February 3, 2021 • 47 mins
Discord started out as a useful tool for gamers, but today lots of people who have never played a video game rely on it to stay in touch. We look at the history and evolution of Discord.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech and I received a
request on Twitter to do an episode about the history
(00:25):
of Discord, the communications platform. Now, if you don't know
what Discord is, it does help to get a quick overview.
So from a high level, Discord of software that let's
users chat with each other either through texting or with
voice communication or video chat. And it has other features
as well, and it grew out of gaming culture. We've
(00:48):
got two founders to talk about, so let's start with
a man named Jason Citron. He grew up playing video games.
He received a Nintendo in ne s. The Nintendo entertain
was stem a groundbreaking console, the one that brought home
video games back from the dead after the Great Crash
of the early nineteen eighties, and he was only five
(01:09):
years old when he got that. He said that when
he was a kid, all he really wanted to do
was play games on the n e S and his
parents essentially told him that if he did all of
his homework, he could spend as much time playing games
as he liked. So while other parents might tell their kids, hey,
you know, you should go outside and play, or otherwise
limit their screen time, Citron was more or less given
(01:29):
carte blanche to do all the gaming he wanted to,
as long as he didn't put off homework or anything
like that. He has said that when he was around
twelve or thirteen, a friend of his taught him some
early que Basic programming tricks during a sleepover. So que
Basic is a very simple programming language, and Citron found
(01:50):
it really interesting. So of course, the first thing he
really wanted to do was to make a game. So
he and his buddy stayed up late while everyone else
was asleep, and they got to work programming out a
text adventure. For those of you who have never played
a text adventure, it's pretty much what it sounds like.
The game presents the player with text and describes an
(02:12):
environment and any actions that are going on. Then the
player types in a command, and if the programmers anticipated
that command, you get a response that progresses the game
or perhaps ends it if you made the wrong choice. Now,
if the programmers didn't anticipate the command, you're likely to
encounter a failed message. So, for example, if you were
the type look under rock, and the programmers didn't anticipate
(02:36):
that action, you might receive the generic response I'm sorry,
I don't know how to do that. But if they
did anticipate it, you might get something like you lift
up the rock and you see an old rusty key,
or maybe you get you lift up the rock and
see dirt. What did you expect? It all depends upon
the programmers. And just for the record, I love old
text adventure games. Some of them get wicked hard because
(02:58):
programmers really went out of their way to make obtuse puzzles. Anyway,
let's get back to Citron. As he got older, he
decided he didn't want to just play games. He wanted
to make them as well, like as a job, not
just as a hobby. He enrolled in Full Sale University,
which is a private, for profit university in Florida. I
(03:19):
know it best as the home of n x T,
which is kind of the developmental branch of the w
w E, the professional wrestling organization. Anyway, the school is
known for its programs and feels like computer animation, audio design,
and that sort of thing. Citron graduated in two thousand
four with a Bachelor's of Science in game design and development.
(03:40):
He went on to develop for a few different game studios,
like Papaya Studio, which, if I'm doing my math correctly,
would have probably been working on titles like Disney Princess
Enchanted Journey and Windy Woo Homecoming Warrior Kick In Challenge.
He was there for less than a year before he
moved over to Storm Runt Studios, which was probably working
(04:02):
on licensed properties like Aragon and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Citron
stayed there for about a year and a half before
he moved over to Double Fine Productions in two thousand six. Now,
before I chat about that little part of his career,
I did want to mention that Papaia Studios and storm
Front are both no more. Storm Front actually folded first
(04:23):
in two thousand and eight after Sierra Entertainment, which was
set to publish the company's next game, closed down, and
I should probably do an episode about Stormfront at some point.
Papaia Studios stuck around till or so. I'm not actually
sure what happened with that studio other than it went
out of business. I couldn't find more detailed information about
(04:43):
what caused it to do that anyway, onto Double Fine.
This company, founded by Tim Schaefer, is known for games
like Psycho Knots and also the remaster version of Grim
Van Dango, the Brutal Legends game, and more. Citron joined
that team in two in six, a year after the
first Psycho Knots game had come out. Citron was there
(05:04):
for eight months and left in June of two thousand seven.
Now when you hear about these relatively short stints with companies,
with just you know, a few months here or a
year and a half there, you might get the feeling
that young Citron had itchy feet and he couldn't settle down.
And that is possibly the case, but it's also possible
that Citron was working for these companies on a contract basis.
(05:27):
A lot of studios will bring in freelance game developers
to help with titles that are in production. These developers
work alongside full time salaried employees until their contract is over,
whereupon the freelancer might have to head off in search
of their next gig. They might get resigned to a
new contract, but chances are they may just have to
(05:48):
try and line up their next job. And I'm not
sure if that's what was going on with Citron, but
I figure it's a pretty fair guess. He had some
bigger plans in store. However, He really wanted to try
and create his own own company, but Citron also recognized
that he didn't really have that kind of experience or background.
He was a developer, not an entrepreneur, at least not
(06:09):
yet anyway. He applied to and was accepted by you web,
which is a company that helps develop people into entrepreneurs.
The focus on fields like app development and gaming. You
web provides an environment and initial funding for product development,
sort of like the seed money to get a business going.
(06:29):
At you Web. Citron began to work with a developer
named Danielle Castley, and the two of them created a
game for iOS devices. It was called Aurora Faint and
it was part RPG, part Tetris like puzzle game. Citron
described it as quote a puzzle based m m O
RPG for the iPhone end quote. M m O RPG
(06:52):
says for massively multiplayer online role playing games, so a
game that supports lots of players simultaneously and as role
playing elements to it. The first game was actually fairly modest,
a single player game with some leader boards, but the
second attempt was far more ambitious, with chat rooms, asynchronous
multiplayer support, ghost battling, and more. Ghost battling is where
(07:16):
you create a profile, and when you're offline, your profile
is able to play against other players and perform as
if you are controlling it to some degree. Citron and
castlely recognize that players liked having ways to interact with
one another, whether it was to form friendships or talk
some smack, or you know, just have a conversation about
(07:37):
anything at all. And you could see that some of
the concepts that would later transition into what would become
features and discord we're taking shape. The experience convinced Citron
to try something bigger. He wanted to build not just
a game, but a platform for games on iOS. He
pitched it as Xbox Live but for iPhones, complete with
chat and video board features. He decided to quote, just
(08:01):
announce it and see if people would want it end quote,
which is a pretty seat of your pants approach, like
you don't even know if you can build it yet,
You're really just kind of fishing to see if there
are any bites, and there were. The developers put out
their announcement, which tech Crunch would pick up and publish.
So now lots of people were seeing it, and the
(08:23):
next thing they knew they had four hundred developers indicate
their interest in this project. Citron and Castley founded open Faint,
which would focus on building out this platform, and when
the company launched in March two thousand nine, there were
fifteen developers signed on with thirty games for this platform,
not games from open feint, but games that would use
(08:46):
open feint as the platform. At first, the open feint
team was really small, with just four or five people
working on it in the early days. By the end
of that first year that number was up to fifteen,
and two years in it was at sixty. And then
a Japanese mobile game company called g r E or
GREE made an offer that the founders could not refuse.
(09:08):
They acquired open feint for the princely sum of one
hundred four million dollars. Now, sit Tron figured he'd stay
put as the leader of open feint at least for
a while. In an interview with Business Insider, he said, quote,
I will be sticking around for a while. My personal ambition,
it might come off as a little naive but it's
(09:30):
a change the world kind of thing. I see open
Faint as an opportunity for me to help developers create
what I call shared experiences. You play games, right, so
you've had experiences like Mario Kart or Fifa where you're
playing with buddies and right as you're about to win,
your friend comes up behind you and wins. You throw
the controller on the ground and yell and scream at
(09:51):
each other. Those moments of connecting with your friends where
you can laugh and share like that are so powerful.
End quote. So again we see yet more signs of
this idea of communication and community, things that we become
really important. So if you've used Discord, all of this
probably sounds a little familiar, right, But we've got another
(10:12):
founder we need to talk about. So we're gonna leave
Citron at this stage in his career and switch gears
to talk about Stennislav Vishnevsky. Now, I gotta preface this
by saying I found way more information about Citron than
I did about Vishnevsky. Uh, Citron has been pretty you know,
much the face of Discord. But here's what I can
(10:33):
tell you. Vishnevsky earned a degree at California State University
at Northridge, presumably in computer science or some other field
related to software engineering. He speaks Russian. In two thousand nine,
he worked for a software company called Kassamba Incorporated. That
quote focused on developing technology solutions within the healthcare industry.
(10:54):
End quote. That's from Visionevsky's LinkedIn profile, which I found
very useful trying to find out more about his history.
He was there for about eight months. In the meantime,
he was also working on his own project called guild Work.
Stanislav had developed tools for a Final Fantasy title that
he recognized could be useful if adapted for other games,
(11:16):
specifically m m O RPGs. Many m m O RPGs
allow players to create associations within the games themselves, called guilds,
but depending on the game, the tools that players have
at their disposal might make guild management a bit of
a chore, so some guilds would turn to other tools
(11:36):
to help coordinate efforts within the guild and facilitate guild communication.
