“Discord has changed the way people communicate and connect with others.”


Conference chosen: Communities and Social Media


Introduction

Discord has changed the way people communicate and connect with others in the sense where people are able to connect with their friend group on Discord. It has changed from what people associated with gaming communities into more, such as friends’ group or online communities and in fact, allows people to stay connected to friends and communicate or even meet new friends online. I believe my conference paper fits within the conference stream of Communities and Social Media as it talks about communities online, particularly on the platform of Discord.

What is a community?

By definition, a community is a group of people who either live in a specific area or people who share a common interest, nationality or social group (Cambridge, n.d). While an internet community is defined specifically as “a group of people who have similar interest or who want to achieve something together (Cambridge, n.d). As such, a community can be seen in many ways

With modern technology, there are now multiple platforms that are used for communication such as Skype, Facebook, Microsoft Teams and many more others. These platforms facilitate communication between people, allowing for not just informal communication but also communication-related to work and education (Mastellone, 2021, pg. 5).


Discord has a feature that allows people to create online servers which is space for online communities to form. In these servers, admins of the server can create text channels which allows for people to message with other members of the server, voice channels can also be created for users to talk, through Voice-over-IP technology, with other members of the server who are connected within the same voice channel. Discord was initially created as a program for people to voice chat while playing online video games, but it has since grown to a wider range of audience (Mastellone, 2021, pg. 5-6). While it is believed that the majority of the user base is still related to gaming, a representative of Discord suggested that 30% of the servers on Discord are being used for other purposes outside of gaming. While Discord is believed not to collect demographic data on its users, most of the Discord servers active are on a smaller scale, such as friend groups using Discord to communicate and stay in touch with each other. On a large scale, well-known streamers of games use Discord servers to interact with their fans (Mastellone, 2021, pg. 7). I plan to make use of examples of Discord being used by others outside of gaming such as in, education sector or it being used online for interaction between influencers and fans.

Recently, Discord have started introducing templates when creating your own server, as seen in below, where there is different templates based on what kind of server you want to make, such a School Club, or a server where you can socialise with your friends.

This shows that people are beginning to use Discord for purposes other than gaming, as seen in the available templates above, where there are even school club and study group templates available.

While Discord is available for free, there are paid subscription models available where users can choose to subscribe from $4.99/month to $12.99/month for bigger file uploads and to customise their own Discord profile, with the Nitro offering HD video streaming which allows users to have better streaming quality when streaming their screen.





1st argument: Discord being used by some universities or schools to engage students.

As said previously, while Discord is not originally intended for educational purposes, however they have features that can support online learning, and users can use most of Discord’s features without having to pay for an upgrade (Uong & Nguyen, 2022, pg. 5-6). The crucial part of how Discord is used to support students and teachers is how teachers (server admins) are allowed to create multiple voice channels in the server, and spilt students into multiple groups who are then placed in respective channels (Uong & Nguyen, 2022, pg. 7). The feature that separates Discord from other applications is that Discord does not limit the call duration in a server and that the ability to split students into different voice channels is not locked behind a paywall (Uong & Nguyen, 2022, pg. 7). The feature of dashboard, also allows for teachers to remind students of classroom tasks or homework, making it easier for students to keep track of their work. This makes it easier for teachers to interact and communicate with students, while giving the chance for teachers to organise activities for students.

In a survey done with teachers and students who have used Discord as a communication platform for classroom, most agreed that Discord was easy to use and their experience on Discord was smooth (Uong & Nguyen, pg. 16). It can be seen that Discord is well-qualified to be used for classroom teaching and learning. Where schools can use Discord as a space for them to teach or online classroom, especially its availability and quality services relative to their pricing. There are however some challenges into adapting Discord into classrooms as there some teachers who would are not used to technology and would find it difficult adjusting to using Discord as a platform to teach and interact with their students.

Discord allows teachers to manage their communication better when teaching and interacting with their students. It has been observed that when Discord is used for learning between 2 classes, there is an atmosphere of social debate where it is interactive, fun and relaxing. And most students who have classroom experience at Discord, found it pleasant and rarely found an issue with communicating on Discord (Dayana, Y.E, Andre & Andrade-Arenas, 2021, pg. 2).


As seen, Discord in some schools has changed the way teachers communicate with students, where teachers can conduct online lessons on Discord, keep track and notify students of assignments, while at the same time, it can be place where students can conduct a relaxed social activity/debate.



2nd argument: Discord being used for fans to keep in touch with influencers that they are interested in or follow.



The online world has allowed people to interact online, and one popular genre is fandom. Fandom activity is where fans of a certain influencer or celebrity gather to talk about their favourites. Most of the time, fan communities are filled with people with diverse backgrounds and nationalities. In this case, K-pop fan communities are those who share a common interest in Korean pop or in most cases, a fan of a certain K-pop group. Each K-pop group usually have their own official fandom name, for example, the boy ground Monsta X’s fans are called Monbebe (Mailk & Haidar, 2023, pg. 3).

