Discord CEO Jason Citron makes the case for a smaller, more private internet

This episode explores Discord's transformation from a gaming-focused communication tool to a central hub for private, small-group online interactions, emphasizing privacy and control over user spaces.

1. Discord is focusing on providing intimate and private communication spaces, moving away from the public social media model.
2. The platform has evolved to support diverse communities beyond gaming, incorporating AI tools and more.
3. Discord’s business model includes a mix of subscription services and developing tools for better community engagement and moderation.
4. Citron emphasizes the importance of user safety, especially for teens, which influences many of Discord's design and policy decisions.
5. The discussion on potential future regulations highlights the ongoing balance between user freedom and necessary moderation.

1: Introduction and Background

Neil I. Patel introduces Jason Citron and sets the stage for a discussion on Discord's impact on internet culture. The chapter outlines Discord’s transition from a gaming-focused tool to a versatile platform for various online communities. Jason Citron: "Discord has evolved much beyond just being a tool for gamers."

2: Discord's Business Model and Community Engagement

This chapter explores Discord's business strategies, including its subscription service, Nitro, and new avenues like integrating AI tools and advertisements. Jason Citron: "Our goal is to create a platform where people can feel safe and enjoy intimate communications with their close friends."

3: Privacy, Safety, and User Control

Citron discusses the paramount importance of user safety, especially for teens, and the tools Discord uses to ensure a secure environment. Jason Citron: "Keeping our platform safe, particularly for younger users, is our top priority."

4: The Future of Discord and Online Communication

The final chapter delves into Citron’s vision for the future of Discord and the internet, emphasizing smaller, private spaces over public social media dynamics. Jason Citron: "We believe the future of online communication will continue to move towards more private and encrypted messaging."

1. Prioritize privacy in your online interactions by using platforms that offer control over your data and communication.
2. Engage with communities that share your interests in a safe and moderated environment to enhance your online experience.
3. Consider the implications of the platforms you use on your personal data and adjust your usage accordingly.
4. Support platforms that prioritize user safety and transparent business practices.
5. Stay informed about the tools and settings available on communication platforms to manage your privacy and security.

Today, I’m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord.

In many ways Discord represents a significant shift away from what we now consider traditional social platforms. As you’ll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hangout with your friends over shared common interests, whether that’s video games, the AI bot Midjourney, or maybe your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the internet, but that comes with serious challenges, especially around child safety and moderation.

People

Jason Citron, Neil I. Patel

Companies

Discord, Microsoft

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Neil I. Patel

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Jason Citron

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Search Wix Studio today to explore the. Full range of features hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Jason Citron, the co founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming focused voice and chat app.

Now, you might think Discord is just slack for gamers, but over time it's become much more important than that. And for a growing community of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture fandoms and other communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as Internet culture is happening on Discord, and in many ways, discord represents a significant shift away from what we now consider to be the traditional social platforms. Its not a public facing network like Facebook or Instagram, and its not really a broadcast medium for creators like YouTube or TikTok. But its also not a forum with moderated communities like Reddit.

Instead, as youll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hang out with small groups of friends over shared common interests, whether that's video games, interacting with the AI image generation bot mid journey, or maybe just talking about your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the Internet as a whole. Jason and I dug into the nuances of how he sees discord as compared to all those other platforms, and how he's made conscious choices around what he sees as the future of online communication. For Discord, that future is smaller, it's more intimate, and it's farther away from the public eye. We also discussed some of the inherent tensions of Discord between the version of Discord that's a tool for voice chat among friends and the version of Discord that's become a social destination, mixing public and private in increasingly complex and in times legally fraught ways.

For example, Discord just banned some groups that were making software for emulating retro video games. I asked Jason about it. You'll hear his answer. You'll also hear Jason talk about Discord's evolving business model. Unlike Slack, this isn't enterprise software.

Instead, there's a consumer subscription service called Nitro and a growing number of other ways that Discord is exploring making money, including the platform's very first ads. Jason also revealed why he ultimately decided not to sell the company to Microsoft for a reported $10 billion, but also how the post pandemic slowdown across the tech industry led to two rounds of layoffs and a major refocusing effort on what Jason thinks the Discord community really wants and needs. The short answer was more focus on gaming and more outside developers building apps, bots, and games that live exclusively inside of Discord. Of course, because Discord's users are so young, it faces some particularly unique content moderation challenges. You'll hear Jason reflect on his testimony in front of Congress earlier this year around child safety, and also why the company has made very different decisions around features like encryption than other platforms.

Because Jason's perspective is that the first goal is to make Discord safe for teens. This was a fascinating conversation. Jason's perspective that online life will only continue to move towards more private messaging seems more and more convincing by the day. All right, Discord CEO Jason Sichuan. Here we go.

Jason Citron, you are the founder and CEO of Discord. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me, Eli. I am really excited to talk to you. Discord is a very seemingly very simple application.

It's also very complicated. It exists in a complicated ecosystem of things. There's a lot to talk about with Discord all the time. It started as a voice chat for gamers. It grew into a place where people hang out to talk to each other.

What do you think Discord is now? Now? I think Discord is a place that people talk and hang out with their friends online. A long time ago, I was talking to Stuart Butterfield. This is before he sold Slack to Salesforce.

And I said, do you think Discord is a competitor to Slack. And he said, no, absolutely not. Slack is enterprise software. We do all these enterprise logins. We got to deal with all this stuff at your company.

Discord is over there, and that's different. And I always thought that was interesting. I think that's true. But the idea that one is very enterprise and one is very consumer, that's gotten a lot blurrier since I've had that conversation. I know entire businesses that not only run in Discord, but talk to their communities, to their customers in Discord.

Has that gotten blurrier for you as well? We have always focused on Discord as a service and tool for consumers to come together and talk and hang out. And it is used in many different ways. To your point, lots of companies use Discord almost as a new way to communicate with their super fans online. And we love that and we support that use case.

But most people who use discord are in smaller invite only groups. We call them servers with people that they know or friends of friends. And it's a place that sort of feels like your dorm common room or your living room, where people are hanging out with people they know. That server terminology is always really fascinating to me. I'm somebody who came up on IRC.

The first tech website I worked for, Engadget, actually ran itself on IRC, and we had to teach everybody how to use IRC when they got a job with us, which was wild. Everyone's moved on from that now. But you've kept that terminology, that ethos, alive. You're starting a server, you're in charge. Talk to me about that.

Why keep that sort of old school terminology in play? When we started discord, our focus was very much on building a text and voice chat app for people who played games back in 2015. In that era, the alternative products that people used were literally, they would host voice servers for their friends. The reason we picked the word server was because at the time, that was how our customers thought about what the tool was doing for them. It was a server where they could go and bring their friends together.

So we said, well, in Discord you get a free server, whereas on those other apps, you're paying for a server. Our service runs in the cloud and doesn't literally have a server the way that they used to rent computers and get IP addresses. So it just kind of stuck. People understood the concept of a server as a place where you come together. And for a very long time, Discord's primary focus was on gaming from 2015 to 2020 or so.

And even today still, gaming is a huge part of what people do on Discord. And so people just kind of get it. I asked that question very specifically because the word server, to me implies a bunch of control. Right? As you're saying, you would go out in the world, you would start a server, it would be your own.

But Discord is a platform. There's an App Store built into it. You're doing a bunch of developer outreach. It is the user interface for some very cutting edge products like mid journey. That control kind of goes back and forth.

There's what discord the platform wants, there's what users are doing with it. There's what users might do with it that you haven't even thought of. There's what they might want to do with it that you don't want them to do with it. How do you think about that tension? Our focus is very much on creating tools that give people the capability to design their own space.

That was part of the intention from day one. That's part of the server idea like you're talking about. It's like we give you these tools to make a server and then you can choose, what are the text channels, what are the voice channels, what do you want to name it, how do you want to decorate the different people and have them stand out? We have this permissions and roles capability where you can say, well, these are admins and these are newbies, they show up differently in chat, and they have different powers in chat about who could kick an invite. And these kind of things had this ethos of leaning towards user control of their spaces.

And frankly, what's so cool about that is that extended to customizing discord with our API and Bots platform, because we knew that people were going to want to customize the service and connect it to other services outside in the world. And that user control and open ethos is what enabled things like mid journey to flourish. And so many bots and apps that are built across Discord, there's over half, half a million apps that people have built on discord that are used across our user base. So it's a really intentional posture that creates conditions for exciting things to happen. How much of the evolution of the product itself is guided by what people are doing as they build applications and bots, and how much is it guided by what you want from it?

We take a mixed approach where we spend a lot of time talking with our customers of all different kinds, trying to understand what are people doing with discord, what do they want from it, what are their challenges with it? And then we kind of mix that with, like, what excites us as product creators and as builders, and how do we think the world is changing and where is it going, and what do we want to create for people and kind of put that all in a pot and shake it up and then stuff comes out. So in some places, things that our bots community and apps community has built have driven our roadmap. Like, I'll give you one example. In the early days, we had a hunch that Discord would be used for these kind of public communities, like some of these were talking about.

But we didn't actually design that in a real first class way into the product. When we initially launched, the user cap was like 30 or 50 people in a server, for example. And so as people started using it for more public spaces, we kept raising the cap, which was like infrastructure work to make the product work better. And then we had basic moderation tools. But it became clear when you have thousands of people in a server, you need different kinds of moderation tools.

So a lot of bots sprung up that made us realize, oh, we need to invest in this. We created Automod, which is now built into the platform that allows these communities to moderate in much more advanced ways. Now we have a whole trust and safety team and that whole thing. So that whole effort was really a response to what people were doing with our product that we thought might happen, but weren't really sure, and it wasn't the original focus. Let me put that into contrast with, say, Reddit, which is not a huge user generated platform that is really driven by its community.

There's a tension there, right? There's what the community wants, the tools it builds for itself, there's what Reddit wants. Those things come to a head. They wax, they wane. Have you had those moments where you know that the platform needs to do something that will make the community mad, but you need to do it anyway?

Or have you been able to sort of integrate what the community is building in a more healthy way or more stable way? One thing that's fundamentally different about Discord from Reddit is that we are much more like a group chat app for friends than this public space with moderators. In UGC, we don't think about discord as a UGC platform, for example. I think about it really as a communications app. It's a group chat app.

If you look at where people are spending their time and what they're doing, most of the time, most of the people are texting in invite only group chats with their friends or on voice chat, playing games, talking about their day, cooking dinner separately, falling asleep together. That's what people do. It's a place where people talk and hang out with their friends primarily, and then they do go explore these other spaces and their interests and participate in these big communities. And some people really love that part of the service. But Discord is a communications tool.

It's not a UGC platform in the sense of like, I think that you're describing it. I want to stick on that for 1 second because I think the difference is pretty finely shaded. It's a communications platform, but it's not one to one. It's one to many. By default, you log into a channel, you're talking to one person, but it could be talking to lots of people.

It's not encrypted, which I want to come to. That's a choice you've made to make sure you can monitor what's going on. Then you do moderate it because you're unencrypted and you can moderate, you do moderate it. You do have a trust and safety function. So what is the actual distinction between a communications platform and a user generated platform, like Twitter or Reddit or whatever?

Well, all communications are user generated, so maybe that's what you're getting at. But I think what I was reacting to is more, you were sort of describing trying to make this comparison between discord and Reddit and how Reddit, which is a great product, people post content on Reddit. The content that people post for other people, usually strangers, is the primary thing that I think people get from Reddit. Discord's very different. Discord is like, it's more like a group chat app where you're sending messages, frankly, often to one person.

Direct messages are very popular. Our servers are also popular. But in that case, it's like your three to ten friends. If you're playing a video game, it could be your guildmates or the people you regularly play with or a club that you're a part of. So it's not a broadcast medium in the way that a lot of these other kind of more social media type services are.

So we do moderate it because we know that there are a lot of teens on the platform. And then when we do have those public spaces, we treat that more like the sort of public ugc kind of stuff. But most of the time, most of the people are, like, hanging out with their friends in their virtual living room. That's fascinating. And I want to come back to it because Discord is so many things.

Like I said at the start, you can look at it through so many different lenses, and the idea of it just being a direct small group chat app, I put that right next to the fact that it's the user interface for mid journey, which is one of the hottest AI tools out there. And I say, well, most AI tools are text based, they're prompt based. A chat interface is the way we think about using most generative AI tools, and Discord has become that interface for at least one of them. Is that a future that's in conflict with where a group, small group chat app, or is that the next extension? Or is that something that needs to go off in another direction?

All on the ten. I think that the fact that the chat input box has become the primary way to interact with all these generative AI tools, and we have a really popular and extensible chat input box is great. Mid journey is a really cool product and people love using it. And they have one of the largest servers on Discord, if not the largest server on Discord. But a lot of people actually take the mid journey bot into their invite only server with their friends, and they're using it there in a more creative sort of space that is not in the public view of that server that you can just go join.

So I love the journey and the kind of things that other generative AI apps are on Discord. But for us, when we think about the service that we're offering to users, it's a group communications tool. And one of the things that people do when they're hanging out with their friends is they play around with these generative AI products. They share their creations with their friends, and they act as conversation pieces, as like a shared experience to do together. And so from that lens, we love it, and that's why we encourage and support it.

But we really come back to what are most people doing on discord most of the time? And it's this, like chilling with their friends and hanging out. And video games continue to be a huge part of what people do every month on Discord, you add this all. Up and you kind of get this strikingly different view of what being on the Internet should look like. It's not whatever TikTok is turning into, whatever home shopping network Instagram is turning into.

It's like text. Like you're typing a lot, you're looking at photos are being generated, you're interacting with other computer systems through text prompts. Discord is a window into that. You're maybe writing some applications that are inherently text based inside of Discord. But it's a very.

Almost like a command line vision of connecting on the Internet. Do you see Discord as being that big? As like, this is a different way of thinking about connecting and computing, or are we very focused on chat app. The way that we think about it and sort of our vision for where we think the future goes in regards to Discord, it really comes back to how people spend their time with their friends. And when I started the company back in 2012, the bet that I made was that video games would continue to become a bigger and bigger form of entertainment for people.

They would become more and more social, they would be across more and more devices, and that there wasn't a great communications product that was sort of started with your friends around gaming. That was kind of the original thesis. And even today, now, when we picked our heads up after COVID to re evaluate what's going on in the world, what do our customers care about? Spent a lot of time last year with folks. I have more conviction today that that will continue to become the future.

Like, if you sort of go back over the last twelve years, it's really played out and gaming has very much gone mainstream now. I think like 93% of Gen Z plays video games or something. When I was a kid, I was kind of weird playing multiplayer games by myself or with my friends, but it was a niche thing, and today it's quite normal. So our vision for the future is a world where people have really rich, shared experiences that they can spend quality time with their friends doing, no matter where they are in the world. A lot of those are going to be video games that exist just on platforms.

Some of those will be video games that we will serve directly through our platform. We have the bots platform, where we're evolving it to include embedded experiences, because that's part we think will matter. But it's really about this idea of how I think the Internet's going to evolve to become. There's a need for more cozy, intimate spaces where people can spend quality time with their friends away from the broadcast, kind of performative stuff that we see a lot of. And we're very focused on creating those cozy spaces for people to talk and hang out with their friends and deepen their friendships.

This is a theme I see everywhere right now. The United States is heading into an election year, and what is our social media going to do to us, and what is it doing to teenagers? It's all sort of colliding in. Oh boy, a bunch of these social networks are not ready to take the weight or they don't want to. In the case of meta, I don't think they want to.

You're not positioned in that fight at all, right? You're saying, look, the Internet should go back to being smaller, more fragmented, more amongst people, you know, and less about these giant sort of culture defining social media platforms. How comfortable are you in the bet? And I mean that in the big way, not the little way. Like you're the CEO, you have to say you're comfortable.

But in the like, is the Internet actually moving in that way? Because I know a lot of people who want it to, but I'm not sure that it actually is. I don't think it's an either or. I think over the last 15 years, as we went from the Internet being new to Web 2.0 and now the rise of mobile, I think that we saw a lot of this idea or this sort of aspirational promise of broadcast social media services and what they could do for us as people. And actually, I think they do a lot of really great things.

In 50 years from now, we're still going to have something like this. It's undeniable. All of these services create value for people. I think there's questions we're working through as a society around some of the negative externalities of those things and how do we want to manage through that. But I think we're going to have public photo sharing and public video sharing apps for the long run.

What we're seeing on Discord, and I think this has been a trend for the last five, six, seven years, kind of towards group chat messengers in general, is people understand that those public spaces are interesting, but there's something else that we want in our lives, too, and that's more intimate, cozy spaces where you can spend time in a relaxed way with people you know, and spend quality time with friends, even though you can't maybe be in the same physical space. And that is going to continue to grow and grow. And I think that the social media stuff will grow and grow, and I think that both of these things will exist in big ways in the world. If you go 20 years in the future. When you look at discord right now, what part of it is growing faster?

