Discord reaches 45 million users, 9 million daily active users

[Chary]

The chatting program for gamers, Discord, has reached it's second anniversary this week, and to celebrate, the once-indie programming team have revealed usage numbers for Discord. After only 2 years, the app has gotten a staggering 45 million users to register, with 9 million of those being people who are active daily. 6 billion messages are sent monthly, on average, with 231 countries having used Discord.

The growing number of users also means that more messages are flying around on Discord's various servers. The company is seeing roughly 22 percent growth from month to month in the number of messages sent.

The voice chat figures are similarly huge. The company is up to 16 petabytes monthly of voice data bandwidth; for context, 1PB amounts to roughly 13.3 years of HD video.

The biggest hitch faced by a prospective new user: you need to know what you're looking for. There isn't a built-in search feature for Discord servers and the third-party options out there aren't necessarily giving you a complete picture.

So what do you think? Has Discord succeeded in its job of eliminating the need for Skype? Has it become something you actively use, or an integral part of your gaming experience? Or do you not find a need for it at all?

Source

And don't forget, if you do use Discord, you can join GBAtemp's official server here!

 

[dimmidice]

Personally i only use discord for channel based communication. Not one on one communication. I still use skype for that if only because that's where my contacts still are.

 

[VinsCool]

That's very good for a "fad". Nice to see it growing.

But @FAST6191 would disagree, most likely.

 

[Dionicio3]

I had a discord for the longest time, GBATemp was what made me actually use it

 

[FAST6191]

That's very good for a "fad". Nice to see it growing.

But @FAST6191 would disagree, most likely.

While I still maintain fad my major misgivings are still the lack of interoperability, only private servers, no open protocol (I would like open client but protocol is enough) and meh feature set. Granted the IM market right now is worse than it ever has been since it became a thing.

 

[RustInPeace]

Before, I never jumped on Discord because of Skype, that it was already installed in Windows 10 I think, it felt more ubiquitous, I already had a lot of contacts mainly for pokemon genning requests. So, no need for Discord, but when the league I genned for jumped to Discord, I basically had to, and I guess it's sleeker, cooler, dark theme feature is nice. Overall though, just like Skype for me, it's serviceable. If I wasn't genning for leagues, I wouldn't use it at all. Though I'll bring up that Discord's evolved past just gaming stuff, I've had one-on-one chats with people, there's NSFW related channels, i.e. porn sharing and stuff. Again, Skype had those, but since Discord's the flavor of the month (for lack of a better phrase), it simply takes up things Skype already had and is now ubiquitous in its own right, overshadowing Skype by this point.

So, congratulations I guess.

 

[Vipera]

So what do you think? Has Discord succeeded in its job of eliminating the need for Skype?

It's a bad comparison.

Skype is getting very outdated when it comes to IM functionality, but it's still a great VOIP client for landline and phone calls. It's also more official for overall communication than a gaming chat. I could be Mr John Johnson during the day and Spankmesally69 when I make WoW raids. Nothing is replacing anybody.

 

[DinohScene]

Welp, Used skype for a long time but it became cluttered with ads and started hogging resources.
Goodbye Skype, hello Discord.

 

[Armadillo]

I only use it for voice chat when gaming because it's free, would still being using ts3 otherwise, I can do without the chat/emote/picture spam and other nonsense that discord brings.

 

[Deleted User]

Discord is pretty cool, it has its short comings (like being a botnet that gets all your data) and hypesquad is kinda weird as in nobody knows what to do and it being hard to find non private servers sucks and the way discord is so exploitable sucks and paying for gif avatars sucks and bans being SO easy to get around I could do it with my eyes closed sucks and...........

Ya know, the normal stuff