Guild Work grew out of that need and would expand
to allow for guild hosting as well. Also, it would
provide the foothold that the company Discord would need later on.
I'll explain when we get there. So his next job
was as a software engineer at a company called Kabam,
(11:58):
which developed social games like Kingdoms of Camelot. He was
there for less than a year, leaving at the end
of twenty eleven, and then he joined that Japanese game
company I mentioned earlier called Gree International Incorporated in early
So gree had acquired open Faint in two thousand eleven
and Stan joined Green in And now we've got our
(12:21):
two Discord co founders working at the same general company,
with Citron still leading the Open Faint team within Gree.
But shortly after that, Citron would found a new company
initially called Hammer and Chisel, and Vishnevsky would move over
to join on as a craftsman. According to Vishnevsky's LinkedIn profile,
which I think is cool. An early project of THEIRS
(12:44):
was called uh Fates Forever. It was a game, a
mobile mobile game for tablets and smartphones, and it was
a multiplayer online battle arena or mobile similar to games
like League of Legends Dota to or smite the game
and get a whole lot of traction. It did receive
good reviews, it's just didn't get, you know, widely adopted.
(13:06):
Vishnevsky was a developer on that title, and he campaigned
for the freedom to work on tools and features that
would allow players to communicate with one another in game.
This work, which aligned with Citron's earlier attempts with Aurora
Faint and Open Faint, soon became a bigger deal than
the game that it spun off from, and so we
saw the convergence of efforts to create opportunities for gamers
(13:29):
to communicate with one another while playing games, and these
efforts would combine to form the seeds of a new
software solution, which would ultimately become Discord. I'll talk more
about the coalescing of Discord in just a moment, but
first let's take a quick break. So before we dive
(13:56):
into Discord proper, let's talk a bit more about what
made Jay and in Stanislav feel like it was something
worth doing in the first place. Now, there are a
lot of multiplayer games out there, and obviously the whole
appeal to these games is that you're playing with other
real people. You're all simultaneously in the game, and sometimes
(14:17):
you want to be able to chat with folks. This
is particularly true for team based games, in which chatting
with your teammates is key to coordinating a strategy and
being effective against other teams or against nonplayer characters. But
the fact of the matter is a lot of these
multiplayer platforms are pretty awful when it comes to supporting
(14:38):
team or multiplayer chat. Now, some are better than others,
but in a lot of cases, it feels as though
the actual communication tools are more of an afterthought. In
a way that is understandable. I mean, the team needs
to make sure that the actual gameplay elements of whatever
the game title is happen to be solid. It wouldn't
(14:58):
be much fun if you joined a multiplayer game that
had great communication tools but the game itself was terrible.
I mean, yeah, you'd probably be able to communicate easily,
but you would all likely spend your time complaining about
how crappy the game was. Like Jason had said several
years earlier, he really loved that experience of playing a
game in the same physical space as his friends, Like
(15:21):
you're all in the living room, all on the couch,
and you're playing elbow to elbow and being able to
talk in real time while playing the game, but the
tools available to gamers around twelve or so were, you know,
fairly limited, like teams speak in Skype or the two
big ones, and they also tended to be really resourced heavy.
So if you were trying to run a game and
(15:42):
this separate voice over Internet protocol program, you know, like Skype,
your computer might start chugging a bit and your gaming
experience could suffer because now your CPU has to deal
with not just the demands of the game, but whatever
communications software you're running at the same time. Those were
some of the thoughts driving the push to develop better
in game communication tools for Fates Forever, the game that
(16:06):
Hammer and Chisel was working on, except the team recognized
that it might be better to develop something more broad,
something that could stand as its own communication platform and
not be tied to a specific game title, and so
Citron made the call to shift the focus to creating
the platform that could serve all games, similar to how
(16:28):
he wanted to make an Xbox Live environment for iOS
devices years earlier. It wasn't an easy decision, though, because
it meant backing off of Fates Forever, It meant abandoning
the game that they had been working on, and had launched,
and this was not long after it had launched. It
was like a year later, not even a full year,
(16:48):
and the game died in early death. It also meant
that he had to layoff the five full time employees
who had been working on the game, so it was
a big decision and not an easy one. Hammer and
Chisel then evolved into Discord the company with Citron a
CEO and Vishnevsky as Chief Technology Officer or ct O.
(17:09):
The team began to lay out what they wanted to
achieve with this service. The Discord software needed to give
gamers the ability to create rooms for chat. It needed
to support text chat, voice chat, and then later on
even video chat. It needed to be a lightweight type
of apps, something that wouldn't put too big a strain
on the hardware. After all, the original idea was that
(17:32):
Discord was for gamers, and a lot of gamers really
obsessed over getting the most out of their gaming rigs settings.
You don't want to compromise on the gaming experience because
your chat app is hogging all the resources. While Discord
aimed to avoid the issues gamers had with services like
Skype and team Speak, it didn't always work. Out There
(17:52):
have been times and Discords past when gamers have seen
Discord get a little hungry for CPU and memory re sources. Now,
to explain why this happens would require going into a
lot of technical detail that I'm going to be honest,
I don't fully understand. I'm not a programmer, so I
have a bit of a grasp on it. But rather
(18:14):
than stumble around hoping that I'm telling you the right thing,
instead I'll say that depending upon the settings of a
computer and on Discord and the specific build of Discord
that you were using, sometimes users were fine, and sometimes
they saw Discord alone sapping of a CPUs output. The
(18:34):
team also wanted Discord to be multi platform, so they
wanted to work on PCs, max, mobile devices and in browsers,
and it needed to run smoothly on all of those
platforms and provide a reliable service. To get started, Citron
secured funding from the ub nine plus incubator company and
several others, including ten Sent, the Chinese company that owns
(18:57):
a stake in several video game companies out there. The
team build out the product, prepping it for its public
release in May, and in many ways it is very
much like a web browser. In fact, you can access
Discord over the web, or you can download it as
a native app on a desktop device or mobile device,
(19:17):
and the activities in one instance happened across all other instances.
So if for some reason, you're running the Discord app
on your laptop, Okay, so you've got your laptop going,
you've got the actual Discord program running. Then you've got
a second laptop and you use it to open up
a browser and go to the web based Discord service.
(19:38):
And then you also had your smartphone out and you
activated the Discord app on your smartphone, and you all
three and in all three instances, you navigate to the
same server and the same channel. Typing something in on
your laptop that's running the app would publish it to everything.
You would see it on your phone, you would see
it on the second laptop, and so on. Now that's
(20:00):
assuming again that all three of these devices are logged
into the same server and same channel, which brings us
to how Discord organizes stuff. So Discord has a kind
of hierarchy of organization, and at the top is the server.
The server is kind of like the community base of operations.
When you create a discord server. You're not actually designating
(20:21):
a specific machine on your network to act like a
web server. Instead, the server is the dedicated online gathering space.
I kind of think of it like a Facebook page
in a way, if you are making a page on
Facebook dedicated to something. Uh, it's sort of similar. Now,
when you think about it another way, you can see
(20:42):
why this naming convention makes sense. On the web, you've
got clients and you've got servers. Now, the client is
typically something like a browser. So let's say you are
on your computer and you're surfing the web. To use
an incredibly outdated phrase, the browser you use, whether it's Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox,
(21:05):
or something else, that is the client. So let's say
you're using your browser to look up an article on
Wikipedia about Big Trouble in Little China, which, as we
all know, is the best movie that was ever made.
You type the title into Wikipedia's search bar and you
hit intern And when you do that, you've sent a
command to your client to request that specific web page
(21:28):
from the web server that's hosting Wikipedia. So the client
relays your request, which goes out over the Internet. The
request is encoded so that the message will eventually get
to the correct destination, that destination being the web server.
That request ultimately goes to that web server that processes
it and then returns the Wikipedia page. So the server
(21:53):
since the appropriate data back to the client, which is
your browser, and that's where you can see it. So
with Discord, the app on your phone or desktop or
the tab in your browser is the client. It's how
you are accessing the community you are interested in, and
that is the server, and messages that you type in
the client get posted to the server, which all clients
(22:14):
connected to that server can see at least all clients
connected to that server that have permissions to view the
message within whatever channel they can see it. So within
the server, as I mentioned, you have channels, and these
can be text based or voice based. So you could
create a server for your gaming friends, you know, kind
(22:35):
of the way the service was originally conceived, and you
can create specific voice channels for different games, because maybe
you're a group of gaming friends is really into a
lot of different games, and maybe that group has gotten
pretty big and not everyone is playing the same games
at the same time, So you can have different voice
channels dedicated to the various games and have multiple conversations
(22:56):
happening in separate channels, and you only hear the off
that's relevant to whichever channel you are in. So there's
a conversation. Let's say you're playing Rainbow six Siege and
other people are playing League of Legends. Well, you're in
the Rainbow six Siege room. You've chosen to go into
that channel. You only hear the conversation that's going on
(23:17):
in that channel. Meanwhile, over in the Legal Legends channel,
people are arguing about which path they need to take
in order to defeat the other team, and they're distinct,
so there's no cross talk. You can make channels public,
meaning anyone can connect to them, or you can make
them private and only allow certain people to see them,
(23:39):
which makes you know sense and building out a server
sounds like it could be daunting, but it's actually pretty simple.
