Chat With Your Friends While Gaming With Discord

Three years ago, we set out to bring people together around games. Now, we’re going to bring the games to you.

Today, we’re slowly rolling out a beta test to about 50,000 of our Canadian players and will be expanding to more over time. These players will see an upgraded version of Discord Nitro that has access to a curated selection of games along with the current subscription perks. They’ll also see a new Discord Store tab in the home screen with individual games for purchase.

Nitro Gets B-B-Boosted

For many people like us, you grew up during a time when there were a relatively small amount of games being released. We remember devouring Nintendo Power, PC Gamer, and other various gaming mags to get a sense of the titles coming out. We were always longing for the next best title. Always anxious to get our hands on something fresh.

Today, the problem has flipped on its head. There’s an abundance of fantastic games. Fantastic games that we missed. Games that we even purchased but never got around to playing.

We want to give you an easy opportunity to play the golden games you’ve missed and we want to offer an awesome selection. So, we’ve curated some of these golden games and will be adding them to Discord Nitro.

Edit 8.9.2018 1:09 PM PDT: To be clear, if you’re in the beta and you subscribe to Nitro, you’ll get access to all Nitro games (which is a different selection of games than what’s available in the Store). It’s kinda like Netflix for games.

We’re excited to offer you the opportunity to catch up with amazing game experiences you might’ve missed and even mix up what you play with your friends from time to time.

Of course, we’re keeping all the current Nitro features as part of the perks — animated avatar, ability to choose your tag (the #0000 next to your username), higher quality screen share, custom emoji anywhere, animated emoji, larger file upload limit (50mb from 8mb), and a badge to show how long you’ve been supporting us.

Beyond Nitro — The Store

You ever been in one of those smaller boutique book shops with recommendations from employees written on little note cards? We love that hands-on personal approach to sharing great content with others. We think this kind of cozy neighborhood book shop vibe would be great for games. It reduces clutter and makes it easier to find what you want.

Alongside the upgraded Nitro, we’ll be launching a curated game store experience similar to one of those cozy neighborhood book shops with recommendations about the hottest and newest games from us to you.

We’ll be showcasing a variety of titles that we think you’ll like. As the store grows, we’ll rely on our community and our team to make the store feel super personal and focused on games that we genuinely think you’ll enjoy! Here’s an example of a Discord employee’s recommendation of Dead Cells:

First On Discord

For our store, we’re excited to announce we’ll be supporting “First on Discord” titles — indie games that we’ve helped bring to life. Supporting indie games pushes the boundary of creative game design and is important to innovation and the long term health of the industry. Of course, we think the games are really cool too!

To be very clear, First on Discord games are temporarily exclusive. They’re literally first on Discord — usually 90 days and then the developers can sell anywhere else they want. This beta won’t have any First on Discord titles, but we’ll be showing off some soon!

One Convenient Library

One more surprise for today! We know it’s frustrating to have a bunch of game launchers, so we’ll be adding a Universal Library tab to the Discord home screen as well.

If you want, Discord can scan your computer for games. Then, you’ll be able to launch any of your games through Discord even if they require another launcher (Discord will boot the other launcher and game). This way, you don’t have to worry about which game boots from where!

Voice, Text, and Video Chat

Some of you may be wondering… what about chat?

Discord’s voice, text, and video chat will continue to be a primary focus for us, with features like overlay text chat and priority speaker which we just launched.

We will stay highly focused on maintaining a quality user experience and app performance. We’ve always taken this approach (such as making sure GIFs only play while Discord is focused) and will continue to do this so that chatting in Discord remains awesome. For example, we’re designing the store so that it’s not in your face while you’re hanging out with your friends in a server.

With regards to performance, Discord will remain lean and fast. To learn how Discord will remain performant with the store additions, check out our engineering blog on how we keep Discord speedy with code splitting and dynamic loading.

Bring People Together Around Games

Six years ago, the team behind Discord initially developed an iPad MOBA titled Fates Forever.

