What Discord Is, and Why Microsoft Covets It

Every month or two, a social media platform grabs the spotlight, intriguing some and baffling others. In 2020, former President Donald Trump’s campaign to banish TikTok brought outsize attention to the video app. Earlier this year, Clubhouse surged to prominence as people scrambled for invitations to join chat rooms for the Silicon Valley elite. The platform called Discord is not new, but talks about a $10 billion sale to Microsoft has gotten the world wondering about this video game-centric chat app.

Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, programmers and entrepreneurs, founded San Francisco-based Discord in 2015 as a platform for people to chat while playing video games together. The free service offers voice, video and text as well as gamer-friendly features, including the ability for users to broadcast the name of the game they are playing. During the pandemic, with people stuck at home and playing more video games than ever -- and also looking for ways to safely socialize -- Discord became a hub for communities as diverse as the Black Lives Matter movement, homework help, book clubs and more. It began pitching itself as a “place to talk.”