By Dorian Redding

Discord is a website and app originally targeted toward gamers, but it has evolved into so much more.

Despite its original purpose in catering to gamers and gaming, the global pandemic helped pave the way for many Twitch/YouTube personalities looking for new lines of communication to begin using it as a place for their fans to communicate. It’s even a place for families to talk, both over voice and text chat. Users of Discord can create or join Discord Servers, which are fully customizable with channels of voice, text chat, and custom roles that have access to different things. Discord Servers are completely free to create or customize, and have all of the important features from the get-go.

Users can create or use Bots in their servers, which can have nearly unlimited uses. There are many different bots for almost every use, each with its unique commands and functions, although they serve the same purpose. You can customize the commands used to activate or use the bots, making sure that you will never accidentally activate the wrong bot. There are even bots that can be used to reward the more active players on the server, by giving them access to more chats.

Over the last few years, Discord has seen exponential growth in its number of users. Starting at 25 Million registered users in 2016, the number has rose to 250 million in 2019. The number of monthly active users has risen as well, starting at 10 million in 2019, rising quickly to 100 million in 2020. The peak concurrent users in 2018 were 8.2 million users; in 2020 it reached 10.6 million users. 

Every day, a staggering four BILLION minutes of conversation occur on Discord. This is an astounding amount of traffic on the site, which may make potential users cautious about the safety of the app.

However, Discord staff take users reports seriously, and over the first half of 2020 banned over four million users just for spamming. While there are far more monthly users now than ever, the number of daily users peaked back in 2018 with 19 million users. The Discord server with the most users is the Fortnite server with 571,000 users; the Minecraft server is a close second with 569,000 users.

Discord is filled with endless opportunities for everyone, both gamers, and players alike.