While developing Fates we thought “huh, it’s pretty annoying to get everyone into the same voice chat together.” Then, Stan went home and sautéed what was basically the first version of Discord and served it up the next day (which is ridiculous because Stan has never turned on a stove).

After testing Discord out with our friends and family, we realized we were on to something. So, with one company pivot, three years, and a hell of a lot of support from all of you, Discord is where it is today. There are now over 150 million people who’ve used Discord. That’s insane. I can barely count to ten.

Through Discord’s lifetime, we’ve always been thinking about fun, additive, and cool ways we could build a business that’s exciting and respects our players. We think the new Nitro and store are a great way to do this.

Ultimately, we want to make it easier for you to play games and spend time with your friends. This Nitro boost, store experience, and library will make it easier to find, share, and jump into games with friends all in the same place you already hang out.

Achieving all of this will take time, so we hope that you enjoy our limited but tasty selection for now. This is all in beta, so things may change by the time we’re ready to launch. What you see today will likely not be what you see in the future. As always, if you have feedback on things please hit us up on Twitter or comment below.

Lastly, we really, truly, appreciate all of you. This wouldn’t be possible without your continued support, so again, thank you.

Love,
Discord Team

P.S. If you’re a game dev and interested in working with us, fill out this form and sign up for our developer newsletter here.

The Discord Store Beta was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

LAY IT ON ME

• The Discord Overlay now has Text Chat! Continue chatting in servers and DMs without an alt-tab.
• Receive text notifications within game as well with this overlay so you can continue to watch your friends talk about something stupid while playing.
• Send and accept rich presence game invites directly from the overlay. How many times will overlay be written here?
• A lot, because overlay stability is now over 95% up from 75%. If you have historically had issues with the overlay not loading, please try again. We’re changing history here.
• Overlay bugs? More like overlay bugs are fixed, including stuck cursors, alt-tab failing to re-render the overlay, and the pink screen of death. Pink for pain!
• Ever been flanked or ganked, yelling and screaming, only to realize you were muted? The overlay now shows mute and deafen icons so you can not do that.
• Priority Speaker icons are also supported so you know who to say “Yes M’lord” too.
• Only care about text chat? You can hide the overlay voice component completely.
• Full call support in the overlay. You can initiate calls, view calls that are ongoing, and join calls from the overlay late night when you need my love.
• Overlay is written 15 times here (including the one starting this sentence)!
• We implemented some code splitting to reduce required load and keep Discord lean and fast while we add features. Read more about this here.
• Priority Speaker is now a thing! Exert dominance over your friends through software! Check out how to set that up here. You asked for this!
• We launched servers in South Africa! Enjoy some locally sourced ping.
• Our updated dev portal is live! New design, new features, and it’s mobile friendly. View it here
• Screen share has less issues. Yay!

THESE THINGS TOO

• Wanna see behind the curtain? Follow our Instagram.
• Help our Native and Frontend team make more Discord. View jobs.
• Support Discord’s development and get sweet perks for your account with Discord Nitro!

8.8.2018 — Change Log was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What “bloat” means

When people complain about “bloat” in software, they often mean that every new feature makes it slower to load, takes more memory, and taxes their CPU.

We know that our users are sensitive to performance: they are likely playing a visually intense game while talking on Discord with their friends and the last thing we want to do is cause performance issues. We always keep this in mind when adding new features like video chat, screen sharing, or the overlay.

For our desktop app, we achieve great performance while adding features with something called code splitting which loads code on demand.

How Discord Stays Lean

Every time you load an app, it has to load up code and layout styles in order to run. Each piece of this takes time to load and parse while increasing the app’s memory usage. Segmenting the code required to get the app going makes it load faster and use less memory than if we bundled it all together. This also means that not all of the code is available instantly, but if the bundles are kept small and are well-planned, the user will not experience the loading anyway.

When you boot up Discord, the core set of JavaScript, fonts, images, and stylesheets is about 700KB: about the size of Google’s minimal homepage in a browser. Everything else is loaded on-demand, allowing users to get the parts that matter most to them quickly (and so new users responding to invites don’t need to load the whole web app).

