Discord: The Next Big Thing? A First Look at Discord’s Growth, Servers, and Users Ethan Chiu Eni Mustafaraj Wellesley High School Computer Science Department
[email protected] Wellesley College
[email protected] Abstract—Discord, a voice chat and instant messaging platform platforms is useful to support research that goes beyond “Twit- that went live in March 2015, started as a meeting place for ter research”; (4) how users communicate on a decentralized video games enthusiasts. It expanded quickly, without drawing platform. mainstream attention, until shortly after the “Unite the Right rally” in Charlottesville where the New York Times reported Our contributions in this paper are three-fold: (1) We pro- Discord becoming ‘favorite chat app” of alt-right and it had vide a comprehensive description of Discord and its features been used for advertising and gathering support for the rally. that is currently missing in the research literature of social Since apologizing and removing these hate groups, Discord has media and online communities; (2) we present a series of grown to 87 million users. To date, there has been no in-depth ways that serve to reconstruct the breakout path of Discord, research on this platform yet. How do we study the growth and characteristics of a platform that supports decentralized without relying on any data from the Discord platform itself, anonymous communities? Our study provides the first in-depth but by only making use of its footprints on other platforms; look at Discord’s platform, growth, servers, and users. (3) we analyze how users interact on a Discord server; (4) we analyze messages collected from two Discord servers for I.