Is it the small cozy spaces part? Or is it the we are the place where a bunch of crypto startups talk to their customers? That was a big growth moment for Discord, but that's the big public broadcast version of it. Is it the smaller, cozy part that's growing faster, or is it the more public partner? It's the smaller cozy part.

In fact, that's the part that's always been growing the fastest. But I think the thing that we find that's interesting is because it's not publicly out there, people don't really know about it so much. The crypto thing was big, and now the AI thing is big. Those things did bring a lot of people to our service. But at the end of the day, the people who come to our service and love it the most are the ones who come with their friends or find their friends.

It ends up becoming this place where they hang out online and keep in touch with the people that they care about.

We have to take a quick break. When we're back, Jason and I get into the decoder questions and really break down how he's run discord for the last decade.

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Neil I. Patel

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Jason Citron

We're back with Discord CEO Jason Citron to talk about how he structured the company and, of course, how he makes decisions. I think that brings me to the decoder questions. You've described a lot of things. Discord could be a sense that you need to focus on the main thing, that it always has been and should be in the future. I want to ask you how the company structure, where there's a little bit of context here.

You did just have some layoffs. You cited the economic slowdown. Your headcount was growing too fast. So you cut 170 people, which is 17% of the company. You'd cut 4% previous to that.

How is Discord structured now? Do these cuts change any of that. Structure, the way that we're structured? And those cuts comes back to what are we trying to accomplish and what are we trying to build for the world and for people over the last year? Last year in particular, I mentioned we spent a bunch of time going back into the market and talking to customers in a way we hadn't over the last few years through COVID, to really refresh our mental model of what are people doing, what do they want from us.

What we really clicked in on was this insight that while we were sort of focused on being more mass market through COVID, gaming actually went mass market at the same time as people kind of grew up. And because our service is so good for playing games with your friends while people do lots of things on Discord, what we realized was that gaming actually is still one of the main ways that people spend a lot of time with their friends. On Discord, I think it was like 95% of our users play video games. And last month, one and a half billion hours were spent playing games across Discord on 60,000 titles. So people spend a lot of time playing video games.

And what that made me realize was a we should really focus on gaming because it's a huge thing that people do on our service, and there's a few billion people that play video games in the world. It's the largest form of entertainment that's growing the fastest. And I think we have a very unique role to play there, and we love it. The founder, like me, my co founder, and a lot of the people at the company just grew up playing games. And games are such a core part of our social lives and our best relationships.

So with that insight of saying, okay, we're going to focus in on gaming, we realized that we had too many people at the company, and we were sort of not focused on the right stuff. So we kind of went through a reevaluation of, like, what's the next chapter of discord going to be? And through that, we realized we needed to shrink the company a little bit and shift our focus. So going forward now, we are very focused on gaming as kind of our core use case group chat around gaming, but continuing to enable other things, because people who play games do lots of other stuff, and that's sort of how we got here in the first place. So we are organized as a result of that, as a functional company, meaning we have engineering, product management, marketing, finance, talent.

And we organize functionally because discord is one product. So we need to organize and coordinate in a way that it comes out as a coherent experience for people. I talk about it like a symphony. People hear it as one song. Even though we have 100 people playing instruments, we have to coordinate it effectively.

A functional organization allows us to do that. Then we break it into three different types of work that we organize against. We call them our foundational initiatives. This is the stuff that is the bread and butter of what we need to deliver on for our users. Performance and trust and safety, core messaging and communication features, these kind of things.

So we have cross functional teams dedicated to each of those with like a design leader and a product leader and an engine leader. And they have a roadmap and they work on those. And then we have what we call kind of our core priorities. These are kind of the step function things that we're betting on. We have a few of these, and notably, one of them is our new quests feature, which we announced is we're getting into sort of how do we help game developers bring their games to life and build their businesses.

So we have quests. Another one is our embedded activities platform that I mentioned, and then a couple of other things in there. And then we have kind of a much smaller, I call it venture initiatives team. Just like a team of six people that reports directly to me. This is the crazy innovation lab where we're trying stuff that may never come to life.

But it's sort of the bigger swings to just see what could we create and innovate on for folks. That's kind of how we organize the company, and we run it in kind of an interesting way, too, with loom videos and stuff. And I'm happy to get into that if you want, but I'll pause. Wait. Well, I definitely want you to get into loom videos.

That's the first time anyone's ever said that on the show, which is wild. What is a loom video? How do you run the company with something called a loom video? So loom is actually a specific product that makes it really easy to do video, like screen cap and camera recording, because we run the company hybrid. Like, we use discord to run discord.

So we're all over the country in America, and we'll get groups of people together to look at marketing plans or review creative assets or product strategies or product demos. There was a lot of coordination overhead, and, like, how do you get a meeting together with all the people that want to be in the conversation, participate? And it was just like this sort of chaos thing, and had this idea to like, well, what if they recorded the presentation ahead of time and sent it to me, and then I could just watch it in my free time, and then I could respond with a video as well so they could see my excitement around the feature, and I could have their presentation up and sort of be clicking through it, and then it gets the initial presentation and reaction out of the way. And it turned out that we started doing this in just a couple spots, and now it's becoming this thing across the whole company where people record video of them doing a presentation. Usually it's ten minutes long, 510 minutes long, and then folks can watch it.

I often watch these things at two x, you know, sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth, you know, like, I always have free time, but I don't always have, like, an hour to have a meeting. And then sometimes I'll watch it two, three times, let it marinate in my head, and then I will always have ten or 15 minutes to just, like, respond, to react, or essentially a response video and send it to them. And then 100 people can watch it. They don't have to be in the meeting most of the time. Then we don't need a meeting.