The Real Deal: Code Splitting

As you switch around different views in Discord, you are switching routes through the codebase. We wrap the components for each route in a function which gets called when you arrive at the route. The tool we use to bundle and optimize our code, called webpack, bundles these routes into separate chunks and automates most of the loading.

A problem with this loader is that it can potentially fail to load a chunk. When this happens, the component does not not appear and an error is thrown. To remedy this, we built a custom loader called makeLazy which continues trying at increasing intervals until it succeeds:

The routes also contain stylesheets to layout the screens. Like our code, our stylesheets are split into loadable chunks and only arrive when needed. Even our animations throughout the app are lazy loaded which allows us to continue adding art and polish while keeping performance high.

Additionally, we support a lot of translations in the app. Code splitting allows us to load only the one you use. You might notice this when switching locales because it takes a moment to load the new one. This is our code splitting dynamically loading the required chunk to display the language.

With this technique, we’re able to support as many unique languages as we want without impacting performance. We currently have 27 translations, so at 30KB each this saves the user nearly 1MB.

Code splitting lets us add languages, features, and polish without bloating the app. Performance is a core feature of Discord. As we continue to improve the app, we will be sure to keep it lean and fast.

We’re always looking for the next great addition to our engineering teams at Discord. Check out our available positions here.

How Discord Maintains Performance While Adding Features was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Being one of the first apps built with React Native, we were excited to share our first year journey using React Native back in 2016.

Looking back at the past three years, React Native has proven to be extremely successful at Discord and helped drive our iOS user adoption from zero to millions!

More specifically, React Native has allowed us to reap the benefits of quickly leveraging reusable code across platforms, as well as develop a small and mighty team.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned to adapt to its inevitable pain points without sacrificing overall productivity.

Start with iOS, Try Android Later

We tried React Native literally the day it came out, holding off on building our iOS app because we knew it would be announced at React.js Conf 2015.

Similar to iOS, we tried React Native the day it was released for Android. We were surprised by how easily and quickly we were able to make our comprehensive iOS app run on Android — took only two days and it built!

However, we immediately stopped after identifying various issues such as poor performance of touch events and lack of 64-bit support. We continued to follow React Native Android through observing many other apps and blog posts, but there have been no fundamental improvements to convince us to try again.

Though React Native was not ideal for Android, we realized it would be for iOS. While it might seem odd to choose React Native for only one mobile platform, especially considering React Native was all about “learn once for mobile instead of twice”, it’s given us a lot of benefits, such as:

• React and Flux make up our web front-end tech stack. Therefore we can easily leverage over nearly all of the business logic (i.e. stores and libraries) and a majority of our front-end tooling and infrastructure (e.g. eslint, prettier and flow) from web to iOS.
• Allowing our React Native engineers to focus on a top-notch iOS app without needing to be proficient at the Android platform.

Small & Mighty Team

The Discord iOS app has millions of daily active users and 4.8 stars with over 240k ratings. This has all been accomplished with a team of two engineers!

React Native allows us to keep our team small and efficient while maintaining Discord values like:

• Offering great opportunities to learn and grow. I joined Discord as a native iOS developer, and conversely, our other developer Victoria joined with a web development background. Like many other engineers at Discord, we both were motivated to step out of our comfort zones, learn a new platform, and eventually become more versatile engineers.
• Sharing as much code as possible without sacrificing the user experience. Front-end engineers really own their features across web and iOS platforms through reusable code.

Just like our iOS team, Discord is thriving through learning, growing and leveraging expertise every day. As a result, we are incredibly proud of our amazing engineer to user ratio at Discord — 40 engineers to 130M+ users.

Moving Fast

Faster Iteration of UI components

Without diving into the app, we can use storybook to quickly render "dumb" components that don't manage any state internally with mock props. By leveraging the same tooling, we can quickly follow the web team who originally adopted storybook. Along with hot reloading, storybook dramatically accelerates our UI development cycle. Our designers can even easily tweak styling directly in storybook.

