Why Discord is my new online home

I’m spending more of my time online on Discord, a social network of sorts for small communities of gaming fans. This service combines elements of Reddit, chat rooms, and Skype into a single app, and it has facilitated most of my multiplayer sessions over the last couple of months. And while Discord’s clearly one of the best tools for communication in games, it has become something more than that for me. It’s turning into the place I check before Twitter to talk about games and to see what my friends are up to.

Discord is the latest evolution of a long-running type of third-party app that wants to act as the default service that people go to for voice chat and similar features. We’ve seen programs that focused on voice chat or game-specific communities like Raptr, Player.me, or Razer Comms. People also use services like Skype, Slack, and Hangouts to communicate in games. Discord, however, combines all of those ideas into one app that is free, easy to use, and won’t affect game performance.