Who invented it gets better

Discord's slowly building a business around all that popularity, too, and is now undergoing a big pivot: It's pushing to turn the platform into a communication tool not just for gamers, but for everyone from study groups to sneakerheads to gardening enthusiasts. Five years in, Discord's just now realizing it may have stumbled into something like the future of the internet.

Almost by accident. Pivots are actually crucial to the history of Discord. It wouldn't exist without them. Before he was trying to reinvent communication, co-founder Jason Citron was just one of those kids who wanted to play games with his friends. Citron learned to code because he wanted to make games, and after graduating set out to do just that. His first company started as a video game studio and even launched a game on the iPhone App Store's first day in That petered out and eventually pivoted into a social network for gamers called OpenFeint, which Citron described as "essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones.

It also built voice and text chat into the game, so players could talk to each other while they played. Discord co-founders Stan Vishnevskiy left and Jason Citron. Photos: Discord. And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best thing about their game was the chat feature.

Not a great sign for the game, but you get the point. It was a painful transition. It wasn't obvious its new idea was going to work, either. There was one group playing League of Legends, one WoW guild and not much else. After talking to users and seeing the data, the team realized its problem: Discord was better than Skype, certainly, but it still wasn't very good. Calls would fail; quality would waver. Why would people drop a tool they hated for another tool they'd learn to hate?

The Discord team ended up completely rebuilding its voice technology three times in the first few months of the app's life. Around the same time, it also launched a feature that let users moderate, ban and give roles and permissions to others in their server. That was when people who tested Discord started to immediately notice it was better.

And tell their friends about it. Discord now claims May 13, , as its launch day, because that was the day strangers started really using the service. Someone posted about Discord in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit, with a link to a Discord server where they could talk about a new expansion pack.

Citron and his Discord co-founder, Stan Vishnevskiy, immediately jumped into the server, hopped into voice chat and started talking to anyone who showed up. The Redditors would go back, say "I just talked to the developers there, they're pretty cool," and send even more people to Discord. That kind of kicked the snowball off the top of the mountain. The early Discord team, circa Photo: Discord.

One user, who goes by Vind on Discord, was among Discord's earliest cohort of users. He and his Battlefield 4-playing friends ditched TeamSpeak for the app, right as they were also starting to do more than just talk about Battlefield.

But Vind said one feature particularly stood out: "Being able to just jump on an empty voice chat, basically telling people, 'Hey, I'm here, do you want to join and talk? Almost everyone I talked to picked that same example to explain why Discord just feels different from other apps. Voice chatting in Discord isn't like setting up a call, it doesn't involve dialing or sharing a link and password or anything at all formal.

Every channel has a dedicated space for voice chat, and anyone who drops in is immediately connected and talking. The better metaphor than calling is walking into a room and plopping down on the sofa: You're simply saying, I'm here, what's up? Add that to the list of things about Discord that turned out to be unexpectedly powerful. In retrospect, of course, it feels obvious. Vishnevskiy describes it as feeling like "a neighborhood, or like a house where you can move between rooms," which is a radically different thing than most online social tools.

It had no gamification systems, no follower counts, no algorithmic timelines. From a technical perspective, none of this is easy. Discord spent a long time working on making it easy to be in a voice channel on your phone, then seamlessly switch when you open Discord on your computer.

And it continues to work on latency, the enemy of every real-time communications developer. More recently, the company has added video chat to the stack, believing that was the next level of high-fidelity conversation Discord needed.

The team wanted to build a way to screen-share during a game, basically creating a small-group or private Twitch that would let users stream games with their friends watching. Doing that in 4K, at 60 frames per second, was hard enough. They weren't sure how to add it, either: Should they add a separate channel for video, or would users have a hard time choosing between voice and video?

They eventually added it into the voice channel, turning it into an incremental step up from voice rather than a separate thing. There's not much that Discord does that users strictly can't do elsewhere. On one hand, it's a lot like Slack, blending public channels with easy side-chats and plenty of ways to rope in the right people.

