Discord launches 'Your Place to Talk' initiative with new website & more

Published June 30, 2020 8:04 AM, by TJ Denzer

In a year where the pandemic has forced the more sensible among us to stay apart where we can and engage via social distancing, telecommunications, text chat, voice chat, and video chat have become all the more important. Discord has long been an easy place for gaming groups to gather together, share interests, and make connections, but the company behind it has recognized how expanded its role has become since its beginnings, and especially now. With that in mind, Discord has updated with a new “Your Place to Talk” initiative aimed on becoming a more welcoming digital social gathering and communication app for all people to enjoy.

Discord Inc. announced the new initiative on June 30, 2020, complete with a major update, new website launch, YouTube video, and message from the CEOs explaining the new direction.

“Video games are about people,” The message reads. “That’s why we originally created Discord: we wanted a simple and easy way to capture these feelings we experienced growing up gaming with friends. But, over the past year, we’ve been asking you what really makes the magic of Discord. It turns out that, for a lot of you, it wasn’t just about video games anymore.”

As a result of the expanding audience using Discord for a variety of gatherings and interests, Discord is aiming to become a more reliable service to everyday users, gamer or not.

“In listening to your feedback, we heard that you want Discord to be more welcoming, more inclusive, and more trustworthy,” the message continues. “Today, we want to show you some of what we’ve been working on as a start:

• We’re launching a new website with a new tagline: Your place to talk.
• We’ve streamlined the new user onboarding experience and added server video and server templates, so it’s easier than ever to bring friends to your Discord home.
• We’ve fixed hundreds of bugs, and we’ve cleaned up the more obscure gaming references within the app to make it more welcoming, while still making sure not to take ourselves too seriously.
• We launched a Safety Center so everyone can understand our rules and the tools at your disposal to protect yourself from content or interactions you don’t want.
• As always, we’re committed to making reliability and performance our top priority. We’ve increased our voice & video capacity by 200% and are now investing more than ever into keeping Discord at the quality you expect.”

Certainly many of us, staff here at Shacknews included, have incorporated Discord into our daily lives for everything from video chatting and organization of events, community building and management, and even a few Shacknews developer interviews. Discord is right. Its app is hardly just about connecting to play games anymore. While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a thing, the need for apps like Discord grows. In that regard, it’s great to see an initiative and update like “Your Place to Talk” take that challenge head-on.