Background
Discord, formerly a free web-based real-time chat room software designed for the video game community, is now evolving into a messenger and social platform combined. Now, it is not just for gamers but provides a new interactive social channel for strangers with the same interests. Now Discord, which was only born in 2015, now has 150 Million monthly active users. Even today, many courses in schools use Discord channels as a communication channel.
Introduction
When Discord appeared, the social platform seemed to have reached a bottleneck in the industry. Well-known social software such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are integrated into most of the user’s life scenarios, so it seems difficult for such an emerging social software to succeed in this field. However, Discord has become one of the most popular social software these days, and its success has a lot to do with it capturing the main needs of the current social group (of course, the pandemic has also helped a lot).
Analysis
There are several reasons for Discord’s success in social networking
- Discord identifies users’ social needs and focuses on addressing their core needs. Due to the development of the Internet, unlike in the past, most users are now pursuing real-time social interaction. And Discord provides such a low-latency, multi-platform social software. Users can even use most of the Discord’s main functions through the web without downloading any software. This ease of use is a big factor in Discord’s success. At the same time, users can open the Discord channel link shared by friends and join the channel without any threshold, which helps Discord to spread quickly in the social network, allowing more users to easily access and use the software.
- Discord’s channel nature is also a big factor in its success, with its channels supporting both weak and strong tie networks. According to statistics, 90% of Discord channels have less than 15 users. That’s certainly a large number of channels, but at the same time, the largest Discord channel even has 845,000 subscribers right now. (More statics can be accessed here link) This phenomenon exists because the administrator of the Discord channel can easily set the channel joining mechanism and decide whether to share the link of the channel with more people. This degree of freedom allows users to create a private channel of their own strong social network, as well as join a public channel with most users who share the same hobbies. According to my observation, users in private channels often invite their friends to join the channel, which increases the number of users in private channels, while in public channels, users can easily find like-minded friends and expand their own channels. Friends circle, and then invite these friends to their own channels… This virtuous circle has also helped the development of Discord.
Conclusion
This online social model created by Discord is undoubtedly a success. It gives users a high degree of freedom to improve their experience, allowing users to choose different social modes according to their needs. Its success is not only due to the dividends the pandemic has brought to the online industry, but also because it fits the social habits of online users. From some phenomena of channels and users, it is not difficult to see some classic social network models. Each channel is like a group of communities in the network. Proved some theories about social networks.
Reference
Hadji-Vasilev, A. (2022, August 19). 20 discord statistics, Facts and Trends for 2022. Cloudwards. Retrieved October 28, 2022, from https://www.cloudwards.net/discord-statistics/