Discord Explores AI and Forum Features to Tackle Information Overload

Discord seeks to solve a problem that it created | TechCrunch

Discord is entering its second decade as a company and seeking to go public. Along the way, it's changed the way that online communities interact, turning groups that may have previously existed as forums or message boards into multi-channel instant message servers. Now, everything finds a home on Discord, whether it's an AI platform like Midjourney (Discord's largest server), an international gaming community, or a school club. But message boards still serve their purpose. Sometimes, there's value in more incremental, organized commentary in a forum, as opposed to the rapidity of real-time, casual chats on Discord, which can flood users with an overwhelming number of unread messages and potentially obscure the most useful information. According to The Verge, Discord's SVP of product, Peter Sellis, says that the company is thinking about how to solve this issue. He said that Discord wants to work on features that are "more amicable to structured knowledge sharing, like forums, that we could probably do a better job of investing in." Another proposed solution to this clutter is to use an LLM to summarize long streams of messages. But culture among Discord users varies so widely that the embrace of AI could simultaneously excite and enrage its audience. With LLMs, Sellis said, Discord could take a long, meandering conversation and turn it into "something that could be more sharable and syndicated across the web." However, he said that he and his team hadn't "seen a solution that we feel great about yet."

Discord might use AI to help you catch up on conversations

Jay Peters is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Discord has become the place for gaming communities on the internet. The company just celebrated its 10th anniversary, and its impact is now big enough that it's available directly on PlayStation and Xbox and was ripped off by Nintendo for the Switch 2's GameChat. But as it tries to grow, one of the big challenges Discord faces is that, for big or longer-running communities, it can be hard to know where to start, hard to catch up to the speed of real-time conversations, and hard to sift through the potentially huge amounts of conversations and channels. A lot of communities used to form around forums, but Discord just isn't a good replacement for that kind of structured messaging, as covered by Aftermath's Luke Plunkett. "This is something we want to solve," Peter Sellis, Discord's SVP of product, tells The Verge. "It is not our intention to lock a bunch of this knowledge into Discord." One way Discord wants to tackle the problem is add features that are "more amicable to structured knowledge sharing, like forums, that we could probably do a better job of investing in and is something we want to do for game developers," Sellis says. Another involves LLMs. "There's an incredible opportunity now with large language models and their ability to summarize conversations," he says. That could help Discord take a long conversation between multiple people -- "what is essentially a really poorly structured shareable object," he says -- and boil it down to "something that could be more shareable and then potentially syndicated to the web." Sellis couldn't share many other details, and couldn't give a timeline for when any of this might be ready: "I haven't seen a solution that we feel great about yet." Discord wants to do it right, he says -- especially because a solution that makes information more easily accessible outside of Discord could involve a lot of work for server moderators and admins. "We have a very sensitive radar for stuff that causes them a bunch of work that doesn't give them the return they need," he says. (It's wise not to piss off your moderators.) None of this was imminent, if it even happens at all. That said, "I assure you that this is something that people within Discord feel the pain of themselves," Sellis says. "And when our engineers and product designers and product managers feel it personally, they generally want to solve it." Another big challenge Discord faces is how to build the product to serve both the needs of giant community servers and the tiny servers where groups hang out -- especially when, according to Discord, 90 percent of "all activity on Discord" happens in "small, intimate servers." Sellis calls it "one of the biggest challenges for the team" -- but also says that it's "honestly the biggest opportunity." He says that Discord thinks about how it can make people "feel comfortable in both these spaces, understand that there are different types of spaces, and the technology is familiar, but still different in both of these places." Sellis says that the biggest Discord server is Midjourney, a key company in text-to-AI image generation that lets you generate visuals right inside Discord. Midjourney became popular because it turned the "single-player game" of generating AI images into a multiplayer community. "You can just watch people try things, experiment, fail, succeed, embarrass themselves, etc. And that made it kind of like a collective action." He says Discord is seeing something similar with the recently launched Wordle app on the platform, too, which lets you compete with your friends. That all speaks to some of Discord's larger vision. Sellis is seeing a trend that "everything is starting to kind of look like a game" and "Discord can be used as a social layer on any game to essentially improve its engagement, its socialness, and its multiplayer capacity. That's something we like and are going to lean into." And as for Nintendo's GameChat? "I would say imitation is a very sincere form of flattery," Sellis says. "Hard to imagine being more flattered than being copied by Nintendo."