Chat We Deserve?

Few can deny that Discord is one of the brightest discoveries in the field of online communication right now. It has replaced the inconvenient and faceless Skype and combined the comfortable and practical Slack interface with multi-functionality, thus becoming the unofficial master of the chats, a symbol of informal communication. By positioning itself as a chat for gamers, it, however, lost this label among "knowledgeable" people and became the common heritage, the folksy chat, from users to users. The company's strategy is that they don't take themselves too seriously, following the friendly and playful image of an "Internet-frequenter" which is used everywhere, from Twitter posts to changelogs inside the chat. What else is included in the Discord's formula of success, beyond the obvious server system, interactive bots, the mascot, and so on? It's something sociocultural, something that makes the communication process unique.

Culture
The first and most important thing that distinguishes Discord is the elements of a common culture that extends to all communities inside of it. Basically, this is an essential part of all chats, but in Discord it has reached its peak due to "hitting" the target audience, as well as to a couple of factors mentioned above. It falls short of the complete subculture, as a huge number of people use the service, and inside there are many subcultures, including the very gamers to whom Discord was originally intended to appeal. However, the chat is rich in memes: images, internal jokes, customs, habits, and even taboos, as well as the value system, of which a completely original society is formed. Take, for example, the most characteristic internal joke: the eternal confrontation between the dark and the light themes (less often, between the cozy and the compact mode), which is fueled by the developers themselves, serving as an endless catalyst for communication and creativity. Speaking of taboos and prohibitions, one can mention the abuse of the @everyone and @here buttons, which is not only constantly ridiculed, but is also punishable in almost all communities. Shitposting outside specialized channels is also forbidden in most cases, leading to severe punishment, that is why a sarcastic and dismissive attitude has arisen towards such people. In general, every new feature that Discord adds into their chat becomes a part of culture, the new instrument of memeing.

Memes and Communication

Thanks to its concept of free and mass communication, minimalistic design, and user-friendly interface, Discord has not only united the "Internet-frequenters", but also provided new ways to spread memes, both in a humorous way and not. The basis of memeing lies in the very technical features of the chat, from which some interactivity flows. In total, there are two types of memes associated directly with Discord (except of just thematic memes). Firstly, these are memes that work only inside the chat. So, many users experiment with the transparency of images, placing the necessary information under the background (look to the left), so that these memes are as original as possible and don't make sense outside the chat, which creates a special hermetic environment. Considering the experiments with the background color, most of these memes are tied to the conflict of dark/light theme. Discord is generally famous for its experimental memes: there are images that have three pictures in them: a preview in the chat, a picture in the chat, and an image in the browser. Someone plays with titles, video files, replaces emojis with pictures, and so on. However, this phenomenon is far from new: memes that break the fourth wall and use the external environment as a tool, be it a joke or an element of the narration, have existed long before. For example, I remember Christmas hats on 4chan, or complementary memes consisting of two or more posts (such are especially popular on Reddit), or "comment breaking" pictures in social networks, as well as such memes as "Sal Doesn't Have Editing Software". Another thing is that Discord users have developed this subject to the maximum, diversifying and refreshing chat conversations. The second type of memes is those created within the chat itself, in particular: the videos with different situations in the voice chats. Of course, any meme can be created in absolutely any environment, as well as in any conditions, but that interactivity plays a role here, both from the point of view of creators and viewers. All in all, Discord memes are quite experimental, but they allow to communicate easily, and this is the point, because memes are not only entertainment, but also a means of bringing together different groups of people.

Speaking of communication, it is worth mentioning custom emojis that people can create by themselves. This feature is one of the main communication tools provided by Discord. Actually, these are emoticons, as they are a manifestation of the grassroots, while emojis are delivered "from above" and added to Unicode. However, being both pictograms, they can express certain emotions and/or reflect the context, which is extremely important in the conditions of quick, "instant" chat communication. For example, emoticons have been used to realize many variations of the legendary 🤔 which had also previously been raised to a cult.

Anyway, Discord created a strong community which managed to unite any Internet users altogether, erasing the boundaries of communication between different subcultures. However, in view of their meme reputation, the company is often not taken seriously. By positioning itself as a "chat for gamers", the Discord team creates an artificial barrier for potential users unfamiliar with video games, although the service is so easy to learn that it has a low threshold for entering both the chat and its culture. I think that if a company changes the political course to mass and universal accessibility, it will be able to accelerate the popularization of Internet culture among uninformed people. Another thing is that, many will continue to use specialized Slack for work and business, which also has its own culture. Of course, Discord is not perfect (and there are some controversial points such as tracking or data selling that, however, are not important for this article) and has room to grow, but what we have now is already an indicator of the level of quality. Despite the fact that everything in our world is commercialized sooner or later, I would like to hope that from a corporate point of view, Discord will remain a "meme" company, not losing its reputation, but making communication and information exchange more convenient and accessible. Especially in the conditions when everybody is trying to copy it, by embedding internal chats into their applications or websites. Perhaps in the future we will see a real chat war just like the browser one, but at the moment the winner is obvious. For sure, Discord is the chat we all need and deserve.