How Conflict Arose from an Uncertain Game Became a Social Center


In 2015, Jason Citron, a computer programmer, was struggling to make a breakthrough in the video game industry. The new multiplayer game he created with development studio Hammer & Chisel hasn’t gotten much attention.

So Mr. Citron took a sudden turn. He fired his company’s game developers, made the game’s chat feature its only product, and gave it a mysterious name – Discord.

“I think we had maybe six users at the time,” Mr. Citron said in an interview. “It was unclear whether it would work.”

At first, Discord was only popular with other gamers. But more than six years later, it has gone mainstream, driven in part by the pandemic. As adults working from home flocked to Zoom, their children were downloading Discord to socialize with other teens via text, voice and video calls in groups known as presenters.

The platform has more than 150 million active users each month – more than 56 million in 2019 – with nearly 80 percent logging in from outside of North America. It has expanded from gamers to music enthusiasts to students and cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

In September, San Francisco-based Discord said it had raised $500 million in funding to the company, worth $14.7 billion, according to PitchBook, a market data provider. In 2021, it more than doubled its workforce to around 650 people.

The transformation of Discord into a mainstream tool was an unexpected turn in Mr. Citron’s career. Mr. Citron, 37, said he grew up playing video games on Long Island, spends a lot of time playing World of Warcraft, and went on a first date to an arcade with his wife-to-be, so he almost didn’t graduate from Full Sail University in Florida. .

“Many of my best memories have come from those experiences, so my entire career has been spent giving other people the power to create these kinds of moments in their lives,” he said.

Prior to Discord, he ran a social gaming network called OpenFeint, which he sold to Japanese gaming company GREE for $104 million in 2011. Mr. Citron was considered an innovator by others in the gaming community, as he sought to attract players’ attention through social interactions with friends; this was a new strategy in the nascent mobile gaming market.

“At least he’s trying to get something new into the market,” said Serkan Toto, a games analyst in Japan, adding that Mr. Citron’s reputation is “like a geek in a good way”.

Now, Mr. Citron finds himself running a leading communications platform, a change he describes as “amazing, wonderful and humble”.

Discord is divided into servers, which are essentially a series of chat rooms similar to the workplace tool Slack, facilitating casual, freely flowing conversations about gaming, music, memes, and everyday life. Some servers are large and open to the public; Others are for invitation only.

The service has no ads. It’s monetized through a subscription service that gives users access to features like custom emojis for $5 or $10 per month. Discord also began trialling in December, when the company took a 10 percent cut, allowing some users to charge up to $100 a month for access to its servers.

Discord made more than $100 million in revenue last year, but company officials didn’t say whether it was profitable, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances and not allowed to discuss it publicly.

The company’s biggest change took place early in the pandemic. In June 2020, Mr. Citron and his co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy, wrote a blog post Recognizing that Discord has moved beyond video games and is trying to be more accessible to everyone. Months ago, the company had changed its slogan from “Chat for gamers” to “A new way to chat with your Communities and friends”.

This transition came with growing pains. Discord has faced the same tough questions as other social media companies about regulating conversation, protecting against harassment and keeping teens safe.

Discord allows people to chat using fake names, and the task of ensuring that people follow community standards is largely left to the organizers of individual Discord servers. This gives the platform a “Lord of the Flies” feel with young groups forming online communities and making their own rules.

In 2017, white nationalists gathered on the far-right Discord servers. “Unite the Right” rally Charlottesville, Va. Although Discord executives were aware that white nationalists were on the platform, they did not ban them until the rally took place. The New York Times reports.

Afterwards, the company became more serious about content moderation. Mr Citron said about 15 percent of the company’s employees work on trust and security. The company began issuing transparency reports twice a year in 2019 and banned anyone under the age of 13 from Discord.

inside that latest reportBetween January and June, Discord said it received more than 400,000 reports of inappropriate behavior, about a third of which was harassment-related, and banned more than 470,000 accounts and 43,000 servers.

The company’s efforts have not stopped common problems. They said they know of many underage Discord users interviewed for this article, including some who are 11 or 12 years old. For example, an internet search for eating disorder communities on Discord revealed dozens of servers, some of which openly encourage people to develop eating disorders; Discord’s community guidelines.

The company said it took “immediate action” when it encountered violations such as underage users or inappropriate content.

Most people say they join Discord for healthier reasons, like connecting with friends. The largest public servers, such as those devoted to discussions of Minecraft or anime, have hundreds of thousands of members. They can be chaotic with colorful memes, swearing, and inside jokes.

Others are aimed only at people who know each other in real life or share a particular interest. Some have strict rules that prohibit profanity, uncensored content, or discussion of politics. Server owners can authorize moderators to enforce rules.

21-year-old Clement Leveau has a powerful role on Discord: he’s the owner of Kanye, the artist of the same name, a host of discussions on music, pop culture and other topics with over 58,000 members.

Mr. Leveau, a college student in New York City, has ultimate authority, with the power to appoint moderators and imprison people who break community rules in a solitary confinement channel known as prison. He said he tried to “make people fools, get a place to rest” but did not tolerate hate speech or bullying. Due to the isolation caused by the pandemic, Mr. Leveau said the connections people form on Discord have become very important.

Former Discord employees, investors and gaming industry watchers say Mr Citron has not compromised on his vision for Discord as an independent company as it grows.

Joost van Dreunen, a professor of video games business at New York University, said staying independent would benefit Mr. Citron’s tight control over the company, from which some senior executives have left in recent years.

Regarding turnover on Discord, the company said its rapid growth has caused parts of its business to change “significantly” in a short period of time, meaning that sometimes “the skill and scope of work we need with our leadership team has also changed.” at the same speed.”

Discord is in deal talks with Microsoft this year An acquisition that could exceed $10 billion, according to people who are familiar with the negotiations and who are not authorized to speak about it publicly. The deal didn’t work. (Microsoft declined to comment.)

Mr Citron has repeatedly declined to comment on talks with other companies, only saying Discord has “got a lot of attention”. He didn’t say whether he was considering taking the company public, but said “there are only a few ways this sort of thing can happen.”

Kevin Roose and Erin Griffith contributing reporting.



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