (not many people as you can see) After talking to users and reviewing data, the team realized the problem: Discord was just not good enough, it was slightly better than Skype or Facetime  but it still wasn't very good. For example, the calls kept on cutting, the quality was not good and the software was hard to install. Why would people switch to a buggy slightly better version of what they already had which was working just fine? 

The Early Discord Team (2015):

The Great Re-Brand: 

To combat this issue the Discord team went into action, they completely remodeled their voice technology THREE TIMES! Around the same time, they added features such as tools that let users become moderators of a server. These moderators could kick, mute and ban malicious people. They also added customisations to the server and accounts. All these changes would pay off when the beta testers started to use it even after the testing phase and also started telling their friends about the new app on the market. On May 13 2015 something happened that was crucial to Discord's success. Someone posted about Discord in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit. In that post was a link to a Discord server where they could talk about a new expansion pack. (I don't play the game so correct me in the comments if I  am wrong) Citron (Jason) and his team immediately hopped onto the server and jumped into a voice channel/chat and they started socialising and chatting with anyone who showed up. That had an effect. The people from Reddit would go back to Reddit and say: “I talked to the people who made Discord!” That day, according to Citron, Discord got a couple hundred new users. That was what made May 13 2015 a pivotal point in Discord’s history, not a new donation, not a new office, but a new group of people ready to share discord with the world joined… The rest only gets better… 

The Present:

More recently, Discord has added Video chat to its growing list of features believing that was the next level of chat discord needed. They also added noise suppression (By Krisp) to their calls making them a lot more user-friendly. Furthermore, the Discord team also added a game changing feature to their growing app. Discord Nitro. 

Discord Nitro:

Discord Nitro is a premium version of Discord. Discord Nitro came out on January 23 2017. Nitro was a game changer, for the people who were willing to pay 9.99 (UK) dollars they could get perks included but not limited to; a customisable profile banner, tag and badge, the ability to boost server, having better voice and video quality, bigger upload sizes and much much more! In other words, Nitro was a steady source of money for the Discord team and also a well received feature on the platform. 

Conclusion: 

In conclusion, I  feel that Discord was a huge success with its many ups and downs. It really changed how people communicated online. Also, Discord was built for gamers but now has branched off to include stages, school hubs and much much more. Discord shows us that every dream is possible. 

Where I got most of my research: https://www.protocol.com/discord (it's a really good article check it out!) 

That's it for this week's blog post! Thanks for reading! (Also please follow this blog :D)