In 2015,
Jason Citron, a computer programmer, was struggling to breakthrough in the video
game industry. The new multiplayer game he had created with his development
studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not catching on.
اضافة اعلان
So, Citron engineered an abrupt about-face. He laid
off his company’s game developers, turned the game’s chatting feature into its
sole product and gave it a mysterious name — Discord.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, left, and Jason Citron, co-founders of Discord, at the social hub’s offices in San Francisco, December 20, 2021. (Photo: NYTimes)
“I think at the time we had maybe six users,” Citron
said. “It wasn’t clear that it was going to work.”
At first,
Discord was only popular with other
gamers. But more than six years later, driven in part by the pandemic, it has
exploded into the mainstream. While adults working from home flocked to Zoom,
their children were downloading Discord to socialize with other young people
through text and audio and video calls in groups known as servers.
The platform has
more than 150 million active users each month — up from 56 million in 2019 —
with nearly 80 percent logging in from outside North America. It has expanded
from gamers to music aficionados, students and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
In September, Discord, which is based in San
Francisco, said it was raising $500 million in funding, valuing the company at
$14.7 billion, according to PitchBook, a market data provider. It more than
doubled its workforce in 2021, to about 650 people.
Discord’s evolution into a mainstream tool has been
an unexpected twist in Citron’s career. Citron, 37, said he grew up playing
video games on Long Island, nearly failed to graduate from Full Sail University
in Florida because he spent so much time playing World of Warcraft and went on
his first date with his future wife at an arcade.
“So many of my best memories came from those
experiences, so my whole career has been about giving other people the power to
create those kinds of moments in their lives,” he said.
Before Discord, he ran a social gaming network,
OpenFeint, which he sold in 2011 to a Japanese gaming company
GREE for $104
million. Citron was considered by others in the gaming community to be
innovative because he tried to keep gamers’ attentions through social
interactions with their friends, a new strategy in the nascent mobile gaming
market.
“At least he tries to put something new into the
market,” said Serkan Toto, a gaming analyst in Japan, adding that Citron’s
reputation was “like a geek, in a good sense.”
Now, Citron finds himself running a prominent
communications platform, a shift that he described as “surprising and wonderful
and humbling.”
Discord is split into servers — essentially a series
of chat rooms similar to the workplace tool Slack — which facilitate casual,
free-flowing conversations about gaming, music, memes and everyday life. Some
servers are large and open to the public; others are invitation-only.
The service doesn’t have ads. It makes money through
a subscription service that gives users access to features like custom emoji
for $5 or $10 per month. Discord also began experimenting in December with
allowing some users to charge for access to their server, up to $100 a month,
of which the company takes a 10 percent cut.
Discord made more than $100 million in revenue last
year, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances who was not
allowed to discuss it publicly, but company officials would not say whether it
was profitable.
The company’s biggest shift occurred early in the
pandemic. In June 2020, Citron and his co-founder and chief technology officer,
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, wrote a blog post acknowledging that Discord had moved
beyond video games and was working to become more accessible to all. Months
earlier, the company had changed its motto from “Chat for gamers” to “A new way
to chat with your communities and friends,” a nod to its wider audience.
That transition has come with growing pains. Discord
has faced the same thorny questions as other social media companies about
regulating speech, safeguarding against harassment and keeping young people
safe.
Discord allows people to chat using fake names, and
the task of ensuring that people follow its community standards is largely left
up to the organizers of individual Discord servers. That gives the platform a
“Lord of the Flies” feel, with groups of young people forming online societies
and deciding their own rules.
In 2017, white
nationalists gathered in far-right Discord servers to plan the “Unite the
Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Discord executives, despite being
aware that white nationalists were on the platform, did not ban them until
after the rally had taken place, according to New York Times reporting.
In the aftermath, the company got more serious about
content moderation. Citron said about 15 percent of the company’s employees
work on trust and safety. The company began publishing biannual transparency
reports in 2019 and bars those under 13 from Discord.
In its most recent report, Discord said it had
received more than 400,000 reports of misbehavior between January and June,
with about one-third related to harassment, and had banned more than 470,000
accounts and 43,000 servers.
The company’s efforts have not stopped frequent
problems. People interviewed for this story, including some who were 11 or 12
years old, said they knew of many underage Discord users. And an internet
search for eating disorder communities on Discord, for instance, revealed
dozens of servers, some explicitly encouraging people to develop eating
disorders, a violation of Discord’s community guidelines.
The company said it takes “immediate action” when it
encounters violations like underage users or inappropriate content.
Many say they joined Discord for more wholesome
reasons, such as connecting with friends. The largest public servers, such as
ones devoted to discussions of Minecraft or anime, have hundreds of thousands
of members. They can be chaotic, with colorful memes, profanity and inside
jokes.
Others are intended only for people who know each
other in real life or share a particular interest. Some have strict rules
prohibiting profanity, graphic content or discussions of politics. Server owners
can deputize moderators to enforce the rules.
Clement Leveau, 21, has a powerful role on Discord:
the owner of Kanye, a server hosting discussions of the eponymous artist,
music, pop culture and other topics with more than 58,000 members.
Leveau, a New York City college student, wields
ultimate authority, with the power to appoint moderators and imprison people
who break community rules in a solitary confinement channel known as jail. He
said that he tries to “let people be silly, have a place to unwind,” but that
he does not tolerate hate speech or bullying. Because of the isolation caused
by the pandemic, Leveau said, the bonds people have formed on Discord have
become crucial.
Earlier this year, Discord held deal talks with
Microsoft about an acquisition that could have topped $10 billion, according to
people briefed on the talks who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The deal did not go through. (Microsoft declined to comment.)
Citron repeatedly declined to comment on conversations with
other companies, saying only that Discord gets “a lot of interest.” He would
not say whether he was considering taking the company public, but he said
“there’s only a few ways that these kinds of things play out.”
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