So let me give you an example. I recently created
a tech stuff discord server, which I haven't really publicized yet,
and so for the moment, I'm the only member of
this server. But that's okay. When it's ready for prime time,
(24:00):
i'll chat about it. I'll put the link up on
the Twitter bio. I'll make sure it goes out and
people can join. Then Anyway, the tech Stuff server will
be a community where listeners can go to chat with
each other and share pictures and videos and bad puns
and all that kind of stuff. Within the server, I
can make different channels to help serve the community. Channels
(24:22):
can be text based or they can be voice chats.
So I might make a channel that's just dedicated to
episode suggestions, and if you have a great idea for
an episode, you can pop in there and submit it.
Or I might make one for a community tech support,
where people who know what they're talking about can offer
advice to the technologically challenged. Sometimes I'm one of those
(24:42):
categories and sometimes I'm the other one. Or maybe there
could be a channel just for shooting the breeze to
discuss the latest in tech news or anything else. Really,
there's no limit on what you can build out. You
could get super granular. So for tech Stuff, I might
make categories for every possible topic, Like I could make
(25:03):
a sub category just for smartphone discussions, or maybe I
decided to get even more detailed than that, and I
make a subcategory for iOS and a different one for Android,
or heck, maybe I go even more detailed, and I
start making subcategories for specific models of phones. Now, of course,
the more in the weeds you get with these subcategories,
(25:25):
the fewer people are going to join them because they
won't really pertain to them. So sometimes it pays to
be a bit bigger picture with your topics to create
more of a communal space. So you create your server,
you build out some various channels that you think you're
gonna need. You can always add more as needed. In fact,
I would argue that you shouldn't spend too much time
(25:47):
building out the basic channels, because as your community grows,
you will learn what it is you need and you
can build further. At that point, you've got your voice
chat channels, you've got your text channels. Now you just
need to invite people to the server or else. It's
like the tech Stuff server. It's a waste lam that
only you occupy and you just quietly walk across the
(26:10):
desert landscape. So you can invite other people on Discord individually,
sort of like adding friends on a platform like Facebook,
or you can also post a link to the server
in some trusted space. It really depends on what approach
you want to take. If you want a server that's
just for you and your close friends, you're probably going
to invite each person individually. If it's meant to be
(26:32):
a larger communal space for something, maybe then you take
a bigger step. But that trusted space thing is a
really important detail. If your goal is to have a
focused community, publishing a Discord link publicly might not be
a great idea. It's kind of like how posting a
zoom meeting link publicly can be a really bad idea.
(26:52):
Is I think a lot of people learned the hard
way back in. If you just want the most people
you can get into your server, then publishing the link
everywhere might be your go to strategy. But if your
aim is to actually foster a community, you probably want
to be a bit more selective with Discord. You can
also designate roles to specific users, and roles give users privileges. So,
(27:17):
for example, you might want some of your most trusted
community members to be moderators who can step in if
someone is being a problem. Maybe you've got a jerk
face who's spamming one of the channels, or they're breaking
other rules like posting not safe for work content in
a family friendly chat environment. Moderators have various powers that
(27:38):
you give them. They can have like the power to
mute for example, UH they mute other other users so
that their abuse is no longer visible. Or they might
delete posts, or they might even ban people and help
you maintain order, so they sort of become your digital bouncers.
On top of that, people have made tons of different
(27:58):
automated scripts called bots for Discord. These bots can flesh
out what you can do with the Discord platform. Installing
a boat requires a person with administrator level access, someone
who has that level of authority within a server, to
grant permissions to the bot. These permissions are really similar
(28:18):
to the kind of stuff you see when you install
a new app on your phone or on your desktop.
You might see a checklist that includes stuff like the
bot will be able to see your email address and
your contacts, that kind of thing. So it's a good
idea to give those lists a good look to make
sure you're comfortable with it before you install the bot.
In return, a bot might do one of a billion
(28:40):
different things for you. It's all dependent on the specific bot.
There are moderator bots that can monitor chat rooms for
banned words. For example, uh these bots might be able
to do everything that a human moderator would be able
to do. Delete the offending post, mute the troll with
a warning, maybe even banned the user. Or a bot
might do something simpler like give account on how many
(29:02):
people are actually part of the server. I don't need
that one for tech stuff, because I know that number
is one heavy sigh. Oh wait, that's a stage direction.
Starting in Discord supported video chat and screen sharing as well.
(29:23):
That was added so two years after they launched. The
features are pretty robust, though the layout could seem a
little odd to someone who has never really used it before.
It reminds me a lot of old school chat rooms
from the early days of the public Internet, like even
stuff that existed before the web did, when I would
use tell Neet to log into chat servers and make
(29:43):
friends that way kind of makes me think of that. Now,
when we come back, I'll talk about how Discord was
received upon launch and how it's changed since then, But
first let's take another quick break. So, the Discord team
worked on making the chat feature from the Fates Forever
(30:06):
game into its own distinct product, and it wasn't easy,
not just because they were repurposing and add on feature
to become its own standalone thing, but also because the
company itself, as I mentioned, had to change from being
a video game developer into something else, and it took
about six months just for the company to change and
have its new culture and its new organization in order
(30:28):
to support its new purpose. According to Citron, quote, when
we decided to go all in on Discord, we had
maybe ten users. We would show it to our friends
and they'd be like, this is cool, and then they'd
never use it. End quote. As someone who makes podcasts,
I understand this feeling. I have maybe two friends who
(30:48):
listened to my shows, but let's be fair, most of
them get enough of me already. Discord marks May thirteen
as its launch day, not because that's when the service
officially launched, but because that's when people that the developers
didn't know personally started to actually use the service. A
Reddit user posted about Discord in a subreddit dedicated to
(31:12):
the game Final Fantasy fourteen, and for those who don't know,
the Final Fantasy series in general is a line of
fantasy genre role playing games. Most of those titles are
single player games, but a couple of them aren't, and
one of those is Final Fantasy eleven and the others
Final Fantasy fourteen, and they are both m m O
RPG style games. The original version of Final Fantasy fourteen
(31:35):
launched in two but due to some pretty major problems
with the game, it got shut down. In Square Nicks,
the company behind the series, launched a new version, essentially
rebuilt from scratch with a new game engine and everything,
and that one came out in that was the focus
of this particular subredit. So in that subredit, someone posted
(31:58):
a link to a Discord server where gamers could go
and chat about a new expansion pack for a Final
Fantasy fourteen. The Discord co founders, eager to foster their
new product, jumped onto the server as well, and they
joined the voice chat to talk with players. So now
the guys who built Discord are in the same voice
(32:19):
chat as people who are using it in order to
play Final Fantasy fourteen. This inspired some of the red
users to go back to Reddit and mentioned that, hey,
you know, it was kind of cool we were using
this app and the people who made the app jumped
in and they were pretty interesting, and that encouraged even
more people to check out Discord out of curiosity, and
so what followed was a classic word of mouth campaign,
(32:40):
and Discord started seeing more people sign up and download
the app. And it wasn't like a huge avalanche of
people at first, but it was an encouraging early start,
and the trend was day over day growth with registered users.
Those users began to say that being on Discord was
sort of like being at a house party. Maybe you
and a few friends grab a space on a couch
(33:02):
to talk about, you know, a recent sporting event. Then
after a bit, you excuse yourself and you decide to
head over to the kitchen, and there you get into
a conversation with some other people about how the DC
Cinematic universe really went astray and became a complicated mess.
And after a bit you then pop outside onto the
back deck to talk with a different group of people
about this amazing concert that one of them went to.
(33:25):
It's kind of like a house party, and a Discord
server can have those separate spaces where all sorts of
conversations can happen and you can hop from one to
another just freely, as long as you have the permissions
to join those channels. So rather than setting up a
dedicated call between specific people, you have dedicated spaces. It was,
for lack of a better term, a real game changer.
(33:48):
People frequently will compare Discord with Slack communications and project
management tool, and maybe that's one of the reasons I
found Discord a little bit intimidating when I first popped on.
It's not that Discord is particularly complicated or difficult to use,
more than it represents yet another way of communicating with people,
(34:10):
and I personally have hit fatigue on that. In fact,
I hit fatigue probably a couple of years ago. At
one point people were reaching out to me on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook, Messenger,
Google Hangouts, base Camp, Slack, Discord, email and text, and
probably a few that I've forgotten about, and y'all, that
(34:30):
was just too much for me. But that's not the
fault of any one of those platforms. It's just that,
you know, I had notification overload. Because of its versatility,
Discord didn't take long for people to adopt it, and
for all sorts of community interests. I mentioned the tech
Stuff server, which clearly isn't going to be dedicated to gaming. Instead,
(34:51):
it will serve as a communal place for listeners to
meet each other, talk about tech, maybe get into totally
unrelated conversations, just you know, people connecting with other people. Now,
that doesn't mean that everything on Discord is all peaceful
and happy. The platform, like dozens of other online platforms,
has made the news as different extremist groups have made
(35:12):
their own Discord servers. Discord has had to deal with
things like hate groups, white supremacist groups, and other extremists
who have made spaces on the service. The Discord team
admitted that they responded too late to some of these groups,
that we're creating a foothold in Discord. In seventeen, it
(35:32):
became clear that far right protesters at Charlottesville had used
Discord to plan the event. Prior to Charlottesville, discords general
approach was to moderate and block the worst types of content,
you know, stuff like pornography or racial slurs. But as
I think most people have learned over the last few years,
(35:52):
the obvious stuff isn't where the problem starts and ends.