Like, the communication happen, and they can go. And sometimes then if we do need a meeting, we can get folks together. But we've already basically had a full brain dump back and forth, and it's just really accelerated our product development and creativity and I think also created a more human connection between our employees because now we're seeing each other in video in these ways that is much more natural and casual that I think sometimes is missing when you're hybrid. So it's been really cool. That sounds really cool.

I have to come see a loom video sometime. All right. You can't tell me about your crazy six person renegade crazy ideas squad without telling me a crazy idea. What are some crazy ideas that you've tried? I put the chip on the table so that you all know it's there.

But the challenge with talking about this stuff is most of it's not going to see the light of day. So our users will be listening to this and they're going to hold me to it. Oh, yeah. If I say anything, they're going to hold me to it. So I think my idea in my team is to have the worst ideas so that everyone else can have slightly better ideas.

What's one of your worst ideas that you would just never do? That's obviously a bad idea. I mean, I'm sure I have a lot of bad ideas. I just don't know which ones are bad before I try them. Fair enough.

It really is. The creative process is an interesting thing, and we find this a lot at the company when we build features. If you're trying to innovate, a lot of the times things that end up working seem like bad ideas upfront, and oftentimes they seem like bad ideas to people who even are really good at innovating. I tell the story that when we were originally building Discord back in 2015, we were a team of maybe twelve people. At the time, half of the people working on it thought Discord was a bad idea in a twelve person startup.

It turned out to be a good idea. It's really hard to tell beforehand whether innovation is going to work. It's really important to have space to try things, react to it, and innovate and iterate to see where it takes you. And sometimes magic comes out the other end and a lot of times you just get duds. Yeah, but we don't ship those, we try to ship them.

How big is this core now? 870 employees at the company. We have a little over 200 million monthly active users all around the world. How do you. One thing I think about all the time is when we were small, we were able to try things and get rid of them really fast.

Right. We had a small team. Everyone kind of knew we were trying something the vibes were shared and we had a small audience so we could get rid of things and like, three people would only ever know. Now we're big, right? And we have big team.

Some people are really committed to some ideas, some people aren't. Some people can't tell from a Zoom call that I'm on that. I just want to see what happens, right? And then we have a big audience that's paying a lot of attention to us, and it gets much harder to sort of like, take risks and shut things down. Discord is in that spot, right?

You have a big team, you have a huge audience of people who care a lot. You won't even mention a bad idea because they will hold you to it. How do you think about taking risks in that kind of situation? Yeah, it's a unique situation. Part of the reason why I didn't say anything is because our whole approach is that we take it kind of a like an incremental approach towards exposing users to risk or to ideas based on how confident we are in them.

And so, like, practically speaking, what we tend to do is we tend to launch features to very small segments of our user base and see how they respond. But that even comes after we call it a closed beta or closed alpha, where we just recruit 50 people who sign an NDA to try something. And before that we use our employees. A lot of them are our customers. So that's like a free couple hundred users to test something.

And before that, the team has to be confident in it. So there's sort of these gates that things go through. It's not like a highly structured process because it depends on the thing, but we frequently will eventually get to a point where we might, let's say, launch something to 50,000 people in our customer base, let them try it, send them a survey, see how they interact with it, and then based on that, decide which way to go. While it can be frustrating for those folks, if we, let's say, remove something from the product, we usually only remove something from the product if it's not actually that popular or useful. So the funny thing about it is when we remove something, some people care, but most people don't.

That's why we removed it. So it sort of works. We don't remove something that a lot of people love because if a lot of people loved it, we wouldn't remove it. Do you ever foresee Discord having the Microsoft Excel problem where someone's built an entire business or on one button in the toolbar, and you can just never take it out. We do have a lot of developers that build apps on Discord.

We do think about this around companies that have built these products, and they depend on discord to deliver their service. And as a user interface for their service, we really value that to some extent. We already have this dynamic where people rely on us, users rely on us, too. And this is one of the places where we get a lot of friction with our users sometimes is when we realize that a certain segment of people really like the way something has been designed. Maybe it's tens of millions of people love it.

And then we realize that, like, there's 50 million people or hundreds of millions of people that want something different. And then managing that tension, it can be quite challenging, because that's kind of a case where maybe we ship something that people loved. And now it's years later, our customer base has grown, the dynamics have changed. And so managing all of those competing interests, it's not easy, and sometimes we get it wrong. I think this brings me to the decoder question.

You have a lot of decisions to make, spinning stuff up, spinning it down, growing, focusing. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? We always just focus on our customers. We try to prioritize our customers.

What can we do to better serve people today than we did yesterday? And then we try to mux that with, what do we want to do? Like, what are we excited about? Because great things only come if the people who are making it are excited and passionate about it. So we actually put a lot of stock in that, and then it's like, how do we build a great business and make money and do all that stuff?

Obviously, we are company, so that's part of it. But I really do believe that over the long term, the best way to build a great business is to serve your customers really well. So we just keep coming back to our customers and think to try to figure out how do we best serve the most of them. It really guides everything. Is that the tiebreaker in every scenario?

Or do you sometimes say, look, I'm the CEO. I'm just making this decision? Well, okay. I mean, sometimes the way actual decisions get made is there's like, well, we think 30% of our customers want this, and 40% of our customers want that, and 15% want this. And, like, how do you figure out which ones to listen to?

How do you even know if that's the right breakdown of what customers want? Sometimes we look at data and we're like, well, people don't interact with this, but they tell us that they love it. There's a lot of judgment that goes into making these decisions the way that we try to do it. We've evolved this over time, but there's different models that people have around how to do this, but we essentially try to pick a single person who is the owner of making a particular decision. It's up to them to kind of like farm for dissent in the company, collect the insights that they have from customers.

