Not long ago, it was a humble chat platform for video game enthusiasts.
Now, thanks to its role in one of the biggest intelligence leaks in U.S. history, Discord is suddenly the focus of national attention and growing questions about how classified Pentagon documents circulated on it for weeks, maybe months.
It’s a sudden public turn for a platform that has quietly amassed a gigantic user base and taken on an increasingly central place in internet culture. Boosted by an increase in popularity during the pandemic, Discord has quietly become a fundamental piece of the internet’s social infrastructure.
Discord’s website says the platform has more than 150 million active monthly users. It was the eighth-most-downloaded global social networking app in 2022, according to Apptopia, an app analysis company.
Released in 2015 by the gamers Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, Discord was created to help gamers chat more easily while playing together. While similar chat services exist, Discord was a more accessible, succinct service for gamers.
The app is organized in what are called “servers,” which function as broader communities in which many chat rooms can exist. Its functionality is similar to many workplace chat programs such as Slack. A user can either create a server for their friends or followers to join, or they can join someone else’s server. Some servers are invite-only while others are public. Discord reports that it has 19 million active servers per week.
Once on a server, users can access text chatrooms or voice chatrooms. Roughly 100 people can join a voice chat. Video chat services on Discord are more limited.
Chat rooms were an early mainstay of the internet, though they fell out of fashion as social media became dominant. Discord succeeded in part because of its embrace of already-fervent gaming communities, giving them a space to easily congregate online.
The leak of documents intersected with Discord’s robust gaming community, having been found on…
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