What the press could learn from Discord

On digital media's missing community

Dec 15, 2021

On Thursday, I’ll publish a bunch of predictions for 2022. Today I want to solicit yours — just reply to this email — and offer one to get us started. In 2022, I think we’re going to see a bunch of big publications launch Discord servers.

Today, let’s talk about why.

Recently someone pointed out to me the difference between the way young startup people launch projects in 2021, versus the way they launched them a decade ago. In the 2010s, this person told me, you began by creating a website. In 2021, you begin by creating a Discord server.

Discord began as a place for people to discuss playing video games, and it’s now a default expectation for any video game in development to host a Discord server to glean feedback from its players. In 2021, Discord also became the center of emerging interest in NFTs, DAOs, and other blockchain-based projects, and it became common for new projects to launch with little more than a Twitter account pointing to a Discord invitation.

The fast-paced, real-time nature of Discord can be overwhelming to newcomers, particularly in servers with hundreds or thousands of people typing enthusiastically at the same time. But the experience often proves to be habit-forming, and the more crypto-obsessed of the people I follow on Twitter often lament how many servers they’ve joined and how much time they spend there.

Why is it so habit-forming? I think Discord offers communities two key features that haven’t been widely available for the audiences of most media products to date.

One, Discord gives the most enthusiastic fans of a project direct access to the people who are making it, in the place where key decisions about the project are being made. Being in a good Discord can feel as if you’re in a live press conference with some of your favorite artists, builders, and meme lords, working on some sort of shared goal, whenever you want to be. It collapses the traditional distance between media makers and their audiences completely, and the result can be a lot of fun for both sides. (See: ConstitutionDAO.)

Two, Discord shortens feedback loops between makers and the people they are making things for. Even today, the norm in many video games and other art forms is still to make most things in secret, release them when they’re ready, and then wait for the reviews. Discord invites super-fans into the development process to offer feedback as the artwork is forming, identifying trouble spots and (ideally) shaping the project in a more mutually agreeable direction.

The ongoing pandemic, the rise in popularity of gaming and crypto projects, and excellent product design have contributed to a monster year for Discord: the company now claims 150 million monthly users, who log into 19 million active servers a week.

Most servers are quite small: 90 percent have 15 or fewer people. But there are tens of thousands of big servers dedicated to subjects including music, books, politics, and the economy. There are large, highly engaged audiences of news junkies logging on every day to discuss the day’s events.

All of which raises the question — where are the news organizations?

II.

Digital publishers love talking about “scale”: the sheer size of their audiences, measured through page views, Twitter followers, Instagram live viewers, and whatever other metrics might be plausibly collapsed into a figure numbering into the millions or billions.

Plenty of digital publishers do have significant scale, and have built good businesses on top of those audiences. But it’s striking, when you visit any of their sites, how little interaction there is between those publishers and their audiences. The tools they use have barely advanced in the past 20 years, and the points of entry for audiences who want to connect with their favorite writers in their publications today look — at least by modern internet standards — comically dated.

Letters to the editor? Only newspapers still bother. Web forums? Shut down in the early 2010s. Comments? Turned off by default for most stories. Many reporters, having been stung before by poorly moderated comment sections, pride themselves on never reading them anyway.

Of course, readers still have ample opportunity to comment on the journalism they’re reading: some days, I feel like the majority of the tweets I consume represent media criticism of one sort or another. But that’s not really an “audience” the way publishers typically conceive of it: as a group of dedicated, mostly friendly readers who want to engage with the stories, photos, and videos that their favorite sites are producing in a positive way.

Meanwhile, Discord is helping to redefine the relationship between media projects and their audiences, creating fresh expectations of access and participation. For now, most digital publishers don’t seem to have noticed. But in 2022, I think that will change.

Solo media entrepreneurs have already made live chat communities a core part of their offering. Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter about project management has a Slack community of 6,000 PMs. Many of my other favorite newsletters, including Garbage Day, She’s A Beast, and Today in Tabs, run Discords of their own.

Ryan Broderick’s good experience running the Garbage Day server inspired us and six other independent writers to create the Sidechannel server this spring, and each month has given me new reasons to appreciate the direct access to an audience that it enables. Readers push back on my ideas, send me tips, and suggest good tweets for the end of the newsletter. It makes Platformer feel a bit more like a group project, and I’ve benefited from it tremendously.

I also benefit from the relatively manageable size of the server: it’s rare to have more than a few hundred people in there chatting at once. If the New York Times or Washington Post or Vox.com were to open a Discord server, it would need to hire full-time moderators to keep things manageable, and even then the potential for chaos would be high.