It's also a bit like Reddit, full of ever-evolving conversations that you can either try to keep up with or just jump into when you log in. In fact, a lot of popular subreddits now have dedicated Discords, for more real-time chat among Redditors. It uses simple status indicators to show who's online and what they're up to. But by putting all those things together, in a way that felt more like hanging out than doing work, Discord found something remarkable.

Everybody talks about the notion of the Third Place, but nobody's come closer to replicating it online than Discord. Beyond just making sure things work right, flexibility is key to Discord. The ladder of communications, from text to voice to video, has always been important to get right. Communities can decide who gets access to certain tools and design their space however they want. But it goes even deeper: If you're in a video chat, for example, you can choose whose video you're seeing, not just whether yours is on or not.

You can also be in multiple chats at once, blending one into the background while focusing on another. Doing it passively is also a core feature. That's not important for people on a teleconference call. Video chat is one of Discord's more recent features, and it seems to fit right in. Image: Discord. As Discord grew, so too did some of its communities. And pretty quickly, many of them took on lives outside of games. Vind found himself running a pretty large community, about all things Formula 1 racing , not long after he joined Discord.

He checked to see who owned the server — and thus had complete control over it — and found it was a totally uninvolved Discord user. Vind eventually tracked him down on Reddit, and asked him for admin privileges so he could add some new features.

The guy was focused on creating a Formula 1 group on Kik, which he thought was going to be the better platform. Vind's goal was to build a big community, but not around any particular game. Or even necessarily around racing. The Formula 1 server now has more than 5, users. The history of the internet says that groups of that size almost inevitably devolve into some kind of messy chaos, making moderation and community-building hard to keep up with.

Vind said there have been challenges, sure, but for the most part things have worked OK. Discord's moderation bot, named CarlBot, does a pretty good job of automatically deleting problematic messaging and alerting the mods. When users join the Formula 1 server, they have to read and agree to those rules before they're allowed to post. Not everyone has it so good. Discord's troubles with problematic content are epic and well-documented. It has at various times been a home to members of the 4chan and 8chan crowd; a number of "Kool Kids Klub" servers that are only barely disguised KKK groups; and countless examples of online bullying, hate speech and other kinds of awful behavior.

It pops up everywhere. What happens on the platform isn't necessarily meaningfully different from, say, what happens on Reddit or Facebook, but experts have said they worry about Discord because its semi-private nature and small team make it harder to police.

Since Discord's users skew young, there are even more challenges. Discord employees now admit they noticed this too late. The problematic content on the platform only became an urgent issue after the deadly protests in Charlottesville in , which had been planned and discussed openly on Discord for a long time before the event.

Before that, there was no Trust and Safety team at Discord; Sean Li, who leads that team, joined the company about a month before Charlottesville.

And for too long, the company thought its job was just to keep the worst stuff — the porn, the racial slurs, the flagrantly illegal content — off the platform. It turned a blind eye to the rest, figuring that because it wasn't a public space, what was the harm?

Just don't join the server, and nobody can come after you. Now they see it differently. Those didn't exist for too many years. Now, Discord's trying simply to be clear and forceful about what's acceptable and what isn't, and to enforce those rules consistently. While there's still plenty of bad stuff on the platform, progress seems to be strong. Discord has more rules than before, but it still leaves much in the hands of moderators. Meanwhile, the other thing Discord has had to figure out is how to make money.

Point is, Discord has plenty of runway. But there's not often a clean exit path for a huge communications platform with a spotty reputation for moderation just ask Twitter and Reddit.

Eventually, the company's going to have to make real money. And Citron and Vishnevskiy both adamantly say they don't want to sell ads or user data. Users have long made businesses out of Discords. Mikeyy, for instance, eventually graduated from playing Overwatch to running a big server for people who play FIFA, and particularly those who like to play its addictive Ultimate Team mode.

