Digital Platforms
All The Rage: Discord in India
Discord’s role in the Indian Internet Culture
Every now and again, I have spurts of questioning the functionality vs futility of social media platforms. My stance about most of them is still grey at best with the exception of Discord. It is very easily the only platform that has done me nothing but good; as dramatic as it may sound — it has changed my life.
What is this thing called Discord?
For some context, Discord is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platform that was created for gamers as a more user friendly chatting platform substitute to TeamSpeak. Over the years, Discord remained sort of in the shadows to non gamers and non heavy Reddit users (a lot of subreddits use Discord as their chatting forum) but COVID has resulted in tectonic changes everywhere; leaving not even Discord’s stone unturned.
Discord recognized that despite it having started as a platform specific to gaming enthusiasts, non gamers used it for many different roles; Discord quickly branched out into many other spaces. Listening in on this, they underwent a rebrand and changed their motto from “Chat for Gamers” to “Chat for Communities and Friends” in March 2020. Subsequently, they announced that they were shifting their focus away from video gaming specific content to all purpose communication; reflecting in their new slogan “Your place to talk”.
And talk, people have. About everything under the sun. Discord’s selling point is the community you can build and with COVID having hit, a lot of people, brands and organisations that depended on physical interaction and physical spaces for their communities suddenly had nothing and nowhere to go. Over the pandemic, Discord in India exploded with new servers, with new people and became fairly more known among indie circles. While I was a light user of Discord since the past 2 years, the pandemic and the burgeoning of Indian servers made it my primary “social” app (to even the extent that I’m likelier to respond on Discord than WhatsApp). I write here about Discord in the indie scene over a large part of 2020 (of course, it’s very likely that there are some very large blind spots in the servers I know and I’d appreciate nothing more if you could tell me about them!) largely from my experiences with the communities.
Discord and the indie scene.
Stand up comics like Tanmay Bhatt, Samay Raina and Joel Dsouza created their own Discord servers; fans engage with one another, play games, listen to music and just ‘hang’. The comics use Discord to announce new videos and live streams, to talk to, and to play games with their most loyal, ardent followers — their armies, who are the first ones to flock to new content and show their support there!
For all of the toxicity that often comes with digital platforms, Discord succeeded to provide a safe haven and a safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community of India. With everything from general banter and gaming to yoga and a book club, this server is one where a member of the community can find hobbies, can find others on the same boat as them and can call home.
Lishash, a friend’s homegrown app, tries to change the way we listen to music and is created on the insight of the connections music helps us make. Lishash recently created a Discord server that acts as a platform for the community to grow and to pave the way for music listening parties. Shashwat Singhal and his team created a bot that emulates certain features of the app, to get users more acquainted to their potential experience on the app with the help of habituated users (bots on Discord deserve a whole another article in themselves).
Speaking of music, the indie music scene in India had been burgeoning pre COVID, and the pandemic is hopefully nothing more than a bump. Most artists were extremely agile and quick to adapt, accept and acquaint themselves to their stage for the next couple months (or more?) — the digital one. A few artists and a few venues and publications moved to Discord; Tejas and Dhruv Visvanath interact often with those on their server, giving beginner musicians some advice. Dhruv also hosts audio newsletters where he speaks to other artists like Parekh and Singh and Komorebi; The Indian Music Diaries; a platform that is dedicated to Indian independent music took this opportunity to connect with Indian indieheads.
A Humming Heart’s server The Scene is abuzz, with music listening every night since the lockdown. Every night, a group of people united by their love for discovering independent music, listen to an album/EP together by an Indian artist (group music listening is a feature one can have on Discord using one of many available bot options). Sometimes, some members of the band whose music is playing tune in and walk us through the album; share some anecdotes, the stories behind the music and how it was produced. I’ve never seen music come alive in real time in this way before; it’s impossible in a gig for these long, rambly stories, for these questions and these answers and for us to witness this banter between the bandmates. This article speaks in great detail about this experience from the perspective of the founder of The Scene as well as a guest artist.
My two dimes on Discord.
I’m not a fan of the implications of the word ‘influencers’ but for a lack of a better universal term, how long will it be before influencers like Sukhnid Kaur and Rega Jha create their own servers? Imagine the conversations, the knowledge and the kinds of connections and resources you would find on a Discord server created by them! Lifestyle influencers, health and fitness influencers, tech influencers and eventually even (some select few) brands will find that migrating to Discord will help them connect to the most high investment, high intent followers/fans.
While right now, in my very, very limited experience, brands will see it only as “one more platform to maintain”. However, if used right, Discord can be everything one can need for a community of true loyalists; a place where organic recommendations and Word of Mouth will be the norm. It’s potential is nothing short of what brand dreams are made of. That’s, however, not to say that any brand could achieve this; if it doesn’t fit the bill of ‘community’, the server could be as dead as the hundreds of others. Rather, I imagine a Discord server for a Levi’s lounge — something that fits in exactly with the community cultural hub they aspire to be.
I, and many I know, are finding our aversion towards any kind of push content growing with every piece I consume. The egoistical and farcical natures of social media platforms don’t appeal to me and neither do their algorithms that are created to keep me using the app. Discord has no scrolls, no news feeds, no validation avenues like tags and likes and comments. It’s my respite from the ‘evils’ of the Internet, because it’s where I find content of great value to me, it’s where I have found people with interests I have too and where I have conversations that keep me engaged. It is exactly this deviation from the toxic positivity of social media platforms that I believe is why Discord (and platforms like it) will be the future of digital communication.
