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Midjourney's missing effect
People use Discord to connect with friends before, during, and after playing games. Midjourney, the AI image company that ran on the platform, was phenomenal as a product, but in Discord's daily use you wouldn't be able to pick it out of the line.
Focusing on gamers
In 2024 the team centered everything on being the best place for you and your friends to play intentional multiplayer games together. That looked like a saturated market, since everyone who plays multiplayer games on PC already has Discord. Yet plenty of those players stood on the edge of joining voice and used the in-game voice or called a friend on FaceTime instead.
Making Discord better for those players, with a heavy focus on performance, produced some of the fastest growth since the pandemic. Moving someone from using Discord 10 days out of 30 to 11, to 12, to 13 adds up to monster growth. Focusing on gamers also meant answering every bug thread on Reddit, however small, because gamers are among the most vocal, detail-oriented critics in the world.
How did Midjourney run inside Discord?
Midjourney opened its beta in July 2022, and its only interface was a bot in Discord. Users typed the command /imagine followed by a text prompt in a shared channel. The bot replied with a grid of four images that anyone in the channel could see. David Holz founded the company, and the open channels let new users watch others' prompts and copy what worked.
Why did Discord start as a gamers' voice app?
Discord launched in May 2015, founded by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, who had built a mobile game studio before it. Gamers at the time relied on voice tools such as TeamSpeak and Ventrilo, which often meant renting or hosting a server. Discord offered free voice chat that ran in a browser or a desktop app. The company grew first through gaming communities.
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