Discord

Description

In 2012, Jason Citron took $104 million from the sale of his mobile gaming network OpenFeint and founded a game studio called Hammer & Chisel. The studio spent two years developing Fates Forever, a multiplayer battle arena game for iPad that Citron hoped would prove that the format could work on tablets. The game was released in 2014 and received little attention.

What people did use was the voice and text chat built into the game for player co-ordination. That observation led to a pivot. Hammer & Chisel laid off a third of its employees, closed down game development, and focused everything on a stand-alone communication tool for gamers. The name Discord was derived from Citron’s search for something that sounded related to talking. It was available for trademark.

Discord opened to the public on May 13, 2015 — the day strangers started using it. Someone posted a link to the Discord in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit and a few hundred people joined the same afternoon. From there the spread was organic. Gaming subreddits replaced IRC links with Discord links. Esports teams and LAN tournament organizers moved in. By November 2015 the platform passed the one million user mark. The growth was significantly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which doubled the number of monthly active users to about 140 million in 2020 alone.

Discord reported having more than 200 million monthly active users in early 2024 and more than 650 million registered accounts in late 2025.

SERVERS AND CHANNELS

Discord organizes communication into servers — self-contained community spaces that users create or join by invitation. Servers break down into channels: text channels for asynchronous messages and voice channels where members communicate in real time by walking in and out without scheduling a call.

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, the co-founder and CTO of Discord, explained the server layout as a house where you can move from one room to another. Voice channels sit open. Clicking on one connects you immediately. Leaving will close the connection. There’s no dial tone, there’s no calendar invite. The server’s permanence and the frictionlessness of joining together make something closer to ambient presence than scheduled communication.

Administrators assign roles, which determine who can read, write, manage or moderate specific channels. Bots — automated accounts built by third-party developers — cover everything from moderation and spam filtering to playing music, running polls and integrating with outside services. The biggest Discord server as of 2025 is the official Midjourney community, which surpassed 20 million members. Server discovery for public communities works through the use of Discord’s Explore page, which serves up servers by category and member count.

COMMUNICATION FEATURES

Text channels support markdown formatting, inline images, file attachments, embedded links, reactions, and threaded replies. Voice channels transmit audio at low latency and screen sharing up to 4K at 60 frames per second for Nitro subscribers. Video calls up to 25 participants, work inside voice channels and in direct messages. Stage Channels are for audio only broadcasts that are appropriate for live talks or community events.

Direct messages do not require any server to function. Group DMs are for up to ten people. Discord does not usually store voice or video call contents.

Activities, which were introduced in 2021 and expanded through 2024, embed interactive applications directly inside voice channels. Users can play games, watch YouTube videos together or use collaborative whiteboards without having to leave a voice conversation. Discord has native integrations with Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, GitHub, Google Calendar, Xbox Live, etc.

DISCORD NITRO

Discord’s basic features are free. Discord Nitro, the paid subscription tier, adds enhancements instead of gating the base experience behind a paywall. Nitro is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. A less expensive Nitro Basic tier at $2.99 a month covers a narrower set of perks.

Nitro subscribers receive animated profile avatars, custom emoji in any server, larger file upload limits (up to 500 MB, as opposed to the free 10 MB), HD video streaming, and a custom profile banner. Each Nitro subscription comes with two Server Boosts. Servers gain increasingly higher levels as they gain boosts — more emoji slots, better audio quality, an animated server icon. Nitro subscribers receive a 30% discount on additional boosts than the two included.

Server Subscriptions allow server owners to charge members for access to certain channels, retaining 90% of the revenue. The Discord Shop is used to sell digital cosmetic items. Discord also launched Sponsored Quests in 2024 as its first advertising format: opt-in challenges where users stream a particular game for a set time and receive in-game rewards, with game publishers paying Discord to place the Quest. Revenue estimates for 2024 varied between about $725 million and $879 million, largely due to Nitro and boosts. Discord was not profitable throughout this time.

SAFETY AND MODERATION

Discord’s scale presented safety problems from the beginning. In August 2017, organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, used Discord to organize the event, which resulted in the death of a counter-protester. Discord banned the servers involved and increased enforcement of white nationalist content.

In April 2023, the platform, called Discord, was the scene of one of the largest classified intelligence leaks in recent US history. Documents about the Russian-Ukrainian war, US spying and alliance relations were circulated on a small Minecraft-focused Discord server, with someone taking pictures of the documents and posting them. Discord cooperated with the Defense Department and Justice Department, removed the content and banned the accounts involved. A National Guardsman was later arrested.

Discord has about 900 employees as of 2025, of which about 15% are in trust and safety. Moderation works on three levels: Discord-wide Community Guidelines that are enforced by the company, server-level rules that are enforced by volunteer administrators and moderators, and user-level controls over who can contact them and what content they see. Discord has PhotoDNA to scan for known child sexual abuse material, machine learning models for large-scale detection, and an AutoMod system that allows server moderators to set keyword filters. The company acquired an AI safety firm Sentropy in 2021. Teen Safety Assist, which was introduced in 2023, sets default restrictions for accounts of users under 18.

France’s data protection authority CNIL has fined Discord EUR800,000 in November 2022 for GDPR violations.

MICROSOFT ACQISITION TALK AND INDEP.MICROSOFT ACQISIT TALK AND INDEP.

In early 2021, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal reported that several companies were considering buying Discord, with Microsoft being the likely buyer at an estimated $10 billion. Discord terminated these talks and remained independent. Sony Interactive Entertainment invested in April 2021 funding round, which valued Discord at $15 billion. Later secondary market activity in 2025 put the implied valuation closer to $9-10 billion.

Jason Citron stepped down as CEO in April 2025, handing the role to Humam Sakhnini, the former vice chairman at Activision Blizzard who helped lead that company through its acquisition by Microsoft. Citron remained on the board of directors at Discord. Reports in early 2025 suggested that Discord was in preliminary discussions with banks on a potential IPO, but no timeline was given. The CEO transition was interpreted by analysts as preparation for that process.