The obvious stuff is just the most overt manifestation of
deeper problems. But those underlying issues like racism, homophobia, misogyny,
and that kind of thing, those could be present and
exacerbated without it being you know, obvious and on the surface.
(36:14):
We've seen that across numerous online spaces, and Discord was
one of them, and to some extent still is. After Charlottesville,
the Discord team created a new department called Trust and Safety.
The company now takes a more active role in defining
the boundaries for online communities using Discord. Within those boundaries,
server creators can make whatever type of community they like,
(36:37):
but all of that has to be nested inside the
more general rules for Discord as a whole. According to
a website called Protocol, the Trust and Safety team makes
up about fift of all of Discord's staff, which is
a significant percentage and it really shows how big the
challenges are when it comes to creating a safe space online.
(36:58):
In dis Chord saw a major growth spurt, helped in
large part by the fact that people were stuck at
home during the COVID pandemic. From February to July of
that year. The site's user numbers grew by nearly fift
Schools were using it, some businesses were using it. Discord
itself was looking different, with the team moving further away
(37:19):
from the gaming culture that had spawned it. But one
thing I haven't really mentioned in this episode is revenue.
If Discord is a business, how does it make money.
The co founders have already said that one thing they
don't want to do is sell user data or to
show ads to users. So the really big way the
most online networking platforms rely upon to make money is
(37:42):
off the table. So what is Discord doing instead? Well,
right now, there are two main ways Discord makes money.
One of them is the big one, and the other
one is the small one. And the big one is
through investments. Discord has received a lot of investments a
million dollars or so. As I record this, analysts value
(38:05):
the company at about three and a half billion dollars,
But that valuation is based on discords utility and popularity,
not on how much money it actually brings in. Because
the second way, a much more modest means of revenue,
is through a premium service called Nitro. Nitro is kind
of like a V I P version of Discord, with
(38:26):
some perks that the typical user doesn't have. They include
the ability to change your user name, to access special emojis,
and have better quality voice and video chat within the system.
The subscription costs ten dollars per month. Now, I am
not sure what percentage of active Discord users are Nitro subscribers,
(38:48):
but my guess is that it's a fairly low percentage.
I don't know that for a fact, it's just a
guess now. In the past, Discord has also tried to
get into the game's storefront business, something that's dominated by Valves,
Steam storefront and the Epic Games storefront. This turned out
to be a bust for Discord, and I imagine there
(39:09):
are a couple of reasons why I didn't pan out.
For one thing, Steam is a monolithic force in digital
game delivery. It already has a really big user base,
and just like real brick and mortar stores, customers tend
to stick with whatever store they become used to. They've
got a lot of stuff in that store already. And Secondly,
(39:30):
discords user base wasn't just gamers. In fact, a lot
of folks who never used Discord for gaming at all.
We're relying on the app, so they really didn't have
any interest in purchasing games through Discord. That's not why
they used the service for After trying to market games
for a few months, Discord pulled the plug on the experiment.
(39:51):
It just it wasn't making Discord or their third party
partners that were providing the games any real money, So
it was more of a drain on reest Is than
anything else. In more recent news, Discord became part of
the brew haha surrounding the Wall Street Mets subreddit. Now,
if you're not familiar with that story, here's the shortest
(40:11):
version I can manage. The subreddit is taking aim at
hedge funds that specialize in something called the short cell. Now,
this is when an investor borrows stock from a broker,
So the investor doesn't own these stocks, but then the
investor sells these borrowed stocks at whatever the market prices
in the hopes that the price is going to soon drop.
(40:34):
And if the price does drop, that's great news because
then the investor buys back the borrowed shares and they
are buying it back for less than what they sold
them for, So they returned the borrowed shares to the
broker and they pocket the difference. So if you have
borrowed to share and you sell it for twenty dollars,
and then you buy it back at ten dollars and
(40:56):
you return the borrowed share, you get to keep that
extra ten bucks. It's a way to money on a
stock when the stock price drops. But there are a
lot of different market forces, some of which are malicious,
that can lead to stock prices dropping. That's kind of
what the Wall Street Bets folks were objecting to. So
(41:16):
here's the catch with this approach. If the stock price
goes up instead of down, now you have to spend
more money to buy back the borrowed stock to return
it because you are obligated to return the shares that
you borrowed. So if you sold shares for twenty dollars
but the price goes up to twenty five dollars, you
(41:37):
have to spend an extra five bucks of your own
money to buy back the share you borrowed so that
you can return it to the broker. Well, the Wall
Street Bets sub breddit took aim at those big hedge
funds that specialize in short selling, and the stock that
got the most focused was for game Stop, the video
game retail company just coincidentally happens to go back to
(41:57):
video games. The Wall Street Bets for Oakes encouraged people
to buy up shares of game Stop now buying up
shares of a company tends to drive the stock price
for that company up. It shows an increased demand. So
you have these companies that are short selling, and people
started buying these shares and the price started going up,
not down. That puts the squeeze on groups that are
(42:20):
trying to short sell the stock. So some of those
folks will just cut their losses and they'll get out. Uh.
But no one really likes to lose money, right, So
a lot of people and a lot of these hedge
funds would start to try and short sell even more shares.
So they're borrowing even more shares and selling them at
the market price, the idea being that, well, we already
(42:42):
expected the price to go down. The price went up.
Now I'm sure the price is going to come down,
So I'm gonna do it some more, and I'm gonna
chase after that lost money. Kind of like if you're
in Vegas and you're playing blackjack and you lose some money,
so the next time you bet even more because you
want to win back the money you lost plus make
some and you're just getting into a sunk cost fallacy there.
(43:07):
But since there were more active buyers because of the
Wall Street bets folks, this price just kept going up
and the squeeze was getting worse. In fact, if you
go to the sub credit you might see people saying, hey,
the squeeze hasn't even happened yet. What we're seeing is
the early activity before the squeeze. Now, in reaction to
all this, we saw several online platforms shut down to
(43:30):
try and curb the behavior of the Wall Street Met's
crowd um And this could be an entire episode, probably
will be an entire episode in the future, but that
included a discord server dedicated to the group. Now this
story is still playing out as a record this and
there's a lot to be said on all sides of it,
including pointing out the hypocrisy of how wealthy hedge funds
have essentially played the same sort of games with the
(43:52):
stock market for decades, and yet when it comes to
groups of an individual investors who are organizing to do
it online somehow, then it wrong. The whole thing is complicated,
and like I said, I'll try and tackle an episode
to talk more about in the future. It's a little
tricky because really it's a subject matter that's better suited
to a money oriented podcast. Anyway, Discord got some flak
(44:14):
for banning the server, and they eventually reverse course on
the decision. But it turns out that, at least according
to Discord, this band was due to the server hosting
quote hateful and discriminatory content end quote, which I'm guessing
revolved around the general philosophy of eat the Rich. Also,
the subreddit Wall Street Bets is filled with a lot
(44:37):
of loaded language, which I'm guessing also triggers Discords moderation policies,
essentially saying, hey, guys, don't use these types of words.
It's harmful and it's not funny. Um where it. Meanwhile,
it's going like crazy on the subreddit. So the server
is actually back. Now the Wall Street Bets discords er
(45:00):
has returned, Discord is taking a more active role helping
the Wall Street Bets team moderate content on that server
to make sure it aligns with Discords policies, and as
long as it does, then presumably it will still have
a home over on Discord. I am sure that Discord
is going to continue to play a big part in
(45:20):
a lot of people's lives moving forward. I know that
a lot of the gaming channels I follow Discord is
playing a huge role because it tends to be the
platform that creators are using in order to have conversations
in the background that aren't going out over a stream,
so that people can coordinate, get everything working together, work
(45:42):
out a technical issues before they play together. So it's
it's become a really useful tool for a lot of folks,
and um one that I expect we'll see grow. And
like I said, once that tech Stuff server is, you know,
ready to at least be tested out, I'll let everybody
know so people can join if they like. Chances are
in the early days it will be pretty quiet, but
(46:03):
I hope to actually foster a community that we're you know,
my listeners can talk with one another. We really haven't
had that in the past, and I think that that's
a shame because I know that I've got a lot
of super smart listeners who are experts in different fields,
some of which overlap mind so in which I can't
even begin to understand, and it would be really interesting
(46:25):
to be able to have a place where that kind
of conversation can happen. So that's my hope. I'll let
you guys know when that thing is up and running
and ready for folks to join and tear it to
shreds because I know I'm not going to do a
great job out of the gate, but that's okay. It'll
be a work in progress in the meantime. If you
have any suggestions for future topics I should cover on
(46:45):
tech Stuff, the best way to reach out to me
really right now is on Twitter. To handle for the
show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(47:06):
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech and I received a
request on Twitter to do an episode about the history
(00:25):
of Discord, the communications platform. Now, if you don't know
what Discord is, it does help to get a quick overview.