And depending on the decision, sometimes I will, you know, if I'm not happy with it, I'll pull the veto card as CEO. But I try not to do it because great people want to have autonomy and make great decisions and want to collaborate with other great people. And so I like to participate in that collaborative process. But from time to time, it's like, okay, Jason, what do you think we should do? And then I apply my judgment and make a call, and we see what happens.

One big call, 2021. You decided not to sell the company to Microsoft. Can you walk us through that decision? Every great company along its life will get acquisition offers. It's just a fact of life, because if a company is great, someone's going to want to buy it.

That was not the first one we've gotten. It wasn't the last one we've gotten. And it was just the one that became most public.

Whenever we get into any of these situations, I just try to ask myself a question around where are we at as a business? What's the best thing for our customers? What's the best thing for our shareholders, and what do I want? What does my team want, and how do we sort of work through that? And so far, every time it's fallen out on the like, let's stay independent, let's keep building, let's keep growing.

We're having a blast. There's a ton of opportunity in front of us. And so that was kind of all it was. It came back to our customers and what we think we could build and what we wanted to do. And then we made a call.

I just talked to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, who told me every company tried to buy Dropbox at the beginning. They would say, look, this is a feature. It's not a whole product. But Dropbox has managed to survive because it is cross platform, because it works with everything, because they prioritize working with everything. Well, because you can just use it without being sucked into some other ecosystem and locked in.

Discord is sort of like that, right? You just use it and then you're playing a game over here, wherever you're playing a game, do you think about that? That if you'd sold to Microsoft, they would have pulled more people into that ecosystem and that would have constrained you in some way? I'm sure Sony has talked to you at some point, or Nintendo or whoever, that actually being cross platform is the thing that lets you be successful. Cross platform is part of it, but it's also sort of our focus as a business is on building communications tools.

There are a lot of other gaming companies that have communication services as part of their offering. Most major game publishers have something, but it's not their priority. So whenever they're forced to make a trade off around where do we put our best engineers and our best creative people? They focus on the gameplay as they should be, but we focus on communications. And so that business structure combined with cross platform, combined with the sort of macro trends around gaming becoming more cross platform and more device agnostic, I think that is really a big factor in what's helped us get here.

But at this point, a lot of people are on discord and we've become known as the place to talk and hang out with your friends. And so there's a lot of momentum around that that I think we appreciate and seek to cultivate. So I think that's kind of what really makes us successful. Do you think about how many fronts of competition you have with the big game companies? Microsoft has Xbox Live chat.

They also obviously make video games. You are slowly starting to make some actual games as part of the Discord platform. That's another front of competition. Is that something you think about how many ways you're competing with those companies and how many ways you might stand apart? Our focus is very much on communications.

We have a very small games team, mostly to help us figure out how our platform should work so we can open it up to other folks, which we did open up just before the game developers conference a couple weeks ago. So anyone can come to discord and right now opt into the developer preview and build an HTML five game embedded right in Discord. And that exists because we've built some stuff ourselves to figure out how it should work. So when I think about competition, I don't think we're competing with the gaming companies. In our earlier days, like 2016 2017 era, all of them tried to launch competing discord services and I don't think any of us know too much about them anymore.

I think we won that battle. And at this point now most game developers use Discord as some part of their go to market and development process. This is one of the other things that we really learned over the last year as we were talking to customers and game developers too, was how essential Discord is today and our community capability is part of development. We heard from a lot of folks that they bring in early playtesters into smaller private discords and hop on with the developers and they'll do nightly play tests on Discord to get feedback to guide development of the game. And a lot of that informed our roadmap for this year in really trying to elevate game developers and make them our customers and really collaborate with them.

We got a lot of positive excitement from folks around quests and our HTML five platform and some other things we're doing. So I very much think that we are helping game developers with the services that we provide, not really competing with. Them in terms of revenue. Where you're growing, it seems like Nitro, the subscription service, is. That's where the focus is.

How's that going? Are you getting a lot of consumers actually paying for yet another subscription service? Nitro is doing very well. People really enjoy the features that they get higher game streaming, animated, custom emoji, being able to give their friends benefits through server boosts. I haven't publicly shared how much revenue it's making, although you could google it and figure it out, but it's doing very well.

We recently launched another consumer revenue line, which we call our avatar decorations in our shop. Just a couple weeks ago we launched a partnership with Valorant, which is one of the big FPS titles, and you can buy Valorant decorations for your profile and players love that. So that's going incredibly well and I'm really excited about what could come next for us through our sponsored quest format, where we're helping game developers reach their audience on discord to help them build better businesses. And of course we'll make some money and then players will get free rewards in their games that they love. And our platform, where we can help support games and other things like Midjourney, build businesses and create new shared experiences for people.

Those are some pretty direct revenue models. You have a subscription service, you buy some cosmetic items for an avatar. Those are some microtransactions. Some developers come on the platform, you monetize those developers directly. You're also poking at ads.

You've launched some gamified ads inside of quests and other things. Is that the bigger revenue opportunity or is that something you're trying out? We're just trying it out right now. It's hard to say how big it will be. What we have heard from game developers and game publishers is that they know that their players are on Discord and they really want to be able to reach them.

And when we talk to players and we've run some of these quest experiments, players really love getting free rewards in games they like or games they like. People love free stuff. That's universal truth. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, please give me free match at the gathering packs.

Just send them to right there. I think it's possible that at some point every game will be running quests on Discord. And if you like to play games, there'll be free stuff you can get in every game that you care about. So I'm excited for that. So I think it could be a big business, but we just started it like a week ago.

One of the things I think about when I think about a platform like Discord and ads and games is that a huge market for ads around games is app install ads, right? Download this game. That was a huge market for Facebook and Instagram before Apple introduced app tracking transparency. It seems pretty clear Apple wants a piece of that. But you've got a whole community of gamers who like video games and you could show them ads to download video games.

