Every community needs a place to communicate online. Discord has the best offering, and it is free. Other platforms either force you to pay by the member or have a flat rate paid by the community host. Discord doesn’t require either. Servers can grow as large as they want for free, moderators and admins don’t have to pay, and Discord still makes money.
As communities continue to grow on Discord, the money Discord makes from those communities goes up as well. Flat rates and tiers limit this. Communities want to grow, Discord provides them with an easy and effective way to do that. Users want status, Discord gives them a shortcut. This aligns incentives better than advertising or paid memberships do.
Discord won by building 10x better spaces for communities. By selling status, they have also managed to capture more value from those communities than other platforms.
Discord won the competition for the gaming chat platform of choice, and now it wants to be the platform for all internet communities. This means they will be competing with the “big dogs” like Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Epic. Their free-to-play, pay-for-status monetization model is a competitive advantage.
It single handedly started the Online Community Platform Rush. It's best in class.
Slack had an opportunity to go after this market, it had a bunch of communities already on their platform, but it stayed true to its core function and went after the enterprise market.
I'm curious when it's time to kickstart your Discord Server.
Specifically, I find that Facebook Groups is the easiest way to invite members and keep engagement active.
Fortunately, folks are getting used to communities on Discord and Slack. So, it's far easier to keep sticky vs a self-hosted forum on Discourse or the like.
I sense that you need a decent following elsewhere (e.g. existing community on YouTube/FB Groups)... then you'll port over the community to Discord?
Highlight from the article:
Every community needs a place to communicate online. Discord has the best offering, and it is free. Other platforms either force you to pay by the member or have a flat rate paid by the community host. Discord doesn’t require either. Servers can grow as large as they want for free, moderators and admins don’t have to pay, and Discord still makes money.
As communities continue to grow on Discord, the money Discord makes from those communities goes up as well. Flat rates and tiers limit this. Communities want to grow, Discord provides them with an easy and effective way to do that. Users want status, Discord gives them a shortcut. This aligns incentives better than advertising or paid memberships do.
Discord won by building 10x better spaces for communities. By selling status, they have also managed to capture more value from those communities than other platforms.
Discord won the competition for the gaming chat platform of choice, and now it wants to be the platform for all internet communities. This means they will be competing with the “big dogs” like Slack, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and Epic. Their free-to-play, pay-for-status monetization model is a competitive advantage.
I also think the ease of sign up for them makes them such a big competitor to Slack — getting into slack channels is a true PITA.
Great insights you provided in the article. We always prefer effortless and simple ways to do things so Discord is on the right track.
I've been with Discord since the Beta
It single handedly started the Online Community Platform Rush. It's best in class.
Slack had an opportunity to go after this market, it had a bunch of communities already on their platform, but it stayed true to its core function and went after the enterprise market.
I'm curious when it's time to kickstart your Discord Server.
Specifically, I find that Facebook Groups is the easiest way to invite members and keep engagement active.
Fortunately, folks are getting used to communities on Discord and Slack. So, it's far easier to keep sticky vs a self-hosted forum on Discourse or the like.
I sense that you need a decent following elsewhere (e.g. existing community on YouTube/FB Groups)... then you'll port over the community to Discord?
That's a nice break down, thanks for posting this.