So from a high level, Discord of software that let's
users chat with each other either through texting or with
voice communication or video chat. And it has other features
as well, and it grew out of gaming culture. We've
(00:48):
got two founders to talk about, so let's start with
a man named Jason Citron. He grew up playing video games.
He received a Nintendo in ne s. The Nintendo entertain
was stem a groundbreaking console, the one that brought home
video games back from the dead after the Great Crash
of the early nineteen eighties, and he was only five
(01:09):
years old when he got that. He said that when
he was a kid, all he really wanted to do
was play games on the n e S and his
parents essentially told him that if he did all of
his homework, he could spend as much time playing games
as he liked. So while other parents might tell their kids, hey,
you know, you should go outside and play, or otherwise
limit their screen time, Citron was more or less given
(01:29):
carte blanche to do all the gaming he wanted to,
as long as he didn't put off homework or anything
like that. He has said that when he was around
twelve or thirteen, a friend of his taught him some
early que Basic programming tricks during a sleepover. So que
Basic is a very simple programming language, and Citron found
(01:50):
it really interesting. So of course, the first thing he
really wanted to do was to make a game. So
he and his buddy stayed up late while everyone else
was asleep, and they got to work programming out a
text adventure. For those of you who have never played
a text adventure, it's pretty much what it sounds like.
The game presents the player with text and describes an
(02:12):
environment and any actions that are going on. Then the
player types in a command, and if the programmers anticipated
that command, you get a response that progresses the game
or perhaps ends it if you made the wrong choice. Now,
if the programmers didn't anticipate the command, you're likely to
encounter a failed message. So, for example, if you were
the type look under rock, and the programmers didn't anticipate
(02:36):
that action, you might receive the generic response I'm sorry,
I don't know how to do that. But if they
did anticipate it, you might get something like you lift
up the rock and you see an old rusty key,
or maybe you get you lift up the rock and
see dirt. What did you expect? It all depends upon
the programmers. And just for the record, I love old
text adventure games. Some of them get wicked hard because
(02:58):
programmers really went out of their way to make obtuse puzzles. Anyway,
let's get back to Citron. As he got older, he
decided he didn't want to just play games. He wanted
to make them as well, like as a job, not
just as a hobby. He enrolled in Full Sale University,
which is a private, for profit university in Florida. I
(03:19):
know it best as the home of n x T,
which is kind of the developmental branch of the w
w E, the professional wrestling organization. Anyway, the school is
known for its programs and feels like computer animation, audio design,
and that sort of thing. Citron graduated in two thousand
four with a Bachelor's of Science in game design and development.
(03:40):
He went on to develop for a few different game studios,
like Papaya Studio, which, if I'm doing my math correctly,
would have probably been working on titles like Disney Princess
Enchanted Journey and Windy Woo Homecoming Warrior Kick In Challenge.
He was there for less than a year before he
moved over to Storm Runt Studios, which was probably working
(04:02):
on licensed properties like Aragon and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Citron
stayed there for about a year and a half before
he moved over to Double Fine Productions in two thousand six. Now,
before I chat about that little part of his career,
I did want to mention that Papaia Studios and storm
Front are both no more. Storm Front actually folded first
(04:23):
in two thousand and eight after Sierra Entertainment, which was
set to publish the company's next game, closed down, and
I should probably do an episode about Stormfront at some point.
Papaia Studios stuck around till or so. I'm not actually
sure what happened with that studio other than it went
out of business. I couldn't find more detailed information about
(04:43):
what caused it to do that anyway, onto Double Fine.
This company, founded by Tim Schaefer, is known for games
like Psycho Knots and also the remaster version of Grim
Van Dango, the Brutal Legends game, and more. Citron joined
that team in two in six, a year after the
first Psycho Knots game had come out. Citron was there
(05:04):
for eight months and left in June of two thousand seven.
Now when you hear about these relatively short stints with companies,
with just you know, a few months here or a
year and a half there, you might get the feeling
that young Citron had itchy feet and he couldn't settle down.
And that is possibly the case, but it's also possible
that Citron was working for these companies on a contract basis.
(05:27):
A lot of studios will bring in freelance game developers
to help with titles that are in production. These developers
work alongside full time salaried employees until their contract is over,
whereupon the freelancer might have to head off in search
of their next gig. They might get resigned to a
new contract, but chances are they may just have to
(05:48):
try and line up their next job. And I'm not
sure if that's what was going on with Citron, but
I figure it's a pretty fair guess. He had some
bigger plans in store. However, He really wanted to try
and create his own own company, but Citron also recognized
that he didn't really have that kind of experience or background.
He was a developer, not an entrepreneur, at least not
(06:09):
yet anyway. He applied to and was accepted by you web,
which is a company that helps develop people into entrepreneurs.
The focus on fields like app development and gaming. You
web provides an environment and initial funding for product development,
sort of like the seed money to get a business going.
(06:29):
At you Web. Citron began to work with a developer
named Danielle Castley, and the two of them created a
game for iOS devices. It was called Aurora Faint and
it was part RPG, part Tetris like puzzle game. Citron
described it as quote a puzzle based m m O
RPG for the iPhone end quote. M m O RPG
(06:52):
says for massively multiplayer online role playing games, so a
game that supports lots of players simultaneously and as role
playing elements to it. The first game was actually fairly modest,
a single player game with some leader boards, but the
second attempt was far more ambitious, with chat rooms, asynchronous
multiplayer support, ghost battling, and more. Ghost battling is where
(07:16):
you create a profile, and when you're offline, your profile
is able to play against other players and perform as
if you are controlling it to some degree. Citron and
castlely recognize that players liked having ways to interact with
one another, whether it was to form friendships or talk
some smack, or you know, just have a conversation about
(07:37):
anything at all. And you could see that some of
the concepts that would later transition into what would become
features and discord we're taking shape. The experience convinced Citron
to try something bigger. He wanted to build not just
a game, but a platform for games on iOS. He
pitched it as Xbox Live but for iPhones, complete with
chat and video board features. He decided to quote, just
(08:01):
announce it and see if people would want it end quote,
which is a pretty seat of your pants approach, like
you don't even know if you can build it yet,
You're really just kind of fishing to see if there
are any bites, and there were. The developers put out
their announcement, which tech Crunch would pick up and publish.
So now lots of people were seeing it, and the
(08:23):
next thing they knew they had four hundred developers indicate
their interest in this project. Citron and Castley founded open Faint,
which would focus on building out this platform, and when
the company launched in March two thousand nine, there were
fifteen developers signed on with thirty games for this platform,
not games from open feint, but games that would use
(08:46):
open feint as the platform. At first, the open feint
team was really small, with just four or five people
working on it in the early days. By the end
of that first year that number was up to fifteen,
and two years in it was at sixty. And then
a Japanese mobile game company called g r E or
GREE made an offer that the founders could not refuse.
(09:08):
They acquired open feint for the princely sum of one
hundred four million dollars. Now, sit Tron figured he'd stay
put as the leader of open feint at least for
a while. In an interview with Business Insider, he said, quote,
I will be sticking around for a while. My personal ambition,
it might come off as a little naive but it's
(09:30):
a change the world kind of thing. I see open
Faint as an opportunity for me to help developers create
what I call shared experiences. You play games, right, so
you've had experiences like Mario Kart or Fifa where you're
playing with buddies and right as you're about to win,
your friend comes up behind you and wins. You throw
the controller on the ground and yell and scream at
(09:51):
each other. Those moments of connecting with your friends where
you can laugh and share like that are so powerful.
End quote. So again we see yet more signs of
this idea of communication and community, things that we become
really important. So if you've used Discord, all of this
probably sounds a little familiar, right, But we've got another
(10:12):
founder we need to talk about. So we're gonna leave
Citron at this stage in his career and switch gears
to talk about Stennislav Vishnevsky. Now, I gotta preface this
by saying I found way more information about Citron than
I did about Vishnevsky. Uh, Citron has been pretty you know,
much the face of Discord. But here's what I can
(10:33):
tell you. Vishnevsky earned a degree at California State University
at Northridge, presumably in computer science or some other field
related to software engineering. He speaks Russian. In two thousand nine,
he worked for a software company called Kassamba Incorporated. That
quote focused on developing technology solutions within the healthcare industry.
(10:54):
End quote. That's from Visionevsky's LinkedIn profile, which I found
very useful trying to find out more about his history.
He was there for about eight months. In the meantime,
he was also working on his own project called guild Work.
Stanislav had developed tools for a Final Fantasy title that
he recognized could be useful if adapted for other games,
(11:16):
specifically m m O RPGs. Many m m O RPGs
allow players to create associations within the games themselves, called guilds,
but depending on the game, the tools that players have
at their disposal might make guild management a bit of
a chore, so some guilds would turn to other tools
(11:36):
to help coordinate efforts within the guild and facilitate guild communication.
Guild Work grew out of that need and would expand
to allow for guild hosting as well. Also, it would
provide the foothold that the company Discord would need later on.
