Discord: Imagine a Place

Discord is all about lively community engagement. It bridges content gaps by giving an “always-on” chat where fans may get a chance to interact with creators, but critically, it allows members of the community to carry on a continuous, fun conversation with each other outside the context of a creator’s content. This is valuable for creators as it 1... See more

Roberto Blake, an Atlanta-based YouTuber, compared Discord not to Slack but to “chat rooms from the 1990s.” But, he told me, “they made that experience mobile and way more robust and sophisticated.” In a social-media landscape organized around reverse-chronological feeds, profile pages, default public content, and follower counts, Discord is palpab... See more

1. User ownership can jumpstart growth, but sustaining it is more challenging Giving users ownership in the form of tokens can be a powerful alternative to paid marketing, helping to bootstrap networks and overcome the cold-start problem.

The more interesting opportunity lies with “community owned games” – where enterprise value is not monopolized by equity holders of a studio but funneled entirely to holders of the community token. It will be very difficult for existing game studios to morph into community-owned ones – for the same reason that Epic can’t just dissolve and “convert”... See more