Discord have been getting increasingly popular, especially for fans, where they can create a private space where they can develop a close community based around a common ground, such as being fans of a certain K-pop group. Discord changes the way fans are able to connect with others or follow their favourite K-pop idols. Usually, many fans want to keep their everyday life and fan identity separated.

So in this case, I will be showing how IVE, a K-pop girl group, uses Discord as a platform to create a server for their fans to join in, allowing for fans to have a chance to interact with their favourite idols and at the same time, staying notified about IVE’s latest activities.



This is what a user would find when joining IVE’s Official Discord server.

When a fan or a user first joins the IVE official server, they will be asked a few questions, the first of which, is a language preference question, where users will be asked and then be able to access either English or Korean language text channels, based on their choice. Next, they will be asked who is their “bias” which basically means favourite member in the group, the user can choose more than one of the options available, which then they have access to the certain channels, which discuss about the certain member. Next, they will be asked about your location, “Where are you chatting from?” Where users will be given options to answer which continent they are from. And furthermore, in the text channels, they will be given the option to be notified when IVE updates on their social media.



The image below, is an example of what a user would get when they choose to be notified when IVE updates on YouTube.



As seen from the content in this argument, Discord has become a platform where fans can connect with other fans who also like the same artists, or K-pop idols in this case. With IVE having their own official Discord server, for fans to have a chance to interact with the IVE members.



3rd argument: The server-creating feature of Discord is a ground for some ill-intentioned individuals to create accounts and spread hate messages around on the platform.



With how Discord is now being used by more and more people, it is inevitable that some people will start putting out hate messages out. Many online communities face toxic behaviour such as hate speech and harassment. Discord has a formal rule in their Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, as well as any custom rules in each Discord server (Jiang, et al, 2019, pg. 7). For this, I will link back to my previous example, where I mentioned IVE’s official Discord server.





In this image, we can see IVE’s admin team have created a list of rules for members of the server to follow, which includes respecting each other, adhering to Discord ToS. In fact, it is said that the admins will often delete any hateful comments on the server quickly.



However, there are other extreme cases where there are dedicated servers for hate speech. These hate speech servers boast about going around Discord’s system to cover for the users who upload hate content. In one case, a server reveals that it have a “n-word deleted…. runs every 24 h so your account is safe with us!” This means that the server claims to use an external party bot to remove slurs however this is not to prevent slurs from being used, but instead to “clean up” their server chat to prevent their members from getting banned in case Discord ever investigates their server (Heslep & Berge, 2024, pg. 15). These servers often enables Discord’s strictest verification, which they admit using it to “keep out the snitches and feds”.



Discord’s reaction to this is often just to hide these toxic servers from server lists but not remove them, which is a large problem in Discord’s ecology. And when the server is recreated, it ends up on top of Discord’s server list due to it being a newly made server, which only makes it worse as it is exposed to more people, and usually, the servers’ numbers increase.

(From Heslep & Berge, 2024 ,pg .5)

The image above is an example of hate speech servers that were just created and is shown on top of listings on an alternate site, Disboard.com, which shows the list of public Discord servers.

Some of these hate speech servers recruit members to go and “raid” another Discord community/server which basically means, these servers would send members of the server to join another server and harass them, spamming hate speech on the server (Heslep & Bere, 2024, pg. 13)





Conclusion

Discord, as a platform, has allowed for people to create servers where they can have their own community, based on however they want it. Such as being used for school space (classrooms) where teachers interact with students, or for fans to gather and talk about their favourite celebrities. For this essay, I have used IVE, a K-pop girl group as an example, as they have their own official Discord server, a move which initially surprised many fans. However, there is a negative side as there are ill-minded people who posts hate speech onto the server and at the same time, Discord is not doing much to enforce the rules and reduce hate speech.
Hopefully this paper, has shown the way Discord changed the way people interact with each other, and how it fits into the conference stream of Communities and Social Media after talking about Schools (teachers and students), fans and influencers.









References:



Cambridge (n.d.). Community. In dictionary.cambridge.org dictionary. Retrieved Saturday 20 April 2024, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/community



Mastellone, D. (2021). Online Social Status: A Critical Discord Analysis (Master’s thesis).



Uong, T. G. T., Nguyen, D. K., & Nguyen, H. N. (2022). Teachers’ Feedback on Using Discord as an Online Learning Platform. International Journal of TESOL & Education, 2(4), 84-104.

Dayana, Y. E., Andre, O. M., & Andrade-Arenas, L. (2021). Design of the Discord application as an E-learning tool at the University of Sciences and Humanities. In Proceedings of the 18th Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions international multi-conference for engineering, education and technology (Vol. 9, pp. 1-7). Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions

Malik, Z., & Haidar, S. (2023). Online community development through social interaction—K-Pop stan twitter as a community of practice. Interactive Learning Environments, 31(2), 733-751.

Wagenaar, W. F. (2024). Discord as a fandom platform: Locating a new playground. Transformative Works and Cultures, 42.

Jiang, J. A., Kiene, C., Middler, S., Brubaker, J. R., & Fiesler, C. (2019). Moderation challenges in voice-based online communities on discord. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1-23.

Heslep, D. G., & Berge, P. S. (2024). Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard. new media & society, 26(1), 534-555