Skype->Discord->???

Recently, I've been thinking about what replaces Discord. Frankly, I stop being particularly interested in mainstream things.

I started using Skype from c.2010-2015, which I would argue was on its last legs throughout. I knew very little students in my grade who used Skype at all; it was Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. They didn't really need voice calls either when there was phone calls and FaceTime (and Oovoo maybe for the video call group). Skype was me and my friends' go-to for voice comms for League of Legends.

Afterwards, we migrated to Discord around 2016, for which I am not particularly sure why. Someone in the friend group introduced us to it, and we just moved. In retrospect, it did have extra features and QoL over Skype that I never really had any strong feelings or opinions about. Additionally, Skype's subsequent updates just kept making it look incredibly ugly and more "corpo". Discord felt like it was the next evolution of Skype with the gamer direction; conversely, TeamSpeak was the "gamer" alternative to Skype at the time, and so, Discord felt like a friendlier transition.

Discord was widely known and used in gaming communities, that much I am aware of. But, then it started attracting a wider variety of people outside of gaming communities and gaming voice comms needs. In around 2020, COVID-19, and Zoom schooling is when it feels like its popularity BOOM'd. I'm not hating on people's needs and wants to socialize, and Discord being an accessible avenue allowed them to satisfy such things. By all means, people should live their lives. 

However, the subsequent Discord updates and changes has felt so incredibly plastique and corporate, as well as the general mainstream inclusion of Discord in many other adjacent applications that gamers would use, flooding them with similar traffic from non-gamers.

Gamers as in people who are a part of gaming communities and engage with it in good faith. I feel like the Discord Boom opened the avenue of gaming to a lot more people but in a trendy way. Most of these newcomers weren't the loser, weird kids who got bullied in school. Non-gamers without that background of playing games and the societal consequences that came with being an undesirable nerd.

I don't know. There's all these updates being added that don't necessarily improve QoL, but rather, a money-making scheme because Discord now wants to make profit. I think Nitro already existed back then (primarily for limitless file size uploading and 60fps video streaming), but now, they're investing so much into Nitro-exclusive things and interesting stuff you can access with Nitro. I don't know.

And now, Discord is just mainstream. Everyone talks about it. All peoples involved could be anyone and they're just there to hang out, but the people feel... weird.

I'll try to amend this with an anecdote: there's an episode of Rocket Power where a company opens an establishment called Skatopia, and initially, they attract skaters nearby and convince them to hang out there instead of their original skating spot. Then, people start coming to the establishment and Skatopia is popular and making profit (cause the real skaters are here and so it must be legit), but the people coming in aren't really skaters who respect the establishment, the rules, etc. of skating. But, the company doesn't care, they're making money. So, the original skaters realize that this space isn't... for them anymore.

That's how I feel about Discord: it doesn't feel like a space for gamers anymore. I don't know; I can't pinpoint it, but something just feels off about it. Something feels off when it is mainstream. I do not belong in mainstream spaces. I am an outcast always.

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Any way, that's why I've been looking for and wondering about what succeeds Discord. I'd like to be there early. They had MSN, I had Skype and then Discord. What follows? I've had to ponder why the Skype-to-Discord transition even happened, and for me, my friends just chose it. It's not like we really hated using Skype. These days, I don't have such attachments. I am simply alone. What am I gonna do by myself in applications meant for communicating? Me and my friends' server was ours; that's why we stayed. I have no community like that anymore.

Ugh, I don't know. Whatever.

28 January 2026 (12:04 AM)