Twice in this week I’ve seen Youtubers invite people to join them on their discord. What the heck is a discord? I have googled and it doesn’t seem to be any sort of illegal file sharing system.
I’m not not completely computer illiterate, but I’m definitely not keeping up with the times.
Our son and a group of friends use it to talk online.
It’s a VOIP chat system that allows you to share your screen so other members of the group can see it, you can post videos & such. It also includes a general chat function. Lots of gamers user it for online gaming, raids & such. Not creepy, dangerous or illegal, as far as I can tell.
Just to build on this – Discord supports both voice chat and text chat.
I’m in a number of them related to the MMORPGs that I play. Guilds, and other groups of players within games, set up their own “servers” so that the group can chat, share info, and share bad memes.
One can access Discord via its own app (which is available for both computers and mobile devices), or in a Web browser.
Am I the only one who sees that and thinks “Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!”?
Chaos reigns.
Fnord
In the context of a youtuber’s discord channel, it’s far more likely to be used for text rather than voice chat. So, basically the youtuber is inviting people to join his chat room.
I remember the days of the early internet (say 1996-1999), when chat rooms were a huge new thing. Then they faded away.
Is discord different than ICQ and AOL chat rooms of old?
(also, why is it called “discord”? To my ears, that sounds negative, like disconcordant)
I dispute your chronology: chat rooms, at least in the form of IRC and similar, were a “huge new thing” more like 1989. What you didn’t have were screen sharing, video and audio chat, and similar advanced/high bandwidth features.