Easier React Native Upgrades

It was painful and time consuming to upgrade our React Native fork which fixes issues specific to our use cases. Nowadays, releases are more stable. Compared to spending days before, it only took us few hours to upgrade our fork to 0.55 from 0.53 recently.

However, our web team usually upgrades React and/or other shared dependencies faster than the iOS team. Being on different versions of shared frameworks may cause non-obvious problems which leads to time-consuming investigation. For instance, the iOS app encountered an instant crash in a full-release build although it ran fine locally. After bisecting commits on master, it turned out that the web-only webpack 4 upgrade broke the iOS build due to shared base configs. However, we were able to learn from those issues and apply the knowledge to our infrastructure which ultimately benefits all the teams.

Over The Air Patches (OTA)

A few days ago, we were able to quickly deploy a post-release fix for cameras and skip the approval process. We can’t even begin to count how many OTAs we’ve shipped. Being allowed more room for mistakes, engineers can ship often with confidence and avoid coordination, which unblocks everyone.

And More…

In the past three years, React Native has proven to be a great platform which allows engineers to move at an unparalleled speed. Getting it right has required a fair bit of learning, so we’d like to dive deeper into how we’ve learned and adapted to some pain points without sacrificing overall productivity.

Learn to Adapt to Pain Points

Like any technology, React Native is not perfect, but it excites us to see Facebook and the community at large actively working towards improving or eliminating its weaknesses like large-scale re-architecture and better flow type coverage.

React Native is certainly a revolutionary and fast-moving framework, so the challenges we face today are quite different than what we faced three years ago. For instance, while learning to reuse front-end tooling, we started with React Native Webpack Server, but after a year found out it was abandoned. We eventually had a non-trivial migration to Haul for React 16.

Next, we want to share how we conquered our top five pain points with React Native. Hopefully, it will help you too!

1. Immature Long Lists

Immature long lists have been a well known issue since day one. Without a doubt, we have encountered the same problem in our core component: the chat view. Alternatively, we use UITableView for smooth scrolling performance and dynamic cell heights. Furthermore, our chat view is extensively controlled by Javascript. It computes all the data sources in Javascript, passes them to Objective-C as properties, renders the entire table view in Objective-C via Yoga directly (the same layout engine React Native uses), and finally sends events back to Javascript for user interactions.

It’s worth mentioning that this chat view is so far the only native view we have, which means the hundreds of other of React Native components we have are able to provide a satisfying 60fps performance.

2. High-Priority Updates

Facebook is solving this problem by re-architecting the threading model:

It will be possible to call synchronously into JavaScript on any thread for high-priority updates.

We also found a quick workaround for high-priority UI updates while we worked on synchronous keyboard layout animation. All the keyboard layout solutions are one frame behind when start dismissing keyboard and therefore results in a noticeable gap between TextInput and keyboard.

After various attempts at solutions like InputAccessoryView, we eventually figured out a way to "portal" the React Native component into native iOS views hierarchy and therefore manage high-priority keyboard updates synchronously in native. We will detail this more in a later blog post.

3. Requires Native Platform Knowledge

In React Native world, a web developer will take much longer to succeed than a native developer. Most of the time, it has been smooth sailing working on React Native. However, you sometimes come across very specific native technical details, or find yourself working on OS-specific features like the share extension on iOS.

Web developers will likely take longer to learn and sometimes need help from engineers with native experience. But once they learn and grow, they can share valuable information across front-end platforms and help keep our teams small and mighty.

4. Startup Delay

Time to Interaction (TTI) is a key aspect of how a user perceives the performance of an app. The TTI of our iOS app is noticeably longer than other competing messaging apps written in native code. Since React Native loads and parses all the Javascript code before execution, you get startup delay based on bundle size. In our case, it’s roughly 1.5s startup delay to load a 15mb bundle on an iPhone X.