Everything runs through PayPal and similar services, though, and Discord doesn't see a dime. Over the last couple of years, Discord has become a place where lots of streamers, influencers and others chat more directly with their fans — Discord has official integrations with Twitch, Patreon and more — but it doesn't get a cut there either.

But Discord always had bigger plans. One plan seemed obvious: Sell games to gamers! In Discord launched the Discord Store, with a hand-selected set of games available for purchase.

Except that didn't work. Users didn't come to Discord to find games, they came to hang out with their friends. The Discord Store's failure was an eye-opening moment within Discord. And it caused another pivot: Discord had to be less about video games and more about becoming the place for people to hang out with their friends. It was now in the era of Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox and so many other games where being together was far more important than the activity on the screen.

Starting last year, they did. They ran focus groups and user studies, trying to figure out how millions of people were using Discord. One question they asked was, "What's the biggest misconception about Discord?

In early , as Discord was embarking on a big redesign and rebranding exercise designed to help it appeal more broadly, COVID happened. Suddenly, stuck at home, everyone's social life turned to the internet. Study groups started using Discord; teachers used it for class; friends used it to hang the way they normally would after school or on the weekend. At the end of June, Discord's rebrand was complete.

Its new tagline was "Your place to talk," and its homepage was mostly free of gaming jargon or confusing instructions. Though the nods to gaming do persist, from the controller-alien logo to the. In the months and years to come, Discord has plenty of work to do, particularly on continuing to improve moderation tools and make sure the communities on its platform operate the way the company hopes. And as it keeps adding more features — eventually, VR and AR and so many others will be on gamers' and everyone's wish lists — it'll have to figure out how to do it all without adding the kind of complexity it has so far avoided.

But five years in, it's clear that Discord has done something remarkable. It's built a space that feels unlike any other on the internet. It's not quite group chat, it's not quite forums, it's not quite conference calling. It's all of those things and none of them.

It turns out, in that messy middle, is a place that mirrors what it's like to be human, and interact with other humans, more closely than just about anything else on the internet. For better, and sometimes for worse. That's not what Citron, Vishnevskiy and their team were going for, but it's what they have now. And they're not pivoting anymore. David Pierce pierce is Protocol's editorial director. He owns all the phones. Recruitment startups aim to help tech companies access a more diverse candidate pool and help students access opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.

The recruitment tool companies are all in on helping Gen Z find jobs, and making the process more fair than it was for their parents. She's a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied sociology and international studies. She served as editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, her school's independent newspaper. She's based in D.

Jordan Brammer, a senior at New York University, said he used to apply to finance jobs through a mishmash of networks, like LinkedIn and Google. But after being ghosted by one too many employers, he realized he needed a better recruitment tool. He eventually stumbled across HIVE Diversity, a network connecting students and companies who might not have found each other otherwise. Professional networking sites have been around for a while.

LinkedIn, the dominant career development site, launched in But startups like HIVE have popped up relatively recently targeting young job seekers and claiming to tackle the access problem.

In , after finding themselves shut out of Silicon Valley jobs, three students at Michigan Technical University launched Handshake to create a more-equal playing field for students looking for job opportunities. Even TikTok wants to help young people find jobs — the platform launched TikTok video resumes in July. The companies are all in on helping Generation Z find jobs, and making the process more fair than it was for their parents.

Those are things that are within your control. Hiring is a painful, belabored process both for the people desperate for jobs and for the places that want to hire them. Big tech companies constantly look for ways to optimize their recruitment strategies.

As Facebook's engineering hiring crisis , Google's brutal recruitment process and a fake resume that garnered top tech interviews show, the system is often broken. And for young people breaking into the job market, there's the age-old issue of access. It often feels to them like they're sending your resume into the void.

And if a candidate didn't attend a top school or doesn't have a "white-sounding" name , or if the candidate doesn't look or sound like other people who work at the company, recruiters may be biased against hiring the person.

