Discord is a social platform that's a bit like a Facebook or Twitterish social network, but oriented around

real-time chat and voice communication, rather than focusing on posts and timelines.

It was built by folks who had worked in the video game industry, and the core concept

shaping Discord was to allow people playing online games to chat with each other and develop strategies and figure out puzzles

or just casually banter while competing with other teams, fighting a difficult boss, or whatever

else in-game.

The word Discord was used as a name because it was available as a URL and trademark,

but also because the problem the founders were trying to solve was

the issue of discord within in-game communication.

Chatting and such was generally limited by the often quite not good built-in options in each

and every individual video game.

So this network gave gamers a means of typing or talking to each other while playing with the minimum of difficulty or distraction.

Shortly after its founding in mid-2015, it also became a place to hang out between gaming sessions and took on a role similar to Reddit,

in that asynchronous, not just real-time communication, was both allowed and encouraged.

People used the available chat rooms like message boards,

which centralized that type of conversation around games and related topics

in the same application as their instant messaging and in-game chatter.

Discord has, in the years since since been built into the infrastructure of

video gaming consoles and computer gaming platforms, making it the default Omni-communication app for much

of the video game world. In 2020, it made a push to diversify beyond gaming as well. The platform

had long been used for non-gaming stuff

alongside the core gaming content, but it was still branded and predominantly used as a

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