Fortunately, Facebook documented unbundling to only load necessary portions of the bundle for startup and progressively load more as needed via their packager. However, Haul, our React Native packager replacement for webpack, doesn’t support unbundling/code splitting yet. We wish React Native was more webpack friendly out of the box; we will inevitably need our front-end infrastructure engineers to build this in-house.

5. Limited Visibility into Facebook

In the React Native repo, we sometimes see hot issues with limited activity in response from Facebook. Lack of visibility into such a large company can bring about frustrations when so many people depend on their open source contributions.

On the other hand, it forces us to dive into the core codebase in order to figure out the problem, which admittedly one of the best ways to learn an open source platform. By understanding the React Native platform deeply, we were able to maintain a fork that fixes issues for our own use cases and reuse their core modules. For instance, our UIImageView, for avatars and/or emojis in native chat, reuses RCTImageLoader for consistent caching.

Sticking with React Native

React Native is a great framework that bridges the gap between web and mobile. At Discord it has brought us incredibly efficiency. It allows us to write reusable code, learn from each other, and move fast with a two person team.

Although there are real pain points and challenges, the overall gains significantly outweigh the costs which motivates us to keep investing in the platform.

We’re always looking for the next great addition to our engineering teams at Discord. If what’s described here sounds interesting to you, and especially if you are a gamer at heart, check out our available positions here.

Why Discord is Sticking with React Native was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the dawn of a new era for the Discord overlay. We can call this the Awesomozoic Era. No dinosaurs here. Instead, we have some awesome updates for the overlay released a couple days ago as well as a preview of some more updates to come.

We’ve got pictures for all these things, so please leave if you hate pictures.

What’s Already Available?

Overlay Performance Boost

We know how unreliable the Discord overlay has historically been. We understand how annoying that can be (we use it too!), so we’ve invested heavily in improving overlay performance. We’ve managed to get our overlay success rate up a lot. So basically, it should work most of the time instead of not working.

Furthermore, we’ve squashed some bugs like your mouse sticking on screen, pink screen of death, and render failures after alt-tabbing.

A Hot New Look

We’ve finessed our overlay to look more like the app. This redesign also gives us more room to expand and flex the overlay into the future.

Anyway, now you’ll see mute and deafen icons next to the voice indicators on the overlay. You can also move the voice indicators anywhere on your game screen now. The rectangle is freeeeee!!!

What’s Coming Later

Our longterm vision for the overlay is to make using Discord in game as convenient as possible. We’re aiming for a 647% increase in convenience. You should basically never have to alt-tab if you don’t want to.

The overlay should always be there for you and always listen to you when you’re sad and lonely at night. The overlay should be your best friend and sing you lullabies when you can’t fall asleep.

As we said earlier, the redesign is a major first step in letting us expand the functionality of the overlay over time. You’ll soon see some sick new features like…

• Support for more notification types
• Customizable notifications (what kind and where on screen)
• Adjustable audio settings
• Full support for calls
• Text Chat
• TEXT CHAAAAAAT
• T.E.X.T C.H.A.T.
• TEE EE EX TEE CEE AECH AY TEE

Plot twist — you’ll even be able to pin text chat over the game so you can keep track of any Discord chatter while you’re running around Azeroth or jumping out of the battle bus. The chat can be cozy or compact style.

Lastly, below you can see a shot of the home bar we’re cookin’ up. The home bar is sort of the master control panel to access all the future goodness that the overlay has to offer… like the Rich Presence game invite feature you also see below! Games with Rich Presence integration will allow you to invite and start parties directly through the Discord overlay.

That’s all the pictures the design team let me have. Next time, I’ll bribe them with some salmon jerky to get more.

The designs and features here are subject to change because you’re not my boss and we can do what we want, but also because we like to treat projects like this as living and breathing so we can nurture them to the best of what they can be. As always, hit us up with your feedback through Twitter or drop some ideas on our feedback site.

Anyway, if you hit any speed bumps or just aren’t sure how to set up the overlay, check out our help article here.

