Crypto News: Discourse on Discord

Hi everyone, it's Cecilia. This week, we're talking about anti-social media. But first…

This week's top gaming news:

Microsoft's $69 billion Activision deal is uncertain
Discord announced subscriptions for creators to make money
Activision Blizzard lost its second union vote.

I have a deep antipathy toward Twitter. This could be because I follow its new Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and my newsfeed is rife with bootlickers and his replies to them. But there's a reason why very online people have referred to Twitter as "the hellsite" for years. It teases us with crumbs of human connection while enabling toxicity and disinformation.

Like a lot of journalists and academics, I think about Twitter a lot. I don't post on Twitter a lot, though. Because, does posting really connect us? Does shouting, "Toasting New York bagels should be illegal!" into the abyss, and the abyss screeching back, "I'll do what I want!" bring us together in the way the internet's early adopters envisioned? I'd argue that it doesn't, really.

A lot of people seem to agree and Musk has only made things worse since he bought the platform in October: Twitter is bleeding its most active posters. More than a million people may have left, thinning out the social media giant's "community."

Disaffected Twitter users are desperate for an alternative. It's not Mastodon or Hive. The best place to meet and keep up with people online today is a darkmode dwelling gamers have been raving about for years: Discord. During the pandemic, much more of the general population caught on and it has now become one of the most popular places to communicate online.

Discord was founded in 2015 so gamers could strategize dungeon raids and evolved into what I'd call the anti-social media. Today's Discord Inc. is an AOL-like text and voice chat platform where users are members of multiple themed servers ("Anime Universe" or "Ariana Grande") with a couple dozen or couple thousand members each. All day and night these channels light up with small, impulsive little chats from friends or strangers, which can feel as easy and low-stakes to respond to as banter at a party. If you like what someone says, you can send them a direct message, or if you learned they're also into restoring old Game Boy Advances, invite them to join the "Retro Gaming" server with you.

Discord users congregate around specific topics or themes making it feel more personal than Twitter's single feed. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

"We're not really a platform where you're scrolling mindlessly through a feed liking posts," said Rick Ling, Discord's head of product and communities, in our July conversation. "We really only work when you want to talk to somebody else." Ling drew a distinction for me that I've been thinking about ever since: "When you come to Discord, you're here to meet and talk to another person or group of people–not just engaging with a piece of content."

Discord has nearly tripled its user base since 2019 to 150 million active users per month, according to the New York Times. At the same time, Twitter has clearly had an exodus, and Meta Platforms Inc.'s Facebook has seen a decline in its US userbase. Gen Z is using less social media overall, according to a Pew Research study cited by Axios. TikTok, wisely, has decided to call itself an "entertainment platform."

And as disaffected Twitter users look for elsewhere to roost, many are bouncing off alternatives they feel aren't sating their desire to meet, talk and be merry. Discord's popularity could speak to a younger generation's desire to connect online without the baggage of "posting" or the same same sort of posturing we've come to accept as normal on other social media sites.

To be sure, Discord has also faced issues with user hate speech, misinformation and troublesome content, similar to other social media sites. But I keep wondering whether there's something more humane about Discord, and that's why I've been spending a lot more time on it.

On Discord, typing some words and hitting "Enter" feels more about connecting person-to-person than on Twitter, where a lot of users are connecting through the medium of a post. (It helps that it's very difficult to generate platform-wide "clout" on Discord).

I bounced this theory off my favorite academic writing about Twitter, Katherine Cross, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington's Information School studying online harassment. "To be a 'poster' is to be a rhetorical vandal with an audience," she wrote in an email, "and I mean that in a mostly complimentary fashion."

Cross compares posting to graffiti, "meant to be public and often meant to make a statement." But she doesn't necessarily agree that Discord is free of the same dynamic of public posturing. "A server with dozens or hundreds of live members makes for a sufficient audience for posting's performative aspects," she said.

To Cross, Discord feels more connective because of the way it organizes information. There's a reason why, on Twitter, someone can be the "main character" for a day: We're all reading the same infinitely long doomscroll. Twitter single-channels information and flattens its context, whereas on Discord, information exists in archipelago-like servers.

On Discord, I'm not swimming in a snowglobe of posts about what Musk posted about some other poster. I'm just a girl with an anime avatar and a strong desire to discuss the latest episode of Chainsaw Man with my circle of friends.

The Callisto Protocol releases Dec. 2. Source: Krafton Inc.

Survivor-horror game The Callisto Protocol is out Friday, by the same team behind the genre classic Dead Space series, and directed by the same Glen Schofield. Reviews so far are are mixed; Metacritic gave it a 75. Some critics cited "beautiful audiovisuals and heaps of gore," but also a "lack of innovation and "wasted potential." What I'll say is that it's dark, atmospheric and feels somewhat stilted in the short time I've played so far.