May 13, 2015 — Release of Discord

Discord officially launched on May 13, 2015.

Today it’s hard to imagine the internet without Discord. For many people, it’s no longer just a messenger, but a place where communities actually live: gaming clans, open source projects, student chats, servers about music, programming, anime, or simply groups of friends.

But in the mid-2010s, things looked very different. People usually used Skype, TeamSpeak, or Mumble for voice chat while gaming. Skype constantly overloaded computers and loved crashing right in the middle of a match. TeamSpeak looked like enterprise software from the early 2000s and required setting up separate servers.

Discord founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy were game developers themselves and understood this frustration very well. They wanted to build a service that launched in a minute, worked in the browser, and didn’t require explaining to friends how to connect.

Discord turned out to be a perfect product for its moment. Persistent servers, separate text and voice channels, low latency, decent performance even on weak computers, and the feeling of having “your own place” made the service extremely convenient.

Discord really started growing after the gradual disappearance of Xfire and the decline of TeamSpeak. People began moving not only gaming chats there, but entire communities.

At first, Discord was associated almost entirely with gaming. But during the COVID pandemic, everything changed very quickly. People started using Discord for online classes, work meetings, book clubs, podcast recordings, and even virtual parties.

In many ways, Discord became a modern version of old internet forums and IRC chats, just in a much more convenient form. The idea of “a server as a small private internet for your group of people” turned out to be surprisingly durable.