Cheers to convenience!

Discord Overlay — Text Chat, Performance Boost, and Notifications was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Time Is Future

• Introducing the Games tab! See what’s going on in your Discord universe — games being played, news on games you play, Spotify listening parties, and more. Read our help article to get the full scoop.
• Invite links for Group DMs now exist because they should.
• You can also make empty Group DMs and start tossin out invites like you’re a promotor to a an indie concert that no one really wants to go to but will because what else are they gonna do on a Tuesday night out in the BIG CIIIITTYYYY.
• @everyone messages will now warn you and ask if you really want to send that message. I believe this is a famous psychological experiment where people who reserved @everyone for truly important reasons had greater success later in life.
• Colorblind mode begins! User statuses are no longer a secret for humans with different configurations. Turn this feature on in User Settings -> Appearance. You asked for this!
• When set to Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, Discord’s font will look more consistent and better like my three pointer. Jake didn’t know what a three pointer was so here’s a wikipedia link for Jake.
• Changing input or output device now makes a BEEP bEEP beep.
• B1nzy did not have anything to add. Smh.

The Future Is Now

• Wanna see behind the curtain? Follow our Instagram.
• DISCORD IS HIRING TALENTED BEAVERS!.
• Our HypeSquad needs Event Coordinators! If you run LAN events, University Gaming Clubs, or the like, sell your soul to us here.

6.21.2018 — Change Log was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Discord is now three years old! According to three year old developmental milestones, we are capable of correctly naming familiar colors, drawing circles, and getting a headshot as Hanzo — feel the dragon — and yes that was a link to a tweet with the exact same joke. So joke I used it twice.

IT'S OUR BIRTHDAY!!! Discord is officially three years old 🎉 🎁 🎈 🎊 🎁 🎉 🎊 🎈 🎉 🎊 🎊 🎉 🎊 🎁 🎊 🎉 🎈 🎊 🎊 🎉 🎊 🎁 🎊 🎁 🎉

 — @discordapp

Really though, birthdays are a sacred opportunity for us to look back in time and see just how much love and support all of you have given us. It’s part surreal and part why am I crying?

We want to say thank you to everyone who wished us happy birthday! Thanks for all the fan art, kind words, and good vibes~~

@discordapp HAPPY BIRTHDAY. TYSM FOR ALL OF THE WONDERFUL MOMENTS SHARED WITH MY FRANDS

 — @VanillaSpiffy

Happy Birthday @discordapp!

 — @BoltageGD

@discordapp I love you Discord! 💖 You changed my life in a lot of ways, and I'm not even kidding. Found friends, had unforgettable experiences, great memories on Discord.

 — @Linkuru_

@discordapp

 — @suprkitumeio

Happy birthday @discordapp! Here's one unoriginal piece.

 — @GraphicsSworen

We also asked our HypeSquad to share their favorite Discord memories with the hashtag #discordmemories. Our hearts were collectively warmed by all your reminiscing. There’s so many laughs and so much love that it feels like shopping at a boutique pillow store. Live, Laugh, Love — My Dudes.

My Favorite memory on discord had to be staying in touch with friends and making new ones. Staying up till dawn playing games and just having the time of my life thank you @discordapp #DiscordMemories @HawthorneFox @Quasar_Fox @SurxRosso @Momobeda @BeezlyOfficial @Lukasmcd14

 — @Verenzothehart

I started looking for some people to play @Titanfallgame, and I stumbled onto @Cownt_Chocula Twitch channel who pushed using his Discord channel. I joined a great community in multiple ways that day, somehow became a mod and chat way too much. #DiscordMemories

 — @DarkScibe

DiscordMemories My favourite memory of all was November 4th 2017, the day me and my boyfriend started our relarionship. I cant thank discord enough for giving me the chance to meet the person I hold so near and dear to my heart. Thank you @discordapp, and happy birthday <3

 — @BeezlyOfficial

Honestly, probably one of my favorite #DiscordMemories was when I had 300 people in a voice channel and played spooky scary skeletons on loop for an hour. #SorryNotSorry

 — @tbstewa

Check out the #discordmemories hashtag to see all the love.