I'll explain when we get there. So his next job
was as a software engineer at a company called Kabam,
(11:58):
which developed social games like Kingdoms of Camelot. He was
there for less than a year, leaving at the end
of twenty eleven, and then he joined that Japanese game
company I mentioned earlier called Gree International Incorporated in early
So gree had acquired open Faint in two thousand eleven
and Stan joined Green in And now we've got our
(12:21):
two Discord co founders working at the same general company,
with Citron still leading the Open Faint team within Gree.
But shortly after that, Citron would found a new company
initially called Hammer and Chisel, and Vishnevsky would move over
to join on as a craftsman. According to Vishnevsky's LinkedIn profile,
which I think is cool. An early project of THEIRS
(12:44):
was called uh Fates Forever. It was a game, a
mobile mobile game for tablets and smartphones, and it was
a multiplayer online battle arena or mobile similar to games
like League of Legends Dota to or smite the game
and get a whole lot of traction. It did receive
good reviews, it's just didn't get, you know, widely adopted.
(13:06):
Vishnevsky was a developer on that title, and he campaigned
for the freedom to work on tools and features that
would allow players to communicate with one another in game.
This work, which aligned with Citron's earlier attempts with Aurora
Faint and Open Faint, soon became a bigger deal than
the game that it spun off from, and so we
saw the convergence of efforts to create opportunities for gamers
(13:29):
to communicate with one another while playing games, and these
efforts would combine to form the seeds of a new
software solution, which would ultimately become Discord. I'll talk more
about the coalescing of Discord in just a moment, but
first let's take a quick break. So before we dive
(13:56):
into Discord proper, let's talk a bit more about what
made Jay and in Stanislav feel like it was something
worth doing in the first place. Now, there are a
lot of multiplayer games out there, and obviously the whole
appeal to these games is that you're playing with other
real people. You're all simultaneously in the game, and sometimes
(14:17):
you want to be able to chat with folks. This
is particularly true for team based games, in which chatting
with your teammates is key to coordinating a strategy and
being effective against other teams or against nonplayer characters. But
the fact of the matter is a lot of these
multiplayer platforms are pretty awful when it comes to supporting
(14:38):
team or multiplayer chat. Now, some are better than others,
but in a lot of cases, it feels as though
the actual communication tools are more of an afterthought. In
a way that is understandable. I mean, the team needs
to make sure that the actual gameplay elements of whatever
the game title is happen to be solid. It wouldn't
(14:58):
be much fun if you joined a multiplayer game that
had great communication tools but the game itself was terrible.
I mean, yeah, you'd probably be able to communicate easily,
but you would all likely spend your time complaining about
how crappy the game was. Like Jason had said several
years earlier, he really loved that experience of playing a
game in the same physical space as his friends, Like
(15:21):
you're all in the living room, all on the couch,
and you're playing elbow to elbow and being able to
talk in real time while playing the game, but the
tools available to gamers around twelve or so were, you know,
fairly limited, like teams speak in Skype or the two
big ones, and they also tended to be really resourced heavy.
So if you were trying to run a game and
(15:42):
this separate voice over Internet protocol program, you know, like Skype,
your computer might start chugging a bit and your gaming
experience could suffer because now your CPU has to deal
with not just the demands of the game, but whatever
communications software you're running at the same time. Those were
some of the thoughts driving the push to develop better
in game communication tools for Fates Forever, the game that
(16:06):
Hammer and Chisel was working on, except the team recognized
that it might be better to develop something more broad,
something that could stand as its own communication platform and
not be tied to a specific game title, and so
Citron made the call to shift the focus to creating
the platform that could serve all games, similar to how
(16:28):
he wanted to make an Xbox Live environment for iOS
devices years earlier. It wasn't an easy decision, though, because
it meant backing off of Fates Forever, It meant abandoning
the game that they had been working on, and had launched,
and this was not long after it had launched. It
was like a year later, not even a full year,
(16:48):
and the game died in early death. It also meant
that he had to layoff the five full time employees
who had been working on the game, so it was
a big decision and not an easy one. Hammer and
Chisel then evolved into Discord the company with Citron a
CEO and Vishnevsky as Chief Technology Officer or ct O.
(17:09):
The team began to lay out what they wanted to
achieve with this service. The Discord software needed to give
gamers the ability to create rooms for chat. It needed
to support text chat, voice chat, and then later on
even video chat. It needed to be a lightweight type
of apps, something that wouldn't put too big a strain
on the hardware. After all, the original idea was that
(17:32):
Discord was for gamers, and a lot of gamers really
obsessed over getting the most out of their gaming rigs settings.
You don't want to compromise on the gaming experience because
your chat app is hogging all the resources. While Discord
aimed to avoid the issues gamers had with services like
Skype and team Speak, it didn't always work. Out There
(17:52):
have been times and Discords past when gamers have seen
Discord get a little hungry for CPU and memory re sources. Now,
to explain why this happens would require going into a
lot of technical detail that I'm going to be honest,
I don't fully understand. I'm not a programmer, so I
have a bit of a grasp on it. But rather
(18:14):
than stumble around hoping that I'm telling you the right thing,
instead I'll say that depending upon the settings of a
computer and on Discord and the specific build of Discord
that you were using, sometimes users were fine, and sometimes
they saw Discord alone sapping of a CPUs output. The
(18:34):
team also wanted Discord to be multi platform, so they
wanted to work on PCs, max, mobile devices and in browsers,
and it needed to run smoothly on all of those
platforms and provide a reliable service. To get started, Citron
secured funding from the ub nine plus incubator company and
several others, including ten Sent, the Chinese company that owns
(18:57):
a stake in several video game companies out there. The
team build out the product, prepping it for its public
release in May, and in many ways it is very
much like a web browser. In fact, you can access
Discord over the web, or you can download it as
a native app on a desktop device or mobile device,
(19:17):
and the activities in one instance happened across all other instances.
So if for some reason, you're running the Discord app
on your laptop, Okay, so you've got your laptop going,
you've got the actual Discord program running. Then you've got
a second laptop and you use it to open up
a browser and go to the web based Discord service.
(19:38):
And then you also had your smartphone out and you
activated the Discord app on your smartphone, and you all
three and in all three instances, you navigate to the
same server and the same channel. Typing something in on
your laptop that's running the app would publish it to everything.
You would see it on your phone, you would see
it on the second laptop, and so on. Now that's
(20:00):
assuming again that all three of these devices are logged
into the same server and same channel, which brings us
to how Discord organizes stuff. So Discord has a kind
of hierarchy of organization, and at the top is the server.
The server is kind of like the community base of operations.
When you create a discord server. You're not actually designating
(20:21):
a specific machine on your network to act like a
web server. Instead, the server is the dedicated online gathering space.
I kind of think of it like a Facebook page
in a way, if you are making a page on
Facebook dedicated to something. Uh, it's sort of similar. Now,
when you think about it another way, you can see
(20:42):
why this naming convention makes sense. On the web, you've
got clients and you've got servers. Now, the client is
typically something like a browser. So let's say you are
on your computer and you're surfing the web. To use
an incredibly outdated phrase, the browser you use, whether it's Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox,
(21:05):
or something else, that is the client. So let's say
you're using your browser to look up an article on
Wikipedia about Big Trouble in Little China, which, as we
all know, is the best movie that was ever made.
You type the title into Wikipedia's search bar and you
hit intern And when you do that, you've sent a
command to your client to request that specific web page
(21:28):
from the web server that's hosting Wikipedia. So the client
relays your request, which goes out over the Internet. The
request is encoded so that the message will eventually get
to the correct destination, that destination being the web server.
That request ultimately goes to that web server that processes
it and then returns the Wikipedia page. So the server
(21:53):
since the appropriate data back to the client, which is
your browser, and that's where you can see it. So
with Discord, the app on your phone or desktop or
the tab in your browser is the client. It's how
you are accessing the community you are interested in, and
that is the server, and messages that you type in
the client get posted to the server, which all clients
(22:14):
connected to that server can see at least all clients
connected to that server that have permissions to view the
message within whatever channel they can see it. So within
the server, as I mentioned, you have channels, and these
can be text based or voice based. So you could
create a server for your gaming friends, you know, kind
(22:35):
of the way the service was originally conceived, and you
can create specific voice channels for different games, because maybe
you're a group of gaming friends is really into a
lot of different games, and maybe that group has gotten
pretty big and not everyone is playing the same games
at the same time, So you can have different voice
channels dedicated to the various games and have multiple conversations
(22:56):
happening in separate channels, and you only hear the off
that's relevant to whichever channel you are in. So there's
a conversation. Let's say you're playing Rainbow six Siege and
other people are playing League of Legends. Well, you're in
the Rainbow six Siege room. You've chosen to go into
that channel. You only hear the conversation that's going on
(23:17):
in that channel. Meanwhile, over in the Legal Legends channel,
people are arguing about which path they need to take
in order to defeat the other team, and they're distinct,
so there's no cross talk. You can make channels public,
meaning anyone can connect to them, or you can make
them private and only allow certain people to see them,
(23:39):
which makes you know sense and building out a server
sounds like it could be daunting, but it's actually pretty simple.
