In the past, gamers used to struggle with communicating with their teammates to coordinate their gaming strategies. These struggles created a need for a platform to provide communication channels to gamers. Unfortunately, while most games have in-game chat features, they lacked voice chat features.
Therefore, many different platforms came forward, including TeamSpeak and Skype (which wasn’t targeted at gamers but still worked).
However, most of the options available weren’t right for gaming. These platforms either focused on a general audience or provided features that went hand in hand with gaming. For example, some options used a lot of resources, which interrupted gamers’ experience in-game.
These are some issues that Jason Citron, founder of OpenFeint, faced after selling OpenFeint to GREE and starting game development. To tackle this problem, Jason created a platform named Discord. Initially, Discord was a platform that focused on meeting the needs of gamers.
However, gradually it also expanded its userbase by including features that everyone can use. However, the platform still focuses most of its features on gamers or advanced users in general.
How does Discord work?
Despite its popularity, with over 100 million active users, some people don’t understand how to use the platform.
Therefore, to answer their questions, given below is a general description of how the platform works. While this description does not contain every aspect of how Discord works, it should provide users with a good idea of what to expect from the platform.
1) Registering on the platform
The first thing before using Discord is to make an account on the platform. Creating an account with Discord is straightforward. Next, users need to either download the Discord app for the respective operating system or visit their website to register.
Registration on the platform doesn’t require any special considerations. However, users need to provide an email, username, password, and date of birth to register.
Once they register, they will get an email to confirm their email address. After confirming their email address, users can access their accounts.
2) Joining a server
Once users create an account, they can use many different features of the platform. The first feature they can use is to join a server. A Discord server represents a community of users that follow common rules, topics, channels, etc.
For example, Minecraft players that play on the same server may have a common Discord server as well, where they hang out and chat while in-game. Similarly, users of different programming languages may also have a common Discord server.
Joining a server requires users to obtain an invite link for that server. Almost all online communities that have a Discord server post their invite links on their websites.
There are also some dedicated websites where servers can post their invite links for users to find them. New users can obtain the invite link to their preferred communities’ Discord servers and join them.
Conversely, Discord allows users to find public servers. However, that may not include private servers and still require invitation links.
3) Creating a server
Users that don’t want to join an existing server can also create their own servers. They can do so easily through Discord’s ‘Create A Server’ feature. Creating a server is straightforward. Users only need to enter a server name and select where the server region is.
The server region defines the location of Discord’s host servers that will host the user’s server. The closer the location is to the anticipated userbase of the server, the better its performance will be.
Once users create their own servers, they can generate an invite link for the server and share it with others. Creating a server also gives server owners control of the server. These controls include the basics, including kicking, banning, or muting members.
Similarly, there are also other more advanced features, including managing roles and channels, etc. Roles are groups of users that have predefined privileges. Channels, on the other hand, are rooms that have a similar topic.
4) Adding friends
Discord users can also add other users as a friend. Adding someone as a friend is as simple as right-clicking their name and clicking ‘Add Friend.’ Users can also add their friends from other social media platforms, including Facebook, Reddit, Steam, etc.
However, they must integrate their social media accounts with their Discord account first. Finally, users can manually add friends by getting their username and adding them through the ‘Add Friend’ feature.
5) Using features
Once users join a server or add friends, they can use Discord’s features, including text messaging, voice and video calling, and screen sharing.
Apart from servers and individual friends, users can also create groups to chat or call other users in the same group. However, almost all the main features of Discord require users to join a server or have friends.
Conclusion
Discord is an idea generated as a result of the need for an online platform that allowed gamers to interact with each other. The way Discord works are that it requires users to register first. Once registered, users can join a preexisting server or create their own server.
Users can also add other Discord users as friends. Furthermore, Discord allows users to use its various features once they have others to interact with, whether friends or servers.
