Teachers have relied on it to complete virtual lessons. Boy Scout troops are using it to communicate while social distancing. Book clubs gather through the video-chat function. Through the app, teens trade informal messages, as they do on Snapchat, and assemble study groups, a habit that has increased since the pandemic closed schools. Well over 30% of its users-some teens but the majority of them 18 to 44-now go to Discord for something other than gaming. While Discord is still a place rife with gaming’s school-yard culture, parts of it unwelcoming to anyone not straight, white and male, it has transformed into something much more mainstream since 2017. “As long as it doesn’t kill you, you learn from it.” “You’re going to make mistakes,” says Citron, speaking publicly about Charlottesville for the first time. Caught largely unaware, Discord only worked to expel the racist groups after the protests ended with 34 people injured and a woman dead, mowed down by a car.ĭiscord’s founders CEO Jason Citron, 35, bearded and bespectacled, and Stan Vishnevskiy, 31, the scruffy-faced chief technology officer, willingly admit to missteps through Discord’s first few years.

It was founded in 2015 to make it easier for gamers to talk while playing video games and gained notoriety as a home for the Alt-Right two years later when white supremacists used it to orchestrate that summer’s Charlottesville protests. The ironically named communication app started its life attracting far, far different crowds. It’s a bit discordant to think about Discord being used by Santibanez and other Black Lives Matter activists.

“It’s been awesome to see it grow organically, like a patchwork quilt.” “Most of us were not experienced with Discord, but we’re learning and got things set up,” says Santibanez, who works for Enterprise in its corporate rental fleet. It now has around 1,000 people, and Santibanez is its chief leader, spending much of her past month directing people to it whenever she sees someone online asking about information on the demonstrations. This one in Dallas was dedicated to organizing events and proved to be a useful repository of information.

Funny discord names and pictures