Discord For Dummies

Tee Morris

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119688099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Connect with the newest and most vibrant onlinecommunity

Thoughit was originally a virtual meeting placeprimarilyfor gamers, Discord's userbase has quintupled in size in just two yearsand branched to include discussions on a multitude of topics. DiscordForDummies shows readers how toconnect withthemassive Discord audience, bothwithinandwell beyond the gaming niche.

Celebratedwriter, broadcaster, gamer, and technologistTeeMorris teaches readers how to set up a profile, establish channels, and join other conversations. Along the way, he'll show you how to grow your audience andutilizeDiscordin your business. You'll also learn to:

·Play by the rulesof Discord, both written and unwritten

·Build a Discord studio

·Createa community

·Acquiremust-have accessories

With an audience ofover250, 000, 000 active users, you can't afford to ignore theDiscord community. DiscordForDummies is perfect forbusinesses seeking a larger audience, established media looking for a presence in private chat, andgroups looking to organize their communication.

Part 1

Getting Started with Discord

IN THIS PART …

Set up your Discord profile.

Set up your server.

Communicate with people with text.

Chapter 1

The Lowdown on Discord

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding out what Discord is

Creating a Discord account

Understanding the Discord landscape

When social media offers up a new platform, it fills me both with excitement and dread. I love learning something new. Any opportunity to teach myself something to add to my arsenal of life hacks, daily routines, and day-to-day productivity, I look at as a good thing, in social media especially. I’ve always been a believer that social media is a fantastic tool of communication. With so many ways to get your message out, its possibilities are endless. A new platform means new options other platforms may not offer or possible replacements for routines that once worked wonders for you but seem to be losing their efficiency. Additionally, if the platform becomes a sensation, you become something of a founder in its community, a trustworthy voice on how the new communications avenue works. Awesome!

But here is where the dread settles in with me. When I hear about something new, whether new to social media or new to me, my first thought is always the same: Great. One more platform to add to the stockpile. See, the downside of learning something new is that you won’t necessarily become an expert within the first day or two of picking it up unless you spend uninterrupted hours diving into every aspect of it. Then, once you have a grasp of it, you have to fit it into the rotation of all the other social media platforms you have tied to your name. This also means setting aside time, or pockets of time, to manage this new platform with all the other platforms you have active. There is only so much time in the day, and if your full-time job is social media, you know how tough it can be creating content for audiences across platforms. If your full-time job isn’t social media, then content creation across platforms just got a lot tougher. And now you have a new platform to contend with. And that’s if the platform takes off, lest it become like other social media hot flashes in the pan that everyone joins only to abandon a week or two later. Awesome.

Welcome to a look inside my brain when I first started streaming — creating content live online through a service like Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv), Mixer (http://www.mixer.com), or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com) — and I was asked, “So what’s your Discord server?”

Are you kidding? I have to know this thing called Discord (see Figure 1-1) if I want to know Twitch?

FIGURE 1-1: Welcome to Discord, a Swiss Army knife of communications for you and your team.

No, Discord is not necessarily a necessity for streaming, but if you want to build a community, if you want to extend your reach as a content creator, and if you want to level up your online communications game, yes, you will need Discord.

Awesome.

So What Exactly Is VoIP?

All right, maybe learning something new won’t be so bad if you have a good reason for picking up yet another platform. That is a sound reason to get behind taking time to traverse the learning curve, so where do you begin with Discord? Or where do you begin your serious look at why you need yet one more platform added to your growing palette of applications?

So let’s step back a bit and talk about what is at the heart of Discord: audio chat. Discord is one of many apps taking advantage of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a method commonly used for the delivery of media communications (audio, video, and data files) through online connections using audio and video codecs (formats used for compressing a lot of data into order to make it manageable for exchange). Think of how the JPEG format takes a huge image file and makes it only a few megabytes. Codecs are similar to that. Instead of data being transmitted over a circuit-switched network, digital data is transmitted over a packet-switched network: the Internet.

Perhaps the biggest name of early VoIP that changed the way the world communicated was Skype (see Figure 1-2; https://www.skype.com), offering free calls anywhere internationally by using closed networks for private user bases. The Danish software first reached the public in the summer of 2003. Provided you have broadband Internet, Skype offers up audio and video calls of better quality than standard telephone connections. Along with VoIP, a handy chat function is included for the exchange of data files.

FIGURE 1-2: Skype brought free international communications to everyone around the world with a broadband Internet connection.

Here’s where things start to get a little dicey with VoIP. While the audio and video quality of these calls was unparalleled, a lot of factors would come into play, beginning with the quality of the broadband Internet. Not all broadband is created equal, and in rural areas and developing nations, dial-up was still the way to connect in 2003 and later. Even if broadband is up and running on both the sending and receiving ends of a VoIP call, sending files during a call could disrupt or outright end a call on account of the size of the files being exchanged, the upload/download limitations of the broadband connection, and the amount of traffic on both parties’ end.

Then there’s security. Each point of a VoIP connection creates a potential vulnerability, as firewalls, if not configured properly, can block incoming and outgoing calls. Additionally, distributed denial-of-service attacks can easily take down VoIP systems, rendering them busy. And these are just two of many vulnerabilities that VoIP can bring to a professional or home network. Free global communication is a very cool thing, but it also comes with a lot of compromising possibilities. So while an improvement over your usual hard-wired telephone calls, VoIP is hardly perfect.

So What Exactly Is In-Game Chat?

Now as VoIP has its checkered reputation, it did introduce the idea of open communications within online games. The concept of built-in chat options, a feature that is usually expected in team-oriented games, be they MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), FPS (first person shooters), RPGs (role playing games), or some other flavor of vide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Started with Discord
• Part 2: Communication in Discord beyond Text
• Part 3: Working Discord into Your Routine
• Part 4: The Part of Tens
• Index
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement