If you’ve spent any time online in the last decade, you’ve probably seen that little purple controller-shaped icon. Honestly, it’s everywhere. But it wasn’t always the giant community hub it is today. You might be surprised to learn that Discord didn't just appear out of thin air as a finished product.
Discord was officially released on May 13, 2015.
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It sounds like a lifetime ago in internet years. Back then, if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing League of Legends or World of Warcraft, you were basically stuck with three choices: Skype, TeamSpeak, or Ventrilo. And, let’s be real, they all kind of sucked in their own special ways. Skype was a massive resource hog that crashed your frame rate. TeamSpeak required you to rent your own servers and share IP addresses like it was 2003.
The pivot that changed everything
Discord didn't even start as a chat app. It started as a game.
Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy—the brains behind the operation—were actually trying to build a mobile MOBA called Fates Forever. They had this studio called Hammer & Chisel. The game was beautiful, and they really believed in it, but it just didn't catch on commercially. It flopped.
During development, the team realized that the hardest part of playing together wasn’t the game itself. It was the talking. They were frustrated with how hard it was to just… hang out online. So, they did what every legendary tech startup does. They pivoted. They took the chat tech they built for the game and decided to make that the product instead.
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The timeline of when Discord released
While the May 13 date is the "official" birthday, the platform actually had a bit of a soft launch earlier that year.
- March 6, 2015: Discord opened up a public beta. A few early adopters started poking around, but it was pretty quiet.
- May 13, 2015: The official public release. This is the date the company celebrates every year.
- Late 2015: Growth started to explode. By the end of the year, they already had 3 million users.
- 2017: This was the year they finally added video chat and screen sharing. Before that, it was purely voice and text.
It’s crazy to think about now, but for the first couple of years, Discord was strictly "for gamers." Their tagline was literally "Chat for Gamers." It wasn't until the world flipped upside down in 2020 that they realized everyone else—knitters, students, crypto enthusiasts, and even local bird-watching groups—was using it too.
Why it actually beat the competition
You might wonder why Discord won when Skype was already on everyone's computer. Basically, Discord understood that "servers" were better than "calls."
Instead of having to start a new call every time you wanted to talk, you just "lived" in a server. You could see who was sitting in the voice channel and just jump in. It felt like walking into a friend's living room instead of making a formal phone call. Plus, it was free. Totally free. No ads, no weird "minutes" to buy, just a clean interface that didn't make your computer fans sound like a jet engine.
Growth by the numbers
To give you an idea of how fast this thing moved:
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- 2016: 25 million users.
- 2017: 90 million users.
- 2023: Over 560 million registered accounts.
- 2026: Currently sitting at over 200 million monthly active users.
That is a lot of people sending memes. Specifically, about 25 billion messages are sent every month. It’s a scale that’s hard to wrap your head around, especially considering it all started because a mobile game didn't sell well.
What’s happening with Discord now?
Today, Discord is moving into its next chapter. They’ve dropped the "Chat for Gamers" branding for a more inclusive "Your place to talk." They are leaning heavily into the "Social SDK," which lets game developers bake Discord features directly into their games.
They also finally tackled the "discriminator" problem. Remember when everyone had a four-digit number after their name? Like CoolGuy#1234? They ditched that in 2024 for unique usernames, which was a huge, controversial mess at the time, but we’ve all mostly gotten used to it by now.
Actionable insights for users
If you’re still using Discord like it’s 2015, you’re missing out on some of the best modern features. Here is what you should actually be doing to make the most of it:
- Audit your privacy settings: Discord has a "Trust and Safety" team, but you should still go into User Settings > Privacy & Safety and make sure you aren't allowing DMs from every random person in a 500,000-member server.
- Use the "Activities" feature: You can now play games or watch YouTube together directly inside a voice channel without having to stream your whole screen. It’s much more stable.
- Set up Two-Factor Authentication (2FA): Seriously. Account hijacking is the biggest issue on the platform right now. If you don't have 2FA on, you're asking for trouble.
- Explore Server Folders: If your sidebar is a mess of 50 different icons, just drag one server on top of another. It creates a folder and saves so much visual space.
Discord has come a long way from a failed MOBA side-project. Whether you use it for raiding in an MMO or just keeping in touch with your family, its release changed how we hang out on the internet forever.