The pandemic hastened the shift to primarily virtual recruitment, and to a greater reliance on these tools. Gone are the days of crowded in-person career fairs, or flying out candidates for stressful interview processes. Instead, companies and students turned to networks like Handshake, often aided by universities. For young people, it may be changing for the better. Rembrand Koning, a Harvard Business School professor in the strategy unit, studies the rise of outbound recruitment in companies' hiring strategies.

He became interested in the topic after realizing that most of the famous hiring bias studies looked at people sending their resumes to companies. We're increasingly seeing people getting poached," Koning said. The percentage increases when it comes to Silicon Valley workers, high-skilled workers and workers with LinkedIn profiles. The study looks at currently employed people, but Koning is working on another paper about how this change affects people entering the workforce.

How do recruiters evaluate young people with little work experience? As student recruitment networks grow in popularity, Koning said his biggest concern is ensuring that people are equally represented on the platforms.

The makers of these tools want to host as many students from as many backgrounds as possible on their platforms; it's essential to their business pitch, and it's something they think about constantly. The goal is to help companies access a diverse candidate pool and help students access opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise. Without a strong user base, neither of those things can happen. Digital recruitment networks can broaden choices on both the student and company sides of hiring.

The search is easier when everyone is in the same digital space and can search by category for the jobs and candidates relevant to them. Ariel Lopez, CEO of hiring platform Knac, said he believes strongly in the democratization of the recruitment process. But we also care about the people that are in your pipelines. They're more than just a resume. They're humans. Lopez began her career helping brands and startups with recruitment.

She went on to found Knac, which helps companies manage and give feedback to candidates in their application pipeline. She wants to eliminate the "black hole" of resumes and ensure companies aren't ignoring qualified and passionate people. Often even major tech companies have incompetent applicant management strategies, with candidates "swimming in spreadsheets," Lopez said.

Arsh Noor Amin, an engineering graduate student at Bucknell University, appreciates the consolidation of opportunities on platforms like Handshake. He can easily message recruiters and find software jobs that work for him as a student from Pakistan. The consolidation helps employers, too. Renee Davis, director of recruiting at Duolingo, started using Handshake to find employees in March The game-changing aspect was being able to access such a large student network all at once.

Sometimes the tools are lacking in features, however. Andrea Robinson, a junior at UCLA who's looking for marketing jobs, said Handshake is useful for finding companies, but she'll still apply directly through the company itself. This disparity can make it confusing for students to navigate. Handshake released a report in October looking at how Gen Z navigates the digital job market. The main takeaways were that a majority of students, particularly women, feel that they don't need to meet in-person to make meaningful professional connections.

The report also found that a majority, particularly students of color, feel that it's easier to break into careers compared to their parents' generation. Digital communication is often thought to be isolating, but for some, it's freeing.

HIVE, too, is focused on helping its candidates build deeper connections. Each student on the platform uploads comprehensive resumes, encouraged by HIVE to include as much information about identity and lived experience as they feel comfortable. The platform wants students to share their qualifications and interests beyond professional bullet points. There's a slight barrier to entry with HIVE in that the platform puts its student users through various training sessions to make their applications more attractive to employers.

The quick apply button is the fastest way to nowhere. It feels great to fire off applications, but it feels worse not to hear from anybody. As everyone discusses the "Great Resignation" and companies struggle to recruit the talent they want, some of the power has shifted to workers. A lot of the conversation centers around offering currently employed workers better benefits and pay, but it should be normalized for those entering the workforce as well.

Messy recruitment processes can really turn qualified people off. It's advantageous for any company to really be thinking, 'How do we rewire what we're doing here? For recruitment tools, putting power in young people's hands is what it's all about. Just as the power of the PC fueled the early leaps of the tech revolution and the accessibility of the web built on that, the smartphone and 5G networking technology will reshape our world with blazingly fast connected devices. Leading that charge is 5G, the high-speed next generation of mobile wireless connectivity that will connect virtually everyone and everything, including machines, objects and devices.

