Discord: Imagine a Place

-Give Discord a wedge into the wider internet and serve as its passport.

When Discord sent out a 23 question survey to its community, they discovered that over 30% of Discord’s users weren’t using the product primarily for gaming. They were hosting book clubs, friends’ group chats, fan communities, and even companies. Discord had become the internet’s “third place.”

-Token-gating certain servers and channels within Discord itself without needing to click away to a third-party solution like collab.land.

Starting an NFT project today and inviting supporters to a Slack group would be the kind of shibboleth you couldn’t recover from; the crypto equivalent of using a hotmail account, or telling everyone you use Bing as your search engine.

Defensively, a token might help solve the issues that plague Discord. It could, for example, reward community members in $DISCORD for helping moderate channels and remove the bad actors who have plagued the service. Requiring users to pay a tiny fraction of a $DISCORD to message users with whom they’re not friends in order to reduce spam.

A virtuous, compounding flywheel is created: (i) Discord highlights prominent bots, (ii) customers see these bots and start to use them, (iii) bot creators make more money, (iv) their success attracts new developers to the platform, (v) this makes Discord’s platform stronger, (vi) a stronger platform attracts more users, (vii) more users create dem... See more

Owning a wallet would also have advantages for Discord itself:

In 2020, Discord earned just $1.30 in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). That would rank it last among the public social media companies by a wide margin.

On its face, Discord looks a lot like Slack. It’s organized into Servers -- each community’s space -- and within each server, there are Channels, including Voice Channels, in which users can also choose to turn on video for up to 25 people. Voice channels can be always on, and users can drop in and drop out casually, like hopping onto a couch with ... See more