What Social Media Platforms are Doing Right (from a Teenage User’s Perspective): Part 1 — Discord

Hello! I’m Amy, and in this series I’ll be reviewing several social media platforms I use, why I use them, what makes them special, and what exactly I like about them that keeps me, and all of my friends, avid users.

Part 1 — Discord
The name ‘Discord’ might not be quite as well known as some of the massive social media platforms. It’s a relatively new company (founded on May 13, 2015 by Jason Citron), but it’s actually quite popular. What started off as a platform mostly for streaming or multiplayer games quickly grew into something that is used for a variety of different purposes, from school clubs/classes to fanservers for popular works of literature or TV shows.

Discord has a lot to boast about, with over 6.7 million Discord servers created and over 14 million daily active users, as well as an incredible height of 10.6 million peak concurrent users. (https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/)

Why? Because Discord does group chats right.

Discord Is Organized

Discord has private messages just like any other chat platform, and there’s nothing particularly special there, so I’m going to skip the rundown on that. Discord’s main appeal is its group chats. Allowing up to a few hundred people to join a Discord ‘server’, with each user being able to be in up to a hundred servers means group activities are so much easier on Discord.

One of my friends playing a pokemon game through a bot. You roll with the command ‘$p’, and have a random chance of winning a pokemon. The higher the row number, the rarer the pokemon. You can trade these pokemon in for bot perks like changes in status or player level!

This is what a Discord page looks like. On the very left is all the servers I’m in and their icons, beside that is the channels of the server I’m currently looking at. You can see I’m on the “mudae” channel in the “bots” folder. My emoji are pulled up, several of which are custom ones from the server. On the right is everyone who can see the channel I’m on, and who’s currently online, and what they’re doing.

Discord formatting is clear and concise-you know where you are and where you could go, as well as the fact that it’s very visually appealing-the bright colors and clear rows are extremely aesthetic.

Various channels in a server, neatly organized with folders like “music” and “arts”

Servers in Discord are a thing I’ve yet to see done well in any other social media platform, managing to have massive group chats and keep everything neat.

Two channels, one of which I have access to, and one that I can’t read or chat in. This all depends on your Discord roles, certain chats only accessible if you have a certain role. This is yet another clever organization function on Discord.

With the clear separation of various channels for different conversation topics, roles that only allow select people to chat in or see channels, voice channels for calling or listening to music, and channel separation folders, Discord has an incredible organization system somewhat reminiscent of a filing cabinet.

This organization makes Discord chatting simple and user-friendly, a huge part of why it’s so popular.

Because of Discord’s understanding of how large chat groups should work, it’s a platform used by just about every group activity I know. I myself am in Discord servers for school clubs, gaming, anime, extracurriculars, and art. Discord allows for group conversations with lots of people, creating an easier and more organized method of communication.

Not only does Discord do text chats well, it also has voice chats, where you can talk with other people, and video and voice chats, similar to zoom meetings. Discord calls are extremely fun and I’ve noticed they actually tend to have less lag than legitimate meeting sites like Google Meets.

Discord, since it originated as a game streaming platform, also has a streaming feature I actually highly enjoy. One person can stream their computer screen, and others can watch them play video games or show off cool things or even watch movies together.

On top of that, Discord is fun.

Custom emoji reactions from a server I’m in. We love to use these to show moods that aren’t covered by your regular default emojis, and because they’re really fun to chat with!

Servers allow you to make your own emoji reactions, something I and all of my friends extremely enjoy.

My roles in a server, that allow me to access various chats and also “origami”, which is a joke between me and my friends.

Three bots from discord, one that sends memes, one that does all sorts of various things, and one that sends pictures and plays user-interactive games.

You can also make custom roles for people, some of which are for server organization and channel access keys, and some that are literally just jokes.

Discord also has bots that make group interactions enjoyable (Counting, Rhythm, Mudae) and encourage users to chat more (MEE6 Ranks, Counting). Bots on Discord have just about unlimited potential, adding in fun ways to pass the time while chatting.

Other things I like:

One little thing I actually really really like in Discord is the ability to pin things. Pinning something in a channel or private chat causes it to show up on a “pinboard”, so you can see it easily and jump back to that conversation at any time. It’s both a way to memorialize funny quotes/situations and also to pin important information you want everyone with access to that channel to see and easily be able to go back to.

Discord allows people to rename themselves in different servers, another little quirk of the platform I really really like. Some servers I’m in are my close friends, where I might use my nickname ‘Ori’ as my chat username. In others, I might use ‘Amy’. In an anime server with people I don’t know, I might use something else to identify myself with, like the name of my favorite character.

Discord also does something I personally am very fond of, which is hiding easter eggs inside the platform. There’s a secret ringtone you could get while calling someone, a snake game you can play on the 404 page if you click a secret area, endless fun little things that make the platform feel like it’s somewhere you as a user want to be.

Summary
So why is Discord a platform that I’m such a big fan of? What does Discord do right?

1. Group Chats. Discord group chats are simple, neat, organized, easy to use, and aesthetic. They can support a lot of people.
2. Fun! Discord is extremely visually appealing with its bright colors and variety of text effects like italics, bold, underline, and strikethrough. It also has all sorts of bots and games you can play, and even secret easter eggs you can discover.
3. Freedom. Discord allows the user lots of power, letting us create custom emojis, gifs, bots or bot commands, roles, which makes all Discord chats feel so much more personal and lively.
4. The Little Things. Discord goes out of its way to include tiny things that mean a lot to the user, like having different nicknames in different chats, having chat pinboards, and little fun facts about the site/app during the loading screen, Discord is just a platform that gives off the impression that it cares about its users.

That’s all for my review on things I like/things that are special about Discord.

Index
PART ONE
Part 2 — Instagram
Part 3 — Tumblr