We wanted to get a sense of how 5G will advance the mobile ecosystem, open the door to new industries and dramatically improve the user experience. So we spoke with Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of the Mobile, Compute and Infrastructure business unit at Qualcomm Technologies, which is one of the leaders in 5G and produces the Snapdragon chips that are at the heart of so many mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, VR headsets, AR glasses, smartwatches, cars and more that will enable the cloud-fueled digital future.

Think about the massive amounts of data going through all of our smart devices today. And not just between the devices but also up to the cloud and across the networks — all that bandwidth is increasingly brought to us through 5G.

Now consider all of the functionality and opportunity that come with those smart devices, including quicker communication, better photos, better videos and speech-to-text, speech-to-speech translation. The first female researcher at Harvard Medical School, Hyde created one of the earliest models of an intracellular micropipette electrode, which allowed her to stimulate and monitor a cell without disturbing the cell wall. This technology is still widely used in science laboratories.

Before Blodgett's revolutionary non-reflective glass coating was invented, glass wasn't nearly as useful or reliable as it is today. Her invention has proven indispensable in the making of camera lenses, microscopes and eyeglasses.

During World War II, Lamarr, who also happened to be a movie star, created a frequency-hopping communication system that could guide torpedos without being detected.

A pioneer in the field of solar thermal storage systems, MIT researcher Maria Telkes created the first solar-heated system for her home in Dover, Massachusetts. First inventing a leak-proof diaper covering, then a fully disposable diaper, Donovan was intent on helping as many people as possible with her ingenuity.

These two New York Department of Health lab researchers discovered Nystatin, one of the first effective anti-fungal medicines, by collaborating on experiments through the mail.

This invention turned Graham from a secretary to a millionaire. First marketed as "Mistake-Out," Graham's home-made typewriter correction fluid was an instant hit among her fellow secretaries. After further experimentation, she perfected her recipe and Liquid Paper was born.

A computer scientist who helped design Harvard's Mark I Computer, Hopper also invented a compiler that could translate written language into computer code, and was a part of the team that developed COBOL, one of the first modern computer programming languages.

While attempting to develop a new kind of rubber for jet fuel lines, Sherman and her lab partner Sam Smith accidentally discovered a waterproof, stain proof, insoluble polymer that eventually became Scotchgard. Explorer I, the first satellite ever launched into orbit by the United States, owed its success to Hydyne, the improved rocket fuel that Morgan created during her time as technical lead at North American Aviation's Rocketdyne Division.

During her long career as a pharmacologist, Elion helped develop countless drugs that are used in the treatment of AIDS, malaria, herpes, and cancer. Along with George Herbert Hitchings, she invented the first immunosuppressive drug, Azathioprine, which was initially used for chemotherapy patients, and eventually for organ transplants. While searching for strong but lightweight plastics to use in car tires, DuPont researcher Stephanie Kwolek discovered what would become known as Kevlar.

This revolutionary fiber has saved countless lives in the form of bullet-proof vests, and is also used in numerous applications, such as bridge cables, canoes, and frying pans. Brill's groundbreaking invention, the hydrazine resistojet, streamlined various rocket propulsion systems, which all required different types of fuel and added prohibitive weight, into a lighter system with a single fuel source.

Monopropellant thrusters are now standard, and are why we have self-propelling satellites. Her computerized solution monitored call volumes and adjusted acceptance rates accordingly, so as not to overload circuits. With New York City police being notoriously slow to respond to calls in her neighborhood, Brown took matters into her own hands and created a home security system with closed-circuit television.

Shirley Ann Jackson was an award-winning theoretical physicist. Her contributions to the field of telecommunications led to the invention of numerous technologies, including caller ID and call-waiting, as well as solar cells and fiber optic cables.

In addition to creating the first computerized airline booