At least he's trying to bring something new to the market," noted Japanese gaming analyst Serkan Toto at the time, adding that Mr. Citron's reputation was "like a geek in a good way."
Citron now runs the well-known communications platform and calls the change "amazing, wonderful, and overwhelming."
a series of chat rooms russia number data similar to Slack—where you can have casual, free-flowing conversations about games, music, memes, and everyday life. Some servers are large and open to the public, while others are invite-only.
The service is ad-free. It makes money from subscriptions that give users access to features like user emojis for $5 or $10 a month. Discord also began experimenting in December, allowing some users to charge up to $100 a month for access to its servers, with the company taking 10%.
As noted by The New York Times, a source familiar with the company's finances, Discord's profit last year amounted to $130 million. However, officials do not say whether the business was profitable.
The biggest change in business occurred at the beginning of the pandemic.
In June 2020, Citron wrote a blog post that Discord was moving beyond video games and working to become more accessible to everyone. A few months earlier, the company had changed its tagline from “Chat for Gamers” to “A New Way to Connect with Your Communities and Friends” as a welcoming gesture to a wider audience.
The transition wasn’t easy. Discord faced the same pressing issues as other social platforms: regulating speech, protecting against harassment, and ensuring the safety of young people.
Discord allows people to chat using fake names, and enforcement of community standards is largely left to individual server organizers. This gives the platform a Lord of the Flies feel, with groups of young people forming online communities and setting their own rules.
In 2017, white nationalists gathered on far-right Discord servers to plan a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to a report by the New York Times, despite Discord executives being aware of the nationalists’ presence on the platform, they did not interfere with them until after the rally took place.
Since then, the company has become more serious about content moderation. Since 2019, Discord has published biannual transparency reports and banned anyone under the age of 13 from using chat rooms.
In its latest report, Discord said that between January and June, it received more than 400,000 reports of inappropriate behavior, with about a third of them related to harassment, and suspended more than 470,000 accounts and 43,000 servers.
But these actions failed to prevent widespread problems. People surveyed, including those as young as 11 or 12, said they knew many underage users of Discord. For example, an online search for eating disorder communities on Discord revealed dozens of servers, some of which explicitly encouraged people to develop eating disorders, which violates the community guidelines.