So let me give you an example. I recently created
a tech stuff discord server, which I haven't really publicized yet,
and so for the moment, I'm the only member of
this server. But that's okay. When it's ready for prime time,
(24:00):
i'll chat about it. I'll put the link up on
the Twitter bio. I'll make sure it goes out and
people can join. Then Anyway, the tech Stuff server will
be a community where listeners can go to chat with
each other and share pictures and videos and bad puns
and all that kind of stuff. Within the server, I
can make different channels to help serve the community. Channels
(24:22):
can be text based or they can be voice chats.
So I might make a channel that's just dedicated to
episode suggestions, and if you have a great idea for
an episode, you can pop in there and submit it.
Or I might make one for a community tech support,
where people who know what they're talking about can offer
advice to the technologically challenged. Sometimes I'm one of those
(24:42):
categories and sometimes I'm the other one. Or maybe there
could be a channel just for shooting the breeze to
discuss the latest in tech news or anything else. Really,
there's no limit on what you can build out. You
could get super granular. So for tech Stuff, I might
make categories for every possible topic, Like I could make
(25:03):
a sub category just for smartphone discussions, or maybe I
decided to get even more detailed than that, and I
make a subcategory for iOS and a different one for Android,
or heck, maybe I go even more detailed, and I
start making subcategories for specific models of phones. Now, of course,
the more in the weeds you get with these subcategories,
(25:25):
the fewer people are going to join them because they
won't really pertain to them. So sometimes it pays to
be a bit bigger picture with your topics to create
more of a communal space. So you create your server,
you build out some various channels that you think you're
gonna need. You can always add more as needed. In fact,
I would argue that you shouldn't spend too much time
(25:47):
building out the basic channels, because as your community grows,
you will learn what it is you need and you
can build further. At that point, you've got your voice
chat channels, you've got your text channels. Now you just
need to invite people to the server or else. It's
like the tech Stuff server. It's a waste lam that
only you occupy and you just quietly walk across the
(26:10):
desert landscape. So you can invite other people on Discord individually,
sort of like adding friends on a platform like Facebook,
or you can also post a link to the server
in some trusted space. It really depends on what approach
you want to take. If you want a server that's
just for you and your close friends, you're probably going
to invite each person individually. If it's meant to be
(26:32):
a larger communal space for something, maybe then you take
a bigger step. But that trusted space thing is a
really important detail. If your goal is to have a
focused community, publishing a Discord link publicly might not be
a great idea. It's kind of like how posting a
zoom meeting link publicly can be a really bad idea.
(26:52):
Is I think a lot of people learned the hard
way back in. If you just want the most people
you can get into your server, then publishing the link
everywhere might be your go to strategy. But if your
aim is to actually foster a community, you probably want
to be a bit more selective with Discord. You can
also designate roles to specific users, and roles give users privileges. So,
(27:17):
for example, you might want some of your most trusted
community members to be moderators who can step in if
someone is being a problem. Maybe you've got a jerk
face who's spamming one of the channels, or they're breaking
other rules like posting not safe for work content in
a family friendly chat environment. Moderators have various powers that
(27:38):
you give them. They can have like the power to
mute for example, UH they mute other other users so
that their abuse is no longer visible. Or they might
delete posts, or they might even ban people and help
you maintain order, so they sort of become your digital bouncers.
On top of that, people have made tons of different
(27:58):
automated scripts called bots for Discord. These bots can flesh
out what you can do with the Discord platform. Installing
a boat requires a person with administrator level access, someone
who has that level of authority within a server, to
grant permissions to the bot. These permissions are really similar
(28:18):
to the kind of stuff you see when you install
a new app on your phone or on your desktop.
You might see a checklist that includes stuff like the
bot will be able to see your email address and
your contacts, that kind of thing. So it's a good
idea to give those lists a good look to make
sure you're comfortable with it before you install the bot.
In return, a bot might do one of a billion
(28:40):
different things for you. It's all dependent on the specific bot.
There are moderator bots that can monitor chat rooms for
banned words. For example, uh these bots might be able
to do everything that a human moderator would be able
to do. Delete the offending post, mute the troll with
a warning, maybe even banned the user. Or a bot
might do something simpler like give account on how many
(29:02):
people are actually part of the server. I don't need
that one for tech stuff, because I know that number
is one heavy sigh. Oh wait, that's a stage direction.
Starting in Discord supported video chat and screen sharing as well.
(29:23):
That was added so two years after they launched. The
features are pretty robust, though the layout could seem a
little odd to someone who has never really used it before.
It reminds me a lot of old school chat rooms
from the early days of the public Internet, like even
stuff that existed before the web did, when I would
use tell Neet to log into chat servers and make
(29:43):
friends that way kind of makes me think of that. Now,
when we come back, I'll talk about how Discord was
received upon launch and how it's changed since then, But
first let's take another quick break. So, the Discord team
worked on making the chat feature from the Fates Forever
(30:06):
game into its own distinct product, and it wasn't easy,
not just because they were repurposing and add on feature
to become its own standalone thing, but also because the
company itself, as I mentioned, had to change from being
a video game developer into something else, and it took
about six months just for the company to change and
have its new culture and its new organization in order
(30:28):
to support its new purpose. According to Citron, quote, when
we decided to go all in on Discord, we had
maybe ten users. We would show it to our friends
and they'd be like, this is cool, and then they'd
never use it. End quote. As someone who makes podcasts,
I understand this feeling. I have maybe two friends who
(30:48):
listened to my shows, but let's be fair, most of
them get enough of me already. Discord marks May thirteen
as its launch day, not because that's when the service
officially launched, but because that's when people that the developers
didn't know personally started to actually use the service. A
Reddit user posted about Discord in a subreddit dedicated to
(31:12):
the game Final Fantasy fourteen, and for those who don't know,
the Final Fantasy series in general is a line of
fantasy genre role playing games. Most of those titles are
single player games, but a couple of them aren't, and
one of those is Final Fantasy eleven and the others
Final Fantasy fourteen, and they are both m m O
RPG style games. The original version of Final Fantasy fourteen
(31:35):
launched in two but due to some pretty major problems
with the game, it got shut down. In Square Nicks,
the company behind the series, launched a new version, essentially
rebuilt from scratch with a new game engine and everything,
and that one came out in that was the focus
of this particular subredit. So in that subredit, someone posted
(31:58):
a link to a Discord server where gamers could go
and chat about a new expansion pack for a Final
Fantasy fourteen. The Discord co founders, eager to foster their
new product, jumped onto the server as well, and they
joined the voice chat to talk with players. So now
the guys who built Discord are in the same voice
(32:19):
chat as people who are using it in order to
play Final Fantasy fourteen. This inspired some of the red
users to go back to Reddit and mentioned that, hey,
you know, it was kind of cool we were using
this app and the people who made the app jumped
in and they were pretty interesting, and that encouraged even
more people to check out Discord out of curiosity, and
so what followed was a classic word of mouth campaign,
(32:40):
and Discord started seeing more people sign up and download
the app. And it wasn't like a huge avalanche of
people at first, but it was an encouraging early start,
and the trend was day over day growth with registered users.
Those users began to say that being on Discord was
sort of like being at a house party. Maybe you
and a few friends grab a space on a couch
(33:02):
to talk about, you know, a recent sporting event. Then
after a bit, you excuse yourself and you decide to
head over to the kitchen, and there you get into
a conversation with some other people about how the DC
Cinematic universe really went astray and became a complicated mess.
And after a bit you then pop outside onto the
back deck to talk with a different group of people
about this amazing concert that one of them went to.
(33:25):
It's kind of like a house party, and a Discord
server can have those separate spaces where all sorts of
conversations can happen and you can hop from one to
another just freely, as long as you have the permissions
to join those channels. So rather than setting up a
dedicated call between specific people, you have dedicated spaces. It was,
for lack of a better term, a real game changer.
(33:48):
People frequently will compare Discord with Slack communications and project
management tool, and maybe that's one of the reasons I
found Discord a little bit intimidating when I first popped on.
It's not that Discord is particularly complicated or difficult to use,
more than it represents yet another way of communicating with people,
(34:10):
and I personally have hit fatigue on that. In fact,
I hit fatigue probably a couple of years ago. At
one point people were reaching out to me on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook, Messenger,
Google Hangouts, base Camp, Slack, Discord, email and text, and
probably a few that I've forgotten about, and y'all, that
(34:30):
was just too much for me. But that's not the
fault of any one of those platforms. It's just that,
you know, I had notification overload. Because of its versatility,
Discord didn't take long for people to adopt it, and
for all sorts of community interests. I mentioned the tech
Stuff server, which clearly isn't going to be dedicated to gaming. Instead,
(34:51):
it will serve as a communal place for listeners to
meet each other, talk about tech, maybe get into totally
unrelated conversations, just you know, people connecting with other people. Now,
that doesn't mean that everything on Discord is all peaceful
and happy. The platform, like dozens of other online platforms,
has made the news as different extremist groups have made
(35:12):
their own Discord servers. Discord has had to deal with
things like hate groups, white supremacist groups, and other extremists
who have made spaces on the service. The Discord team
admitted that they responded too late to some of these groups,
that we're creating a foothold in Discord. In seventeen, it
(35:32):
became clear that far right protesters at Charlottesville had used
Discord to plan the event. Prior to Charlottesville, discords general
approach was to moderate and block the worst types of content,
you know, stuff like pornography or racial slurs. But as
I think most people have learned over the last few years,
(35:52):
the obvious stuff isn't where the problem starts and ends.
