Discord CEO Jason Citron makes the case for a smaller, more private internet

Jason and I dug into the nuances of how he sees Discord in the landscape of other platforms and how he’s made conscious choices about what he sees as the future of online communication. For Discord, that future is smaller, more intimate, and far from the public eye. We also discussed the inherent tension between the version of Discord that acts as a tool for voice chat and the version of Discord that’s become a social destination mixing public and private in increasingly complex and, at times, legally fraught ways. We also touched on the word “servers” and how it’s played an important role in the kind of IRC-style culture the company was born in and still cultivates.

You’ll hear Jason talk about Discord’s evolving business model — unlike Slack, it never went into enterprise software. Instead, it has a consumer subscription service called Nitro and a growing number of other ways it’s exploring making money, including the platform’s very first ads. Jason also revealed why he ultimately decided not to sell his company to Microsoft for a reported $10 billion and also how the post-pandemic slowdown forced the company into two rounds of layoffs and a major refocusing effort about what Jason thinks the Discord community wants and needs. The short answer: a bigger gaming focus and more outside developers building apps, bots, and games that live exclusively inside of Discord.

Of course, because Discord’s users are so young, it faces some particularly unique content moderation challenges. You’ll hear Jason reflect on his testimony in front of Congress earlier this year around child safety and also why the company has made some pretty major tradeoffs around features like encryption that other platforms have been unwilling to make — because Jason’s perspective is that they have to make the app safe for teens.

This was a fascinating conversation, and Jason’s perspective — that online life will only continue to move toward private group chats built around the ways we spend our time with friends — looks more convincing by the day.

Okay, Discord CEO Jason Citron. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jason Citron, you are the founder and CEO of Discord. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me, Nilay.

I am really excited to talk to you. Discord is a seemingly very simple application. It’s also very complicated. It exists in a complicated ecosystem of things. There’s a lot to talk about with Discord all the time. It started as a voice chat for gamers. It grew into a place where people hang out to talk to each other. What do you think Discord is now?

Now, I think Discord is a place where people talk and hang out with their friends online.

A long time ago, I was talking to Stewart Butterfield — this is before he sold Slack to Salesforce — and I said, “Do you think Discord is a competitor to Slack?” He said, “No. Absolutely not. Slack is enterprise software. We do all these enterprise logins. We have to deal with all this stuff at your company. Discord is over there and that’s different.” I always thought that was interesting. 

I think that’s true. But the idea that one is very enterprise and one is very consumer, that’s gotten a lot blurrier since I’ve had that conversation. I know entire businesses that not only run in Discord but also talk to their communities, to their customers, in Discord. Has that gotten blurrier for you as well?

We have always focused on Discord as a service and tool for consumers to come together and talk and hang out. And it is used in many different ways, to your point. A lot of companies use Discord almost as a new way to communicate with their superfans online. We love that and we support that use case. But most people who use Discord are in smaller invite-only groups — we call them servers — with people that they know or friends of friends. It’s a place that feels like your dorm common room or your living room, where people are hanging out with people they know.

That server terminology is always really fascinating to me. I’m somebody who came up on IRC. The first tech website I worked for, Engadget, actually ran itself on IRC. We had to teach everybody how to use IRC when they got a job with us, which is wild. Everyone’s moved on from that now. But you’ve kept that terminology, that ethos, alive. You’re starting a server. You’re in charge. Talk to me about that. Why keep that old-school terminology in play?

When we started Discord, our focus was very much on building a text and voice chat app for people who played video games. Back in 2015, the alternative products that people used were, literally, they would host voice servers for their friends. The reason we picked the word server was because, at the time, that was how our customers thought about what the tool was doing for them. It was a server where they could go and bring their friends together.

So we said, “Well, on Discord, you get a free server; whereas, on those other apps, you’re paying for a server.” Now, our service runs in the cloud and doesn’t literally have a server the way that they used to rent computers and get IP addresses. So it just stuck. People understood the concept of a server as a place where you come together, and from 2015 to 2020 or so, Discord’s primary focus was on gaming. Even today, gaming is a huge part of what people do on Discord. So people just get it.

I asked that question very specifically because the word server, to me, implies a bunch of control. As you’re saying, you would go out in the world, you would start a server, and it would be your own. But Discord is a platform. There’s an app store built into it. You’re doing a bunch of developer outreach. It is the user interface for some very cutting-edge products like Midjourney. That control goes back and forth. There’s what Discord the platform wants, there’s what users are doing with it, and there’s what users might do with it that you haven’t even thought of. There’s what they might want to do with it that you don’t want them to do. How do you think about that tension?

