I started playing video games online when I was 7 years old, waddling around in Club Penguin on my Internet Explorer browser. At 11 years old, my brother-in-law gave me his Xbox 360 console, which (unfortunately) introduced me to voice chats specifically for gaming. I first used Skype at 12 to talk to my friends online while I played Minecraft and Wizard101.
Skype lasted me through three moves across the country and two different friend groups, as the games I played matured alongside me. Skype's connection was notoriously shoddy, the service regularly went down without explanation, and it had a nasty habit of making anyone without a $200 microphone sound like they were in a wind tunnel.
But hey, it worked! It was a hell of a lot better than having to call your friends over the phone and balance your headset on one ear.
As MMOs turned into shooters, a friend of mine invited me to join him and his friend group for a few rounds of Team Fortress 2. And it was on that revolutionary day (March 1st, 2017. Yes, I know the day.) that my friend, Damonte, introduced me to the app that would ultimately allow me to foster my closest friendships: Discord.
Discord, from the start, was leagues better than Skype. Having multiple people on a call didn't require a wired ethernet connection, there were servers to organize conversation and memes (a lot of memes), and the Discord team actually did a good job at keeping their service up and running. It was like handing us a tractor when we'd been using trowels.
Theatrics aside, Discord has been my go-to app over any other when it comes to communicating with my friends. I will message and call over Discord before using Snapchat, Messenger, or even a proper phone call, in some cases. Yes, it really is that reliable.
With the option to create servers, it adds an almost forum-like element that encourages users to interact across multiple mediums, and before the inevitable paywall went up, you could actually transfer some pretty hefty files for free without losing quality (I legitimately stopped using Dropbox after I started using Discord for this exact reason).
Issues? I guess that pesky paywall, but otherwise nothing. Discord regularly updates, and any time the service goes down, the Discord team keeps users updated on Twitter about when it'll be back up. They're scary fast, too.
Yeah, I got nothing for drawbacks. Once you get used to Discord's interface, it's hard to go back to using other platforms. You can download it for free on iOS, Android, Mac, and PC.
(Seriously, why are we not using Discord instead of freaking Zoom calls all the damn time?)
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