The obvious stuff is just the most overt manifestation of
deeper problems. But those underlying issues like racism, homophobia, misogyny,
and that kind of thing, those could be present and
exacerbated without it being you know, obvious and on the surface.
(36:14):
We've seen that across numerous online spaces, and Discord was
one of them, and to some extent still is. After Charlottesville,
the Discord team created a new department called Trust and Safety.
The company now takes a more active role in defining
the boundaries for online communities using Discord. Within those boundaries,
server creators can make whatever type of community they like,
(36:37):
but all of that has to be nested inside the
more general rules for Discord as a whole. According to
a website called Protocol, the Trust and Safety team makes
up about fift of all of Discord's staff, which is
a significant percentage and it really shows how big the
challenges are when it comes to creating a safe space online.
(36:58):
In dis Chord saw a major growth spurt, helped in
large part by the fact that people were stuck at
home during the COVID pandemic. From February to July of
that year. The site's user numbers grew by nearly fift
Schools were using it, some businesses were using it. Discord
itself was looking different, with the team moving further away
(37:19):
from the gaming culture that had spawned it. But one
thing I haven't really mentioned in this episode is revenue.
If Discord is a business, how does it make money.
The co founders have already said that one thing they
don't want to do is sell user data or to
show ads to users. So the really big way the
most online networking platforms rely upon to make money is
(37:42):
off the table. So what is Discord doing instead? Well,
right now, there are two main ways Discord makes money.
One of them is the big one, and the other
one is the small one. And the big one is
through investments. Discord has received a lot of investments a
million dollars or so. As I record this, analysts value
(38:05):
the company at about three and a half billion dollars,
But that valuation is based on discords utility and popularity,
not on how much money it actually brings in. Because
the second way, a much more modest means of revenue,
is through a premium service called Nitro. Nitro is kind
of like a V I P version of Discord, with
(38:26):
some perks that the typical user doesn't have. They include
the ability to change your user name, to access special emojis,
and have better quality voice and video chat within the system.
The subscription costs ten dollars per month. Now, I am
not sure what percentage of active Discord users are Nitro subscribers,
(38:48):
but my guess is that it's a fairly low percentage.
I don't know that for a fact, it's just a
guess now. In the past, Discord has also tried to
get into the game's storefront business, something that's dominated by Valves,
Steam storefront and the Epic Games storefront. This turned out
to be a bust for Discord, and I imagine there
(39:09):
are a couple of reasons why I didn't pan out.
For one thing, Steam is a monolithic force in digital
game delivery. It already has a really big user base,
and just like real brick and mortar stores, customers tend
to stick with whatever store they become used to. They've
got a lot of stuff in that store already. And Secondly,
(39:30):
discords user base wasn't just gamers. In fact, a lot
of folks who never used Discord for gaming at all.
We're relying on the app, so they really didn't have
any interest in purchasing games through Discord. That's not why
they used the service for After trying to market games
for a few months, Discord pulled the plug on the experiment.
(39:51):
It just it wasn't making Discord or their third party
partners that were providing the games any real money, So
it was more of a drain on reest Is than
anything else. In more recent news, Discord became part of
the brew haha surrounding the Wall Street Mets subreddit. Now,
if you're not familiar with that story, here's the shortest
(40:11):
version I can manage. The subreddit is taking aim at
hedge funds that specialize in something called the short cell. Now,
this is when an investor borrows stock from a broker,
So the investor doesn't own these stocks, but then the
investor sells these borrowed stocks at whatever the market prices
in the hopes that the price is going to soon drop.
(40:34):
And if the price does drop, that's great news because
then the investor buys back the borrowed shares and they
are buying it back for less than what they sold
them for, So they returned the borrowed shares to the
broker and they pocket the difference. So if you have
borrowed to share and you sell it for twenty dollars,
and then you buy it back at ten dollars and
(40:56):
you return the borrowed share, you get to keep that
extra ten bucks. It's a way to money on a
stock when the stock price drops. But there are a
lot of different market forces, some of which are malicious,
that can lead to stock prices dropping. That's kind of
what the Wall Street Bets folks were objecting to. So
(41:16):
here's the catch with this approach. If the stock price
goes up instead of down, now you have to spend
more money to buy back the borrowed stock to return
it because you are obligated to return the shares that
you borrowed. So if you sold shares for twenty dollars
but the price goes up to twenty five dollars, you
(41:37):
have to spend an extra five bucks of your own
money to buy back the share you borrowed so that
you can return it to the broker. Well, the Wall
Street Bets sub breddit took aim at those big hedge
funds that specialize in short selling, and the stock that
got the most focused was for game Stop, the video
game retail company just coincidentally happens to go back to
(41:57):
video games. The Wall Street Bets for Oakes encouraged people
to buy up shares of game Stop now buying up
shares of a company tends to drive the stock price
for that company up. It shows an increased demand. So
you have these companies that are short selling, and people
started buying these shares and the price started going up,
not down. That puts the squeeze on groups that are
(42:20):
trying to short sell the stock. So some of those
folks will just cut their losses and they'll get out. Uh.
But no one really likes to lose money, right, So
a lot of people and a lot of these hedge
funds would start to try and short sell even more shares.
So they're borrowing even more shares and selling them at
the market price, the idea being that, well, we already
(42:42):
expected the price to go down. The price went up.
Now I'm sure the price is going to come down,
So I'm gonna do it some more, and I'm gonna
chase after that lost money. Kind of like if you're
in Vegas and you're playing blackjack and you lose some money,
so the next time you bet even more because you
want to win back the money you lost plus make
some and you're just getting into a sunk cost fallacy there.
(43:07):
But since there were more active buyers because of the
Wall Street bets folks, this price just kept going up
and the squeeze was getting worse. In fact, if you
go to the sub credit you might see people saying, hey,
the squeeze hasn't even happened yet. What we're seeing is
the early activity before the squeeze. Now, in reaction to
all this, we saw several online platforms shut down to
(43:30):
try and curb the behavior of the Wall Street Met's
crowd um And this could be an entire episode, probably
will be an entire episode in the future, but that
included a discord server dedicated to the group. Now this
story is still playing out as a record this and
there's a lot to be said on all sides of it,
including pointing out the hypocrisy of how wealthy hedge funds
have essentially played the same sort of games with the
(43:52):
stock market for decades, and yet when it comes to
groups of an individual investors who are organizing to do
it online somehow, then it wrong. The whole thing is complicated,
and like I said, I'll try and tackle an episode
to talk more about in the future. It's a little
tricky because really it's a subject matter that's better suited
to a money oriented podcast. Anyway, Discord got some flak
(44:14):
for banning the server, and they eventually reverse course on
the decision. But it turns out that, at least according
to Discord, this band was due to the server hosting
quote hateful and discriminatory content end quote, which I'm guessing
revolved around the general philosophy of eat the Rich. Also,
the subreddit Wall Street Bets is filled with a lot
(44:37):
of loaded language, which I'm guessing also triggers Discords moderation policies,
essentially saying, hey, guys, don't use these types of words.
It's harmful and it's not funny. Um where it. Meanwhile,
it's going like crazy on the subreddit. So the server
is actually back. Now the Wall Street Bets discords er
(45:00):
has returned, Discord is taking a more active role helping
the Wall Street Bets team moderate content on that server
to make sure it aligns with Discords policies, and as
long as it does, then presumably it will still have
a home over on Discord. I am sure that Discord
is going to continue to play a big part in
(45:20):
a lot of people's lives moving forward. I know that
a lot of the gaming channels I follow Discord is
playing a huge role because it tends to be the
platform that creators are using in order to have conversations
in the background that aren't going out over a stream,
so that people can coordinate, get everything working together, work
(45:42):
out a technical issues before they play together. So it's
it's become a really useful tool for a lot of folks,
and um one that I expect we'll see grow. And
like I said, once that tech Stuff server is, you know,
ready to at least be tested out, I'll let everybody
know so people can join if they like. Chances are
in the early days it will be pretty quiet, but
(46:03):
I hope to actually foster a community that we're you know,
my listeners can talk with one another. We really haven't
had that in the past, and I think that that's
a shame because I know that I've got a lot
of super smart listeners who are experts in different fields,
some of which overlap mind so in which I can't
even begin to understand, and it would be really interesting
(46:25):
to be able to have a place where that kind
of conversation can happen. So that's my hope. I'll let
you guys know when that thing is up and running
and ready for folks to join and tear it to
shreds because I know I'm not going to do a
great job out of the gate, but that's okay. It'll
be a work in progress in the meantime. If you
have any suggestions for future topics I should cover on
(46:45):
tech Stuff, the best way to reach out to me
really right now is on Twitter. To handle for the
show is text stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(47:06):
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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