Our focus is very much on creating tools that give people the capability to design their own space. That was part of the intention from day one. That’s part of the server idea like you’re talking about. We give you these tools to make a server, and then you can choose: what are the text channels, what are the voice channels, what do you want to name it? How do you want to decorate the different people and have them stand out? We have permissions and role capabilities where you can say, “Well, these are admins and these are newbies and they show up differently in chat and they have different powers in chat about who could kick people off and invite people on”

We’ve always had this ethos of leaning toward user control of their spaces. Frankly, what’s so cool about that is that it has extended to customizing Discord with our API and bots platform because we knew that people were going to want to customize the service and connect it to other services outside in the world. That user control and open ethos is what enabled things like Midjourney to flourish. There are over half a million apps that people have built on Discord that are used across our user base, so it’s a really intentional posture that creates conditions for exciting things to happen.

How much of the evolution of the product itself is guided by what people are doing as they build applications and bots, and how much is guided by what you want from it?

We take a mixed approach where we spend a lot of time talking with our customers of all different kinds trying to understand what people are doing with Discord, what they want from it, and what their challenges are with it. Then, we mix that with what excites us as product creators and builders and how we think the world is changing and where it’s going and what we want to create for people. We try to put that all in a pot and shake it up, and then stuff comes out, so in some places, things that our bots community and apps community have built have driven our roadmap. I’ll give you one example. In the early days, we had a hunch that Discord would be used for public communities like some of these we’ve been talking about, but we didn’t actually design that in a first-class way into the product.

When we initially launched, I think the user cap was 30 or 50 people in a server, for example. As people started using it for more public spaces, we kept raising the cap, which was infrastructure work to make the product work better. We had basic moderation tools, but it became clear that when you have thousands of people on a server, you need different kinds of moderation tools. A lot of bots sprung up, and that made us realize we needed to invest in this, so we created AutoMod, which is now built into the platform that allows these communities to moderate in much more advanced ways. Now, we have a whole trust and safety team. That whole effort was really a response to what people were doing with our product that we thought might happen but weren’t really sure, and it wasn’t the original focus.

Let me put that into contrast with, say, Reddit, which is another huge user-generated platform that is really driven by its community. There’s a tension there. There’s what the community wants, the tools it builds for itself, and there’s what Reddit wants. Those things come to a head. They wax and they wane. Have you had those moments where you know that the platform needs to do something that will make the community mad but you need to do it anyway? Or have you been able to integrate what the community is building in a more healthy or more stable way?

I think that one thing that’s fundamentally different about Discord from Reddit is that we are much more a group chat app for friends than this public space with moderators and [user-generated content]. We don’t think about Discord as a UGC platform, for example.

Really?

I think about it as a communications app. It’s a group chat app. If you look at where people are spending their time and what they’re doing most of the time, most people are texting in invite-only group chats with their friends or on voice chat, playing games, talking about their day, cooking dinner separately, falling asleep together. That’s what people do. It’s a place where people talk and hang out with their friends, primarily. And then they do go explore these other spaces in their interests and participate in these big communities. Some people really love that part of the service. But Discord is a communications tool. It’s not a UGC platform in the sense that I think you’re describing.

I want to stick with that for one second because I think the difference is pretty finely shaded. It’s a communications platform, but it’s not one to one. It’s one to many by default. You log in to a channel, you’re talking to one person, but you could be talking to lots of people. It’s not encrypted, which I want to come back to. That’s a choice you’ve made to make sure you can monitor what’s going on. And because you’re unencrypted and you can moderate, you do moderate it. You do have a trust and safety function. What is the actual distinction between a communications platform and a user-generated platform like Twitter or Reddit?

Well, all communications are user-generated, so maybe that’s what you’re getting at. But I think what I was reacting to is more what you were describing trying to make this comparison between Discord and Reddit, which is a great product. People post content on Reddit and the content that people post for other people, usually strangers, is the primary thing that I think people get from Reddit. Discord’s very different. Discord is more like a group chat app where you’re sending messages, frankly, often to one person. Direct messages are very popular. Our servers are also popular. But in that case, it’s like three to 10 friends. If you’re playing a video game, it could be your guildmates or the people you regularly play with or a club that you’re a part of.

It’s not a broadcast medium in the way that a lot of these other more social media-type services are. We do moderate it because we know that there are a lot of teens on the platform. When we do have those public spaces, we treat that more like the public UGC stuff. But most of the time, people are hanging out with their friends in their virtual living room.

That’s fascinating, and I want to come back to it because Discord is so many things. Like I said at the start, you can look at it through so many different lenses. The idea of it just being a direct small group chat app, I put that right next to the fact that it’s the user interface for Midjourney, which is one of the hottest AI tools out there. And I say, “Well, most AI tools are text-based, they’re prompt-based, and the chat interface is the way we think about using most generative AI tools.” Discord has become that interface for at least one of them. Is that a future that’s in conflict with being a small group chat app, or is that the next extension? Or is that even something that needs to go off in another direction on its own?

