I’ve encountered a reference to “Discord” on a Patreon account I support.
What is Discord?
How do use it?
Yes, I know. But I am trying to find out if this is something I can benefit from.
Discord is essentially a chat website/app. You’re essentially getting access to an exclusive chat room (or set of rooms) that only Patrons can use. It can also do voice chat and video chat, though these aren’t as common as Patreon perks.
(BTW, are the images in the link box broken for everyone? It’s weirds, as I can view them if I open them manually.)
In many ways, it’s a more modern version of THIS place. Generally a Discord group has a specific theme or focus, but will have several sub-threads related to the primary goal, with subbed members listed for direct chats as well as live text/image contents being frequently posted to the various threads. The voice chat is particularly common for Discord gaming groups as well, for things such as Raids or PvP communication for those who don’t want to use or don’t have the option to use the providers option.
Some Discords are suuuuuper narrow, some are quite general, and everything in between.
Some DO provide perks for people who sign up for the Discord, and it’s often similar to Patreon perks - early releases, special features and the like, but most are for discussions about whatever passion inspired the Discord.
If it’s akin to anything legacy in its implementation, it’s IRC (like Reddit is to Newsgroups).
Yeah, 99% of what I’ve used Discord for is the voice chat. It’s a pretty easy and powerful voice chat client, with a lot of group-related stuff.
I mean, you could use it as an offline sort of group/message board thing, but everything I’ve ever known people to use it for are primarily centered around using the voice chat while gaming. I mean, people do send group messages saying “I’m/we’re playing X, get on the #whatever room with us if you are playing” or things like that.
I’ve been actively using Discord for three or four years now, entirely for gaming-related stuff.
That use falls into three distinct camps:
- I’m in several Discord “servers*” related to the MMORPG that I play; most of them have fairly small membership numbers, and are essentially groups of friends, or members of in-game “guilds.” Those Discord channels tend to be largely text-based conversations, though some do use the voice channels to coordinate playing game content together.
- I’m also in several channels for my various tabletop RPG groups; there, we actively use the voice chat (and sometimes video) to play together even though we aren’t all in the same location (a boon during the height of COVID), but we also use the text channels for an automated dice-roller, to share pictures of characters, etc.
- Finally (and relevant to the OP), I’m a member of a Discord server that’s dedicated to a particular RPG publishing group which I support on Patreon; while that server has a number of different channels that any fan of the RPG group can participate in, it also has several channels which are only accessible to the group’s Patreon supporters.
Discord is free to use, though one can buy a paid subscription (Nitro) to “boost” a server (better video quality and other perks). Most of the Discord servers I’m familiar with are private – i.e., you can’t join the server without an invitation.
*- “Server” is the term that Discord uses to describe a particular community/group within its universe; they’re somewhat analogous to subreddits on Reddit.
Just in case it’s worth clarifying for folks reading the thread - it sounds like Discord access is indeed limited to patrons in the context discussed above, but it’s not always configured in that way; discord is an invitation-only discussion forum, but the ‘invitation’ can be a link that is posted either in a private members-only place such as Patreon, or can be posted in the open (such as on the ‘about’ page of a YouTube channel, or on a regular web page, or in an email or anywhere else a link can be given)
Whereas I’ve only ever seen it used as a group/message board thing …
Yeah, I’m also a member of a Patreon Discord server for a YouTube channel, and in this case it’s partially open to non-supporters, but only supporters can vote on future content etc. or participate in some of the threads.
They definitely started as a gaming-centric platform although they’ve expanded away from that (although it’s still in heavy use there).
The ones I’m on are mostly used to offline coordinate people who might want to play (e.g. “Hey- anyone on?” type stuff), and then there’s a fair deal of people posting cool songs, articles, etc… that we might like. And when people are actually playing, it’s used for voice chat and video streaming (some games have limited numbers of players at once, so some people have to watch).
We have a Discord chat group for my wife’s family (many siblings, aunts and uncles, etc.). Mostly an outgrowth from her younger brothers’ familiarity with Discord in gaming contexts.
I wasn’t trying to say you were wrong, just offering a contrasting user experience.
I’m closer to this side. Discord started as an alternative to clients like Teamspeak and Ventrilo where gamers used it to talk to one another while playing. But, these days, I primarily see it used more like IRC or other text-chat clients with the voice capability as a side offering. Granted, there’s probably some level of confirmation bias at play here but all the largest Discord servers I’ve seen are primarily chat-based. Likewise, even the smaller gaming servers I’m on are more “Everyone idly text-chats during the day and maybe hops into voice for a few hours in the evening while gaming”.
Discord has recently introduced features to make it more “Message board” like if that’s what the channel mods want but I still think it’s closest to IRC right now.
Others have offered basic information about what Discord is.
I’ll just chime in to say that Discord is in my experience better than Zoom or any other group meeting/messaging platform that I have used for organizing groups of people remotely.
You can create a “server” for your group, and the server can be populated with many different forums: You can have a forum for just administrative messages, one for rules, and fora for specific topics. You can even set up separate channels for audio/visual sessions.
Above someone mentioned role-playing games. Discord works great for this kind of group. You can message each other on the text channels and then when you have your actual meeting, you can use the audio/video channel.
Discord offers very powerful tools to the server owner to be able to control who gets in, who can post in which channels, etc.
Now, what I think Discord is not as useful for is for large fan communities for a popular, say, YouTube host, or a popular subject. These kinds of servers have too many members and the server gets blitzed by hundreds and hundreds of posts.
But, if the membership is reasonably limited, I think it can be useful for creating a chat forum for members to participate in.
By the way, I think the text channels are far more utilised than the audio/video channels. So, to some extent you could describe a Discord server as a kind of SDMB for a particular subject matter and invitation-only membership.
Yeah, the textual part is like a sort of old style chat room, but one in which message board-like threads can also be spun off
Still confused here.
So is Discord a service, only offered by some company with their own severs? Sign up as “master” and and create/invite your own group for BBS-chat/video/voice? Clients can download a client software to connect? (Sort of like Twitter or Facebook, Reddit, etc.)
Or is it software - download it and create your own server on your computer and set it up for the rest of your group or the general public to participate on?
And follow-up: then what is StraightDope, is it running on its own server(s)?
It’s the former. They call the individual groups “servers,” but all of it is hosted on Discord’s own servers; none of it is hosted locally on a user’s computer.
One can download the client software (they have versions for desktop/laptop computers, and for mobile devices), or just access it through a web browser.
Discord is a specific online service, with its own website. You go to their website and download their software to your computer or your phone to access it.
“Server” is just Discord jargon for a specific group set up by the owner and its collection of channels. It isn’t directly comparable to the meaning of “server” generally in computer technology.
Yes. Discord hosts the whole thing on their software. You sign up and anyone can start a “server”. For functional purposes, a “Server” is the entire thing and “Channels” are the more focused sub-entities in the Server.
This is a channel named HolyGround I’m on to coordinate a weekly RPG game. There are groups for different games we play such as Starfinder and Kingmaker. Under the Kingmaker group, I am currently in the #Chat channel where we are BS’ing about the game between sessions. The bottom channel with a speaker and labeled “KM” is a voice channel we can go on to use voice chat. To the left are other icons representing other Channels I am a member of.
As others noted, you can access Discord either via a separate app/client on mobile, PC (and presumably Mac) or you can just access the channels via their website.
In fact, we transitioned from Ventrilo to Discord in about 2016
True. Ours is basically a gang of people just posting vaguely interesting/funny/silly stuff and quick comments during the day, and then trying to actively set up games later in the evenings and on weekends.