That could be a big business. Is that something you would do? You know, we've explored in the context of quests, showing you a quest for a game that you haven't played yet, but is similar to something that you've liked to play before, maybe that your friends are playing. People respond quite positively to it. So I think at the end of the day, people who play games like to play games and like to try new games.

And then developers want to build games and create these businesses and reach players. And so I think there's a really interesting win win win type of product experience that we can create to match make players and developers, and quest is our starting point. And so I'm not exactly sure where it's going to go, but so far, response from players and developers have been quite positive. So I'm optimistic about it. One thing that happens to every company that goes from straight direct to consumer subscriptions and direct monetization to ads is they realize the companies that buy ads have vastly more money and will just keep spending money.

It just happened to Netflix. People like free stuff. People run ads on Netflix. That ad supported tier is growing really fast, much faster than the pure subscription tier. And you can see that they're monkeying with the prices, right, to get more people into the ad tier.

And double dip on the revenue. Are you worried about that? That you're going to open Pandora's box here and just start shoving ads all over the platform? No, I'm not worried about that. Our decision making always comes back to what is the best thing for our customers, for our users over the long term.

And the long term is a series of short terms. Prioritizing the end user experience is what's going to build a durable business for us. That is our frame in which we think about if we're going to have sponsored content, what is the product experience and how does that show up in a way that is tasteful, that users enjoy? That is our focus. And so I don't think that we're going to open Pandora's box.

We're making the call. Fair enough. I got to ask. There's a lot of discord users who really wanted me to ask that question, so I had to do it. You have said you want Discord to finally become profitable this year.

You on track to do that with all these new revenue streams? Yeah, it's looking good. Which one of these revenue streams do you think will most help you get to profitability? We haven't really broken this out, but I think that we don't need anything dramatically different to happen to become profitable. Most of our revenue comes from Nitro and I think that can continue to be the case.

And Discord is going to be in a great spot.

We need to take another quick break. When we're back, Jason and I talk about content moderation, the challenges facing discord, and why it's made different choices than a lot of other companies.

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Jason Citron

We're back with discord CEO Jason Citron talking about the renewed focus on child safety on the Internet and what role there is for discord to play. So I've asked you the hard questions about money. Let's ask the even harder questions about content moderation. Every CEO gets a question on content moderation decoder. That's just the way the world.

You've described discord a few times now as a communications tool, which is really interesting, right? We think of communications tools as having much less moderation and much less acceptable kinds of moderation. I would not want anyone looking at my imessage conversations with anyone. I would not want anyone looking at my signal messages with anyone. That's just, it's not allowed.

But social media companies, user generated content companies, we want a lot of moderation. Discord is obviously somewhere in the middle of those things. You have a lot of moderation. You have a big trust and safety team, but you think of it as a communication tool, even though it's not encrypted and you have trust and safety. How do you land on what an acceptable amount of moderation is on discord?

Our priority when we think about this is keeping teens safe. Keeping teens safe, that's the priority. When we think about how do we approach discord as a company doing moderation? That's one there. The second pillar of that is giving people tools to moderate their own spaces so they can decide what the rules and norms are for their spaces.

So this is like the fact that every server can have admins who can kick and ban users and delete messages and enforce rules and norms. So that is also something that's been built into discord from day zero. The way that we think about it is keep teens safe, give people tools to moderate their own spaces, and then we really focus on those public spaces and making sure that we're applying moderation there. So if you join the mid journey server or the Minecraft server, we have expectations of the moderators there, and we have systems in place to make sure that that is a good experience when people join, because that is a little bit more like a social media kind of experience, even though it is a chat surface. Whereas when you're in your DM's, the things that we do are actually very standard.

And I think many other messaging apps actually do these kinds of things, like scan image uploads for CSAm, for example. That's the kind of stuff that we do there. Now, in the case of teens, we have a product we call teen safety assist, which is also like, other companies have stuff like this in messaging services where when a teen is, let's say, interacting with someone, maybe sending photos or doing something, they have like a sidekick that's checking out the conversation, seeing what they're doing, and giving them tips on how to keep themselves safe or report things. So that's how we think about that, because it's really important to us that people feel comfortable and safe using discord, and adults are more equipped to manage their own stuff. And teens, we think they need some more help, but sometimes adults don't want to manage their space, and that's where, you know, our, our teams come in.

Have you ever thought about launching boomer safety assist? Just putting that out there as an idea for you. I think a lot of what Gen Z needs and a lot of what the older folks needs turns out to be the same thing. Anyone can turn on team safety assist if you really want to. Just an idea for you, just putting it out there.

No bad ideas. Right. That's interesting. Right? Earlier I talked about this idea that this is kind of a different way of thinking about connecting and using the Internet.

Right? You have these different tools, you have these different expectations. Do you think this is a place where you're going to just increase the level of moderation over time, or are you at a steady state? Our priority is to get all the bad experiences, the bad crap off of discord. If I could wave magic wand, there'd be none of that stuff there today.

But at the scale that we operate, we basically have a city or a country of people on our service. There's a lot going on, and human nature kicks in. How do you manage in that kind of an environment? What we found is that as a society, I think we're all still working through. What are the expectations we have of companies in this kind of a world?

And so I think that there will probably be more regulation that comes that will require us to do different things, which may cause us to moderate more. But really what drives us from a first principle standpoint, is giving individual users control with our moderation capabilities and then making sure teens are safe. And so we will launch more things for teen safety, assist to help teens be safe, and we will probably launch more moderation tools for people. We launched a couple of years ago something called slow mode, so if people are spamming, you can turn that off. We do have a whole team working on antispam, which is a different version of this, where people are just annoyingly sending messages.