I think that the fact that the chat input box has become the primary way to interact with a lot of these generative AI tools and that we have a really popular and extensible chat input box is great. Midjourney is a really cool product and people love using it. They have one of the largest servers on Discord, if not the largest server on Discord. But a lot of people actually take the Midjourney bot into their invite-only server with their friends, and they’re using it there in a more creative space that is not in the public view or that is a server that you can just go join. I love Midjourney and the things that other generative AI apps are on Discord, but for us, when we think about the service that we’re offering to users, it’s a group communications tool.

One of the things that people do when they’re hanging out with their friends is they play around with these generative AI products. They share their creations with their friends, and they act as conversation pieces, as a shared experience, to do together. From that lens, we love it, and that’s why we encourage and support it, but we really come back to what most people are doing on Discord most of the time, and that’s chilling with their friends and hanging out. Video games continue to be a huge part of what people do every month on Discord.

You add this all up and you get this strikingly different view of what being on the internet should look like. It’s not whatever TikTok is turning into, whatever Home Shopping Network Instagram is turning into. It’s text. You’re typing a lot; you’re looking at photos that are being generated; you’re interacting with other computer systems through text prompts. Discord is a window into that. You’re maybe writing some applications that are inherently text-based inside of Discord. But it’s almost like a command line vision of connecting on the internet. It’s old school. Do you see Discord as being that big, as in this is a different way of thinking about connecting and computing, or are we very focused on it as a chat app?

The way that we think about it and our vision for where we think the future goes in regards to Discord, it really comes back to how people spend their time with their friends. When I started the company back in 2012, the bet that I made was that video games would continue to become a bigger and bigger form of entertainment for people. They would become more and more social. They would be across more and more devices and that there wasn’t a great communications product that was started with your friends around gaming. So that was the original thesis. Even today, when we picked our heads up after covid to reevaluate what was going on in the world and what our customers cared about — we spent a lot of time last year with folks — I have more conviction today that [gaming] will continue to become the future.

If you go back over the last 12 years, it’s really played out, and gaming has very much gone mainstream now. I think 93 percent of Gen Z plays video games. When I was a kid, I was weird playing multiplayer games by myself or with my friends, but it was a niche thing. Today, it’s quite normal. Our vision for the future is a world where people have really rich shared experiences, and they can spend quality time with their friends no matter where they are in the world. A lot of that is going to be video games that exist just on platforms. Some of those will be video games that we will serve directly through our platform.

The bots platform, we’re evolving it to include embedded experiences because that’s the part we think will matter. But it’s really about this idea of how I think the internet’s going to evolve. There’s a need for more cozy, intimate spaces where people can spend quality time with their friends away from the broadcast performative stuff that we see a lot of. And we’re very focused on creating those cozy spaces for people to talk and hang out with their friends and deepen their friendships.

This is a theme I see everywhere right now that the United States is heading into an election year: what is our social media going to do to us and what is it doing to teenagers? It’s all colliding, and a bunch of these social networks are not ready to take the weight, or they don’t want to. In the case of Meta, I don’t think they want to. You’re not positioned in that fight at all. You’re saying, “Look, the internet should go back to being smaller, more fragmented, more among people you know and less about these giant culture-defining social media platforms.” 

How comfortable are you in that bet? I mean that in the big way, not the little way — you’re the CEO, you have to say you’re comfortable. But is the internet actually moving in that way? Because I know a lot of people who want it to, but I’m not sure that it actually is.

I don’t think it’s an either-or. Over the last 15 years, as we went from the internet being new to Web 2.0 and now the rise of mobile, I think that we saw a lot of this aspirational promise of these broadcast social media services and what they could do for us as people. I actually think they do a lot of really great things. I think, 50 years from now, we’re still going to have something like this. It’s undeniable that all of these services create value for people. I think there are questions we’re working through as a society around some of the negative externalities of those things and how we want to manage through that. But I think we’re going to have public photo sharing and public video sharing apps for the long run.

What we’re seeing on Discord — and I think this has been a trend for the last five, six, seven years toward group chat messengers in general — is that people understand that those public spaces are interesting, but there’s something else that they want in their lives, too. That’s more intimate, cozy spaces where you can spend time in a relaxed way with people you know and spend quality time with friends even though you can’t maybe be in the same physical space. I think that that is going to continue to grow, and I think that the social media stuff will grow. I think both of these things will exist in big ways in the world if you go 20 years in the future.