At the same time, it would be a great perk to offer paying subscribers: real-time access to at least some of the publication’s journalists, some of the time, with a mix of live chat, audio and video talks, and perhaps even DM conversations. Publications could solicit story ideas, ask for feedback on ongoing projects, or ask server members to crowdsource materials for investigations — sharing hospital bills, say, or volunteering their experiences with absentee voting.

All of this would carry with it various complexities; there will always be many good reasons to say no. It may make more sense for the largest publishers to develop an in-house solution, rather than build once more on someone else’s platform.

And yet it seems strange that, in 2021, your best bet for meeting a journalist you admire is to pay thousands of dollars to attend one of their publication’s handful of live events during the year. That’s a strategy for keeping your audience small, rich, and at arm’s length. It certainly doesn’t feel anything like scale.

Fortunately, with Discord and apps like it, publishers now have a good alternative to their Web 1.0 toolkit. It’s never easy to build or manage a community, but amid the perpetual chaos of the media industry, a durable audience is among the most precious commodities a media company can claim. In 2022, I suspect some publishers will start to realize it, and invest accordingly.

Governing

⭐ Revisions to the United Kingdom’s proposed Online Safety Bill would create criminal penalties for promoting gender-based violence, self-harm, or sending unwanted nudes. The bill is expected to be debated in Parliament early next year. Here’s the BBC:

The first draft, published in May, put a "duty of care" on large social websites to remove harmful or illegal content and protect children. But it was largely left up to the tech giants themselves to police, with oversight from media regulator Ofcom.
But the parliamentary report calls for Ofcom to set much more explicit standards, and have even greater powers to investigate and fine big tech firms.

The UK’s increasingly aggressive Competition and Markets Authority made a provisional finding that Apple and Google have worked to unfairly limit competition in mobile operating systems and app development. The CMA is seeking public input on its finding, and plans to wrap up the inquiry by February. (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)

OSHA opened a probe into the deadly Amazon warehouse collapse in Illinois. Six employees were killed. (Annie Palmer / CNBC)

Workers at Citizen, the app designed to make you fear your community and anyone you see walking down the street, voted to unionize. The next step is to come together in a spirit of true solidarity and shut down the company. (Brody Ford and Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg)

NSO Group is considering shutting down its Pegasus spyware division, or even selling the company, amid revelations that its software was used for the exact purpose it was designed for. I support both of these ideas; can we get them done by end of week? (Yaacov Benmeleh and Eliza Ronalds-Hannon / Bloomberg)

Some recent Bay Area flash mob thefts were planned on Snapchat. “Law-enforcement officials say loosely organized groups known as flash mobs come together to commit the thefts after someone posts a target and a time on social media.” (Zusha Elinson / Wall Street Journal)

How Beijing influences the influencers. “Together, six of the most popular of these influencers have garnered more than 130 million views on YouTube and more than 1.1 million subscribers.” They’re bought and paid for by the Chinese ruling party. (Paul Mozur, Raymond Zhong, Aaron Krolik, Aliza Aufrichtig / New York Times)

Industry

⭐ In Google’s latest chaotic carriage-rights dispute, YouTube TV said customers are about to lose access to 18 Disney channels. I really hate this aspect of our dumb future. Here’s Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

A failure to get a deal done will take out a large swath of YouTube TV’s programming lineup. The company says if that’s the case, it will try to make things right with users by lowering the monthly price for its streaming service. Instead of charging subscribers $64.99 per month, it would decrease its price by $15 to $49.99 per month for however long the Disney-owned content remains off its platform.
The company also said that while it hopes every member will stay subscribed, it will allow customers to either pause or cancel the service if they choose, as usual. But if customers decide to stay with YouTube TV for its other programming, they could access Disney content directly through The Disney Bundle, a $13.99/month subscription.

Snap said it paid out more than $250 million to creators in 2021 as part of its effort to jump-start Spotlight. While I love this for the creators, its unclear that much of their work has resonated outside the app itself. (Todd Spangler / Variety)

Related: Snap released Story Studio, a video editing app for mobile. It was first announced in May, and is now testing on iOS in the US, UK, and Canada. (Mia Sato / The Verge)

Instagram surpassed 2 billion monthly users. I’d love to know how that compares to Facebook usage these days. (Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC)

Facebook’s parent company paid $60 million to acquire the trademark assets of U.S. regional bank Meta Financial Group. It’s unclear what brand the banks are taking on. (David French and Elizabeth Culliford / Reuters)

WhatsApp will now hide your ‘last seen’ status by default. A welcome privacy protection. (Emma Roth / The Verge)