Furthermore, Discord itself has grown a tremendous amount since our birthday in May of last year. Let’s take a graphical look at how Discord has evolved since then.

As you can graphically digest, year three was pretty amazing for us. We’re consistently blown away by how much support all of you give us. It’s a wind tunnel of love. We look forward to the wind that comes in year four.

PLEASE INSERT DISC 4,
The “Crying Happy Tears” Discord Team

Discord Turns Three! 🎉 🎁 🎊 was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

BETTER FASTER STRONGER LOUDER

• We did some heavy tinkering on Discord’s core infrastructure. Most of the following bullets are related to this. Queue the Daft Punk track.
• We’re not joking, please listen to this while reading for maximum impact.
• Large servers perform better in general. CPU and network usage is about the same regardless of server size (whether a hundred people or a hundred-thousand people).
• Offline members are no longer hidden after you cross one-hundred members. We turned this off long ago for tech… and it is back. Offline lists in large servers are still hidden, though.
• Discord uses a lot less data now. Long live your data plan.
• Discord uses a lot less battery now. Longer live your battery life. Also, the iOS app loads faster. Android imminent.
• Large Discord servers can now grow much larger. This one’s for you, Fortnite.
• Select Xbox Insiders can now connect their Xbox account to Discord. Will be available to the rest of us mere mortals sometime in the very very very near future.
• Audio files can now be played directly in Discord to minimize the time it takes for people to listen to your toasty mix tape.
• Screenshare now includes audio! Now your friends can yell at you to kill the Genji behind you.
• New authentication screens are sexy af. Go check out how wavy they are.
• Added a volume slider to the inline media player because that llama video someone sent me was loud and confusing.
• The instant invite pop up now has user suggestions for speed running server invites. UX BOOOOOOST :rocket:
• Turned off a few lights in dark theme. There’s more dark now. That’s how that works.

WORK IT

• If you’re a YouTuber or a streamer and love Discord, you should apply for the Discord Partner Program and increase your coolness factor by at least 16%.
• We need external validation, so please follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Work For Us Please We Need Help So Come Get A Job Job Job Job Job Job

Change Log — 5.14.2018 was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Years ago, when starting the company that became Discord, I wanted to build a workplace that was rewarding, challenging, and positive. To achieve this, I started with a simple question, “How do you create a place where people can thrive doing their best work?”

My goal for sharing this philosophy is to give everyone a glimpse into how we do things — especially those of you who may be considering joining the team.

Upside Down Leadership

The answer begins with the way leaders see themselves. We have a tremendous impact on the shape of the workplace and I believe that traditional top-down management fails to bring out the best in people.

At Discord, our leadership philosophy is bottoms-up, meaning managers act as support and guidance for individual contributors. I remember loving the jobs where my boss would coach me and give frequent tips on how to do better. I remember hating the jobs where my boss would micromanage me while giving feedback once a year.

Small & Mighty Teams

Contrary to popular Silicon Valley belief, hiring slow and maintaining a small team has tons of benefits. Hiring slowly allows us to take our time to find excellent candidates who truly understand Discord’s mission to bring gamers together. It means our team has a greater opportunity to gel and develop meaningful relationships. Best of all, it means that each employee has a deeper opportunity to learn and grow with the company.

Furthermore, a small team forces us to choose the work that brings us the greatest results — the path of highest compounding leverage. It forces us to say no to good ideas and yes to great ones.

Unleash Talent

With all that said, over time I’ve come to settle on four values (inspired by a variety of sources including this talk) which I believe create the kind of environment that talented top performers thrive in: autonomy, mastery, purpose, and compassion

1. Autonomy

People want the freedom to be creative in their approach to solving problems. I’ve found the conditions needed for someone to be creative boil down to two questions and the space to answer them — what outcome am I trying to achieve and why does this outcome matter?

