Discord is a video game-focused voice and chat app that you’ll want to start using if you’re a gamer. Here’s everything you need to know about Discord.
What is Discord these days; an app for gamers, a community-building app, an off-the-beaten path social media alternative, or a more personal alternative to streaming on Twitch? It’s not as cut and dried as it used to be, where the entire platform was centered around gaming. If you’re the chronically online sort or (increasingly) just sort of online, you’ve probably heard a content creator invite you to join their Discord. With a greater emphasis on community than pure gaming, it can be easy to get lost as to what Discord actually is today, as well as what it does.
Here, we explore how to use Discord, it’s most important features, and what makes it different than other platforms. Along the way we’ll discover what Discord does, who it will appeal to, and how to make the most of your time on Discord if you decide to use it.Further readingSo, what is Discord?
Discord is a chat app that’s similar to programs such as Skype, TeamSpeak, and professional communications platforms like Slack. It’s geared specifically toward video game players, providing them with ways to find each other, coordinate play, and talk while playing. It supports video calls, voice chat, and text, allowing users to get in touch however they please.
Discord is especially useful if you’re trying to play PC games. The app makes chatting pretty easy and offers search functions that can help you find other people and add them to a friends list for quick communication. Lots of people use it not just for talking to each other while playing games but as an organizational and social tool as well.
Thanks to this breadth of functionality, users have also embraced Discord as a semi-public, forum-style community platform. Groups of players with common interests, such as fans of a particular game or studio, can create or join “servers,” both public and private, where lots of people can meet and hang out, chatting via text, video, or voice.
While most of the servers are related to gaming, you can also find public Discord servers that focus on a variety of topics, including things like anime, cryptocurrency, self-improvement, and just making friends and hanging out. There’s also nothing requiring servers to be created for gaming, so if you want a place in Discord to discuss a topic, you can always make one. Handy places to find and search for public servers include Discord.me, Disboard.org, and Discordservers.com.
Oh, and finally, Discord is free.What separates Discord from other platforms?
Though there are a lot of free communication programs online, Discord stands out thanks to its wide array of chat options. It combines all the best features of more commonly used programs, such as Skype and Slack, with an easy-to-use interface. A voice chat program wouldn’t be much use if it slowed down your games while you’re using it, so the team making Discord is dedicated to making it as efficient as possible.
That versatility has led large groups of users to embrace Discord as a place to meet and chat with people who have similar interests, not just friends. It’s part communications app, part social media portal. While the chat room side of the app, in which users can join public or private “servers,” is probably its most popular, it also provides a social forum that’s great for organizing people to play games as well. Essentially, you don’t need video games to make Discord useful — it’s extremely handy for joining with groups of friends on a private server or meeting like-minded folks on public ones.
When you create a Discord server, you can configure it in a multitude of ways by setting up different roles for members, such as creating roles for other administrators and moderators or creating a special role for your most active members. Setting up different member roles has a number of benefits for your server, including making it easier to manage your server, rewarding members for being active, and providing different access permissions. Remember that your Discord channel’s moderators, also known as ‘Discord mods’, will have special permissions in your channel that normal users do not.
Discord is also accessible through a number of means, which makes it easy to use even if you’re not sitting in front of a gaming PC. The app has a downloadable PC program you can run on your computer — which is the handy, lightweight version best for running in the background while you play games — as well as a web-based version, a mobile version, and a beta version on consoles. That means you can interact with people in your Discord chat servers from basically anywhere, extending the social capabilities of the app.How to use Discord
So, if Discord is for you, then how can you use the app effectively? Here, we explore what Discord does and additional features to make the most of your experience.Find a server (or make one)
So how does Discord work? In a word: servers. As with other chat apps, such as Slack, Discord lets you set up a chat room it refers to as a server, to which you can invite people. When you invite someone to the server, they get a link that lets them join it, where they can either text or voice chat with other people using that server. Each server can be broken down further into “channels,” small spaces for discussions on specific topics, as opposed to one giant live forum. Channels come in text and voice versions to further make them easier to use. You can also make individual channels on your server private so only people who are invited into those rooms can use them. On top of that, the whole server can be either public, which anyone can join, or private, which makes it invite-only.
You can be a part of multiple servers at a time, making Discord a hub for social interaction. You might have one private server for you and your friends specifically so you can coordinate before playing a game while also being a part of several public servers (we joined the local Pokémon Go Discord server to try to find people to raid with, for example). There’s no limit on how many servers you can be a part of. You can easily switch from server to server at will. The list of your servers is always displayed on the left side of the app, and choosing your destination is simply a matter of clicking one or another.
