Discord, an Internet-based, instant messaging service and virtual distribution platform, is primarily designed for the creation of virtual communities. Users connect via voice over IP, video, chat, and multimedia messages, and documents in public chats, private chats, audio conferences or group forums called “rooms.” To be able to take part in a “room”, a user can create one.
Much like Reddit, Discord is pretty popular. But what sets it apart from the already existing social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is that it has a lot more flexibility than other similar services. You can even host two teams using Discord! Yes, there is an official Discord bot! The bot will manage all channels and community events for users.
This functionality makes discord a “must have” for all developers and administrators trying to create social community on the internet. It’s free and open source. It’s also super easy to setup. However, it faces a lot of competition from Reddit. Their admin has just released a highly functional version reddits of their popular board. Hipchat, the second largest social network server, recently added Discord bots. What do you know about Discord servers? How does it compare to popular services like Reddit or Hipchat?
First, the big picture. Both services are similar in popularity and number, but they have different ways of serving their communities. Whereas Reddit and Hipchat focus more on gaming, Discord focuses more on the community aspects of gaming. While they share many of the same features like group management and voting, discord shines in the gaming part.
When you play games on Discord, you can invite friends to a group you make. When you join the official Discord channels, you will be given a chat icon and a button to either join or leave a particular group. This allows you and your players to communicate quickly and easily with each other without opening multiple windows. When you communicate with your players on the channel the icon for joining the group will appear at your bottom. Next, there will be a prompt to select a group. Finally, there will be a link to join. You simply click a button, then you can type a message and it will automatically join the chosen group. Even though you may not be able to access the main menu or any commands, you can still communicate much more effectively with your fellow players via discord.
While chitchat is primarily designed as a multiplayer gaming service, it does have some excellent features that allow its users to communicate on a variety of different channels, both with each other and with friends or other users on the server. Although it has some great features on both the channels and the server itself it is not able take advantage of some of twitch’s customizations. If you are interested in gaming or personal networking, you should look into the possibility of connecting your discord accounts to your twitch accounts. This will allow for easy communication with your players as well as keeping them informed about updates to your products.