The entirety of our planning process is about clarifying the what and why of someone’s work. The entirety of our management process is about supporting people to actually do the work which ties into our leadership philosophy as written above.

2. Mastery

One of the most motivating things for a high performing person is making sure their work is important and challenging. Their projects should let them stretch beyond their comfort zone, but not so far that they aren’t successful.

To make sure they succeed, everyone provides constant, real time feedback. We don’t do drawn out performance reviews every year. Instead, we shatter the typical feedback process into hundreds of digestible bits. This structure creates an incredibly fast learning cycle that allows everyone to grow and improve in real time instead of accumulating feedback into a grueling annual review. Over time, I’ve seen junior folks grow into strong senior contributors — and even managers — through this approach.

Feedback is a dialogue at Discord and we recruit everyone to participate regardless of position. Team members are encouraged to give their feedback to leadership as much as leadership is encouraged to share feedback with their team members.

3. Purpose

Many of the best relationships in my life were built playing games. I have such great memories playing all sorts of games with the people closest to me like my wife, brother, and best friends. Some people here appreciate games through time spent playing with their kids or see it in their spouse’s close relationships.

Whatever the specific connection is, the point is to deliberately hire people who can connect with our mission. When they do, it means they sweat the details. It means people put in the extra oomph to make something great. So many things just “happen” because people care.

It’s not possible to manufacture this — we look for it during our hiring process and only hire people who care about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

4. Compassion

At Discord, people don’t leave their personal life at the door. We expect people to show up to do great work. That said, some days you’re just in a bad mood or having a rough time with something at home. We respect each other as people and have come to realize that acknowledging people’s emotions and keeping feelings in the open creates a much more supportive and effective environment.

I remember a day when one of our executives noticed a team member was on the verge of tears at their desk because of a personal issue. At a moment like that, work doesn’t matter — they put it aside and took a walk to chat about what was going on. Not only did it give the team member the opportunity to talk through what was going on in their personal life, it also gave the executive an opportunity to understand what that team member was going through. These kinds of emotionally reflective and vulnerable conversations happen often at Discord.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

Sustained productivity comes from healthy work-life harmony. Each person has their own lifestyle and circumstance which informs their work schedule. For example, many employees at Discord have children and keep family hours — working a solid 8 hours every day and then off to have dinner and tuck their kids in.

Everyone does what’s best for their own situation and their team to ensure sustainable productivity. We respect and accommodate what each person needs to be most effective.

Thrive

Through these foundational principles applied each and every day, we try to thoughtfully create an environment where talented, diverse people from all walks of life feel supported and encouraged to do great work.

Along the way, we make sure to have fun, to celebrate our victories, to eat good food, and to share pet pictures, of course. Take a look:

If this looks and sounds like the kind of place you’d like to work, come apply for one of our many jobs and join us on our mission to bring people together around games.

Thanks for reading,
Jason Citron
Founder & CEO

The Four Values of Working at Discord was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

ROLL THE DICE

• Randomly select someone at random with Discord’s all new @someone. It’s like playing @ roulette.
• Discord will now crash at random to keep you on your toes at all times. Your calves will thank us later.
• While in a voice channel, typing owo in any text channel causes Discord to let out a cry of distress.
• @supereveryone is here! You can now bypass @everyone permissions for when you need to say something urgent or important. We trust you’ll respect other people and use this feature only when needed.

NO MORE MEMES

• Fixed a bug that caused something you didn’t want to happen. Now it does something you want.
• Removed all those heckin’ memes. Who thought any of that crap was funny?
• Fixed a bug where this weird lonely creature was all over our app. It’s in a better place now (specifically, Boise, Idaho).

TWO REMINDERS

• We’re definitely not hiring, so don’t even think about applying for one of our extremely attractive positions.
• Discord Nitro is being downgraded to Discord Stop! Drop calls, prevent your messages from sending, and reduce your file upload limit by half!

Change Log — 4.1.2018 was originally published in Discord Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.