We have stuff on that. It's a continual investment for us because people. I know the problem continues to persist. So we continue to have people at our company working against making discord a safe place for folks. The idea that teen safety is the first order bit, and you're just going to keep focused on that.

Our Congress seems very interested in this idea. It is the skeleton key that unlocks speech regulations for them in a lot of ways. You just testified in Congress for the first time in January. You talked about protecting children. That's where you said you don't encrypt discord messages because you want to be able to protect children on the platform, that's a big trade off, right?

Most other communications platforms are headed towards encryption, and they're waging big fights to encrypt messages. Why did you make the other trade off? For the reason we said? Discord is a place where people talk and hang out with their friends. And coming from the lens of creating a casual place where you're having fun with people you care about, our priority is making sure that people can relax and have fun.

And when you focus on that priority, we made certain decisions in order to make sure we could deliver that kind of an experience for people. So it's really that simple? Yeah. It is very much in opposition to how the other big companies think about their communications systems as opposed to their user generated content systems. As you get bigger, as more kinds of people use the service, you do have weirder, newer problems, particularly as communities start to build things and do things that maybe teens aren't doing.

I'll give you an example. You all recently banned a number of servers related to Nintendo switch emulation. Nintendo sued a group called Yuzu. They basically disappeared. There were some forks of that software, and then now those forks are just gone.

Those development communities are just gone from discord. They've been banned. What happened there? How do you make those calls? Because it doesn't seem very clear to a lot of people.

That is an ongoing situation that I really can't comment on. But generally speaking, we comply. Well, not generally speaking, but we comply with DMCA requests and we treat copyright law very seriously. And so when that kind of process gets instigated by companies, we take it very seriously. So in that situation, my understanding is it's something related to that, but I can't get into all the specifics.

I just wonder, because that is happening all over the place in the platform, right? And you look at other companies, they've developed massive systems to deal with copyright infringement at scale. YouTube has a notice and takedown regime that is so powerful that I think most people think it is copyright law. They don't know there's actually a federal copyright. There's just whatever YouTube thinks.

And that is a good enough substitute for most youtubers. Are you in a position where you're going to have to start building some of those systems as well, like a content id for Nintendo switch emulators? Discord's quite different from a broadcast service like YouTube. So for us, but it is, and it isn't right. I mean, these emulate, these emulation groups.

They were broadcasting their work. Well, I guess what I mean is the majority of things that people are doing on discord are just talking with their friends. So if you look at a business like YouTube, their fundamental business is like someone uploads a video and then they show it to you. And so that core loop, it's quite easy to upload something that maybe you shouldn't in that context. On Discord, we do allow people to upload files and videos.

Of course, we do scan every uploaded file for malware and viruses and things like this. But Discord is not a broadcast video platform where people can upload videos and then other random people can see it. The volume of that thing on our platform is much smaller, I suspect, than something like YouTube. But from time to time, we do get DMCA requests and these kinds of things. And so we do have a process in place to respond to those things effectively, or sometimes we get court orders and we have to interact with law enforcement and stuff like that.

So we do have a process for those things. But the shape of discord is quite different than the shape of something like YouTube. Yeah, I know you said you can't talk about this specific case, but here I think these people don't even know what they did wrong. Right. YouTube has an entire infrastructure.

It has a bureaucracy. That's actually the only way to describe it. There's a YouTube bureaucracy that will take your stuff down if you use some song that you're not supposed to use. Do you have a bureaucracy like that that can effectively communicate in these cases? Because the range of uses for discord expands, you're going to run into people using it like that, whether or not that's your intention.

What I can say is that in this situation, we acted in accordance with our policies and they're based on a court ordered injunctions. So I can't get into much more than that. But I think we shared that in an article, maybe that you guys wrote about it at the verge wrote about it. So that's kind of what I can say about that. But again, broadly, when we can, we try to communicate to people the rationale behind why actions are taken if they break our terms of service or something.

So we recently just released a warning system, actually, in discord, where if you break a community guideline or break terms of service in a way that doesn't necessarily make it such that we should delete your account, we will give your account a warning and a fractional disable. You can go see exactly what you did and you can't send a message for 2 hours now and this kind of thing, because part of that is also that we think sometimes teens just do stupid things and actually it's better to teach them than to just kick them off a platform. But of course, it's commensurate based on the intensity of the infraction, if you will. We've written about this before. I don't know if you have thought about it very much, but in many ways, Discord is a store of knowledge now.

It's replaced wikis and forums for a lot of people. For a lot of things. AI comes to mind, crypto comes to mind. But there are a lot of communities now that are sort of actively updating their discords with what they know. Do you think about that responsibility to preserve and make searchable all this knowledge that is going into the system.

Yes, we do. And we've actually, this. Oh, okay. This is one of those things where I was about to say something, and. And if I say it, then our users are going to hold me to it.

I'll just say that I understand that there's a lot of really important information in public discord communities that people are worried about being stuck in, locked in there. And we understand that, and we intend to try to solve it in a way that makes sense for people. But I don't have anything specific to share right now. All right. That's very exciting.

All right, Jason, I know you got to run. Thank you so much for joining decoder today. Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'd like to thank Jason for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening to the show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have ideas on what we should cover or who we should have on the show, we would love your feedback. You can email us@decoderge.com dot. We really do read all the emails, or you can hit me up directly on threads.

I'm 1280. We also have a TikTok. You can check it out. It's Ecoderpod. It's a lot of fun.

If you like Decoder, share it with your friends. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you really like it, hit that five star button. We love it when you hit that five star button. Decoder is a production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media podcast network.

Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. It was edited by Cali Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder of music is my breakmaster cylinder. We'll see you next time.