Discord CEO Jason Citron makes the case for a smaller, more private internet

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**SPEAKER_3** (1:28)
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming focused voice and chat app. Now you might think Discord is just Slack for gamers, but over time it's become much more important than that. And for a growing community of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandoms and other communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord. And in many ways, Discord represents a significant shift away from what we now consider to be the traditional social platforms. It's not a public facing network like Facebook or Instagram. And it's not really a broadcast medium for creators like YouTube or TikTok.
It's also not a forum with moderated communities like Reddit. Instead, as you'll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hang out with small groups of friends over shared common interests. Whether that's video games, interacting with the AI image generation bot Midjourney, or maybe just talking about your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the internet as a whole. Jason and I dug into the nuances of how he sees Discord as compared to all those other platforms and how he's made conscious choices around what he sees as the future of online communication. For Discord, that future is smaller, it's more intimate and it's farther away from the public eye. We also discussed some of the inherent tensions of Discord between the version of Discord that's a tool for voice chat among friends and the version of Discord that's become a social destination mixing public and private in increasingly complex and in times legally fraught ways.
For example, Discord just banned some groups that were making software for emulating retro video games. I asked Jason about it, you'll hear his answer. You'll also hear Jason talk about Discord's evolving business model. Unlike Slack, this isn't enterprise software. Instead, there's a consumer subscription service called Nitro and a growing number of other ways that Discord is exploring making money, including the platform's very first ads. Jason also revealed why he ultimately decided not to sell the company to Microsoft for a reported $10 billion, but also how the post pandemic slowdown across the tech industry led to two rounds of layoffs and a major refocusing effort on what Jason thinks the Discord community really wants and needs. The short answer was more focus on gaming and more outside developers building apps, bots and games that live exclusively inside of Discord.
Of course, because Discord users are so young, it faces some particularly unique content moderation challenges. You'll hear Jason reflect on his testimony in front of Congress earlier this year around child safety and also why the company has made very different decisions around features like encryption and other platforms because Jason's perspective is that the first goal is to make Discord safe for teens. This was a fascinating conversation. Jason's perspective that online life will only continue to move towards more private messaging seems more and more convincing by the day.
All right, Discord CEO Jason Citron, here we go.
Jason Citron, you are the founder and CEO of Discord. Welcome to Decoder.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:51)
Thanks for having me, Nilay.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:52)
I am really excited to talk to you. Discord is a very, seemingly very simple application. It's also very complicated. It exists in a complicated ecosystem of things.