Discord tutorials, tips, and help
Discord is an app people use to communicate and collaborate. Originally known for its use by gamers, Discord has become a lightweight app used for any type of collaborative work – online classes, workgroups, file sharing, customer support, as well as sharing video game experiences.
About The Discord App
Does anyone remember Skype? Burn-your-retinas with its white-only overlay, janky service running Skype? Yeah, this is about a competitor that came along and put that service in its grave, at least for anyone under the age of 50. When Discord came along, with its funny little mascot and its aim to make gamer’s lives easier, it seemed like yet another chat service. This one, however, blew up. It was hand-tailored for gamers, by gamers, and that’s where its true usefulness shined. It only got better from there!
Discord: What’s It Good For?
I’m glad you asked! It’s good for so much more than just texting, but texting is one of its major features. You can text in DMs (direct messages) with other users, or in servers where the moderators allow texting in certain channels. There’s group audio calling, video calling, one-on-one calls, and DM video chats. Whether you want to casual chat with your pals or join an audio call party for a boss in your favorite MMORPG, Discord has you covered.
Discord has more than one version of their service you can use, creating a Discord App both for desktop and for mobile, enabling an overlay if you’re PC gaming or if you’d rather just chat on the go. The lesser-used version is the actual website in a browser, which negates a lot of notification options. The Discord App, desktop or mobile, has gone through so many updates to make the quality of life better for its users, showing just how much Discord cares about the userbase. Even if its major goal is assisting gamers, the Discord App is useful for so much more than the gamer demographic and is used by all kinds of people for its fantastic overlays, color variation, ease of use, and streamlined features.
As a messaging app – Both private messages and group chats called “servers’
Now, you saw ‘servers’ mentioned above, what on earth is a server? It’s actually an excellent way to have groups of people talk to each other in an organized way! Servers enable different categories, and channels within them, texting or voice, allowing for any topic to stay on topic, or different groups to join certain parties exclusively while others utilize a different voice channel. Channels and categories within servers enable a lot of organization and relieve much confusion from the olden days of a single DM with 30 people in it all trying to talk at the same time.
Whether you’re a gamer or you just have a group of friends who like a plethora of different topics, the Discord App is perfect for anyone.
Discord is used for:
- Group or DM messaging
- Video or voice calls
- Servers that are utilized as organized group chats
- Manage groups
- As a collaboration tool
- Sending and recieving files
- Having fun!
Is Discord safe to Use?
It’s worth mentioning that there are safety measures in place, like having your customization set so that random people are not able to friend you out of nowhere, or even so that randoms from your various servers can’t just DM you without your permission. There are plenty of ways to keep unwanted strangers out of your DMs or friend requests, but what about children?
It might go without saying, but it’s a good idea to cover it anyway, that this requires discretion like any other online service children could have access to. Allowing your child a safe and easy space to chat with their friends is what any parent wants, but a measure of moderation should always be a priority. Discord itself cannot monitor everything, since they aren’t babysitters, but they do have policies that disallow certain topics within reason. Reading the terms of service can come in handy here.
The Takeaway
Discord App is a wonderful way to keep track of your gaming friends and experiences both on your desktop or Android and iPhone. Utilizing these things might be something worth looking into if you haven’t already, gamer or not. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any service as versatile as Discord is in this day and age, which is a testimonial to their success.
Discord uses VoIP protocol.
