With such popularity, perhaps you have asked yourself: “What is Discord?”.
Discord offers a safe place to spend time with friends, create communities, or even share content on a specific subject with others.
Here are some information and curiosities about Discord, including what it is, who can use it, and its main features.
What is the Discord platform?
With Discord, users chat with other people through video calls, audio or message exchanges in communities, system server calls, or privately. It is similar to Skype, TeamSpeak, or Slack.
Since it is easily connected with multiple industry platforms, it is strongly related to electronic games, but this is a direct result of its origin.
Platform origin
Jason Ceitron and Stanislav Vishenky created discord to solve a common problem in the gaming community: the difficulty of communicating and organizing tactics during online games. As a result, the platform was developed with an easy-to-use interface and the capability to overlap with competitive games without affecting performance.
The curious point is that the literal translation is: “Discord,” which gives an ironic connotation since Discord is a platform with a social focus. However, this was one of the reasons why the creators decided to name the platform that way.
Essentially, the idea was to “fix a discord between players” by providing a platform for communication, discussion, and idea sharing between lovers of the same subject. Additionally, the creators recognized that the word was easy to memorize and pronounce and had a free domain and website. All of this resulted in the system being baptized Discord.
How Discord works
Discord is popularly known for creating communities where a company, artist, study group or fans can create, in the same environment, private or public communication channels for sharing files, information and news, curiosities and a discussion environment about a common theme.
When creating a server, you can create and assign roles to different users, helping to keep your community organized and safe.
In addition to the social aspect, it serves as a space for personal conversations in private chats, where the user can add friends to chat and on servers by topics in text channels or voice channels.
Is Discord safe?
As in all virtual life, a question always appears in users’ minds: is it safe to use?
Discord offers a field for the user to control their experience, defining what other users can do on their servers.
In addition, there is an area of the company dedicated to the security of user information, with fraud and phishing bots that fight scams and leakage of important information, in addition to other warning functions about the risk of suspicious external links.
Main features of Discord
Everything on Discord revolves around social function. The platform allows, in addition to sharing images and videos, screen sharing, customizing servers by placing bots on Discord, and custom emojis.
Another interesting function is the possibility of connecting your Discord account with several other social networks and game companies. It is possible to connect with:
- Battle.net;
- Epic Games;
- Facebook;
- GitHub;
- PlayStation Network;
- Reddit;
- Spotify;
- Steam;
- Twitch;
- Twitter;
- Xbox;
- YouTube.
Differences between the web and software version
There are not so many differences between one version and another. The layout of the menus and where to access the settings are the same. However, performance is improved with the application installed on the computer.
In addition, the main difference is the overlay in the game, discreetly showing who is on the call and who is currently speaking, and some shortcuts to configure sounds and conversation participants, which is not possible to do via browser.
Who is Discord for?
Even with a focus on gamers, Discord is a platform that everyone can use. This becomes evident when creating a new community with pre-established profiles that help create structured servers. Some themed servers are:
- Games;
- School club;
- Study group;
- Friends;
- Artists and Creators;
- Local Community.
In addition, the platform allows you to fully customize the server without following pre-definitions, making the platform suitable for all types of audiences.
What makes Discord different?
What sets Discord apart from other systems is that it allows for many different forms of interaction, including live streaming to your community directly from the platform. Look at the text on the side, where we prepared a comparison between Discord and Slack with more information about the two platforms.
Discord is an expansive platform offering multiple options for content creation, social interaction, and space for meetings between friends, family, and work.
