Week 6 – Why Discord is an Effective App?

‘Discord’ is one of the most downloaded iPhone applications in Australia, ranking 18^th over all other apps on the Australian App store. It is a messaging platform that enables users to communicate through text, voice, video and screen-sharing that is mainly advertised to people who enjoy video games and live video streams. It has over 10 million users that are active each day and between those users 900 million messages are sent every single day but why exactly is this app so popular? Especially considering, there are so many other messaging apps out there that seem to have the exact same function.

Unique features

Discord, due to it being promoted to ‘gamers’, has many unique features that apps like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp do not have. One of these features is servers. Servers are similar to giant group chats where there can be hundreds of different voice and text chats running at the same time. Servers can be public, with some of the most popular servers have over 250,000 members, or private meaning a URL would be needed to access and join the group chat. People love this feature as it allows for them to meet many new people that have similar interests as them as most servers are interest based. The servers are also extremely customisable, colours, messages voice and text chats names can be whatever the server owner desires. This allowing the users to be able to express themselves using these features as not all users want the same thing for their servers. People can also have tags which allows them to be pinged or given a message notification even though they have not been sent a message. Say, for example, only some people in the server enjoy a certain TV show, they could be given a tag and whenever someone in the server wanted to tell everyone who enjoyed the TV show they could use this feature to send everyone a message about it.

Another unique feature that discord has is bots. Bots are programs within the group chat that have certain functions. They allow users to be able to have features that would not be accessible in other messaging apps. Although many have different functions, there are mainly two types of bots, bots that allow users to listen to music and bots that enable games to be played through text chat. An example of a music bot is ‘Octave’ which allows users to input YouTube links and play them within a voice chat so all users can listen to music. While a game bot would be ‘Mudae’. This bot is similar to a ‘gacha’ mechanic or where users are randomly given characters from TV shows or video games. Users are able to choose if they want to claim a character and add it to their collection or continue rolling to try and get a character that they like. Unique features such as these keep users entertained while also providing them a way to talk to other users, giving the app a purpose.

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Frequent updates

Discord has their app on many different platforms including windows, macs, smartphones and tablets and is constantly updating these applications to suit their user’s needs. These updates are preformed at least once every two weeks in order for the app to remain up to date and without bugs. They even keep a blog of what exactly is being changed in every single update so users can be completely informed of what changes have occurred. Their Twitter also allows for feedback on these updates and they are extremely responsive to their followers while also being a humour blog to keep these followers. By having these updates, it keeps customers engaged with the app rather than using something like Facebook to communicate with their friends.

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Discord’s Subscription Service

The app is free to use but like many applications, users are encouraged to pay a monthly subscription fee that would allow them to obtain features that would not be accessible by other users. This is called the Freemium Model where users get basic features at no cost but in order to access the full app, they must pay a fee. ‘Nitro’ or Discord’s paid version allows users to have GIFs or moving images as their profile pictures, access unique emoticons that users can make themselves and upload bigger files than discord usually permits.

In conclusion, Discord is an extremely successful smartphone and desktop application that deserves its success. It has main different features that are quite foreign to users but are still easy to use while still updating frequently to improve and extent these features according to user demands. It also has a subscription service so the app can continue to function the way users would like.