Discord has grown beyond being just a way for gamers to chat online and now sits as the main communications hub for many different types of online community, from sports fans to crypto enthusiasts. As the app has gone from strength to strength, picking up all sorts of new users, the company behind it has also been hard at work developing its technical offering. That’s what we’re reporting on here, a new feature that is bringing text chat to all voice channels. Let’s dig in a little deeper.
The way Discord works is that communities set up servers and inside the servers, the community admins or mods can set up channels that serve as the bases for certain types of conversations or announcements. In this way, thousands of members can join the servers but, if the channels are well structured, they can all converse with each other meaningfully and without too much confusion. Usually, these channels are text channels, but Discord also offers voice channels too and this update relates specifically to voice channels.
Voice channels on Discord run a little bit like Twitter Spaces. There is a stage where the hosts can talk away and then there are guests who can raise their hands and be brought up onto the stage to talk with the admins in front of the rest of the channel. They work really well in this regard and allow Discord to keep this interactive voice chat element on its own servers rather than losing them to other services like Twitter.
One of the main gripes relating to voice channels though relates to sending text. At the moment, there is nowhere to send text on Discord voice channels. Imagine you are talking about a new service or product, for example, and you want to send everybody the link, or imagine somebody is taking notes from an AMA session so that everybody who missed it can bring themselves up to speed. Up until now, the only way these types of things could happen was by nominating another channel on the server where the text would go. Once there it could easily get lost in the midst of whatever that channel is actually there for. Now, however, this is all changing thanks to this new update, which will add dedicated text chat for all voice channels.
If you haven’t already, you really should check Discord out as it is an incredible tool for the modern internet era. If you are unsure about where to start, check out our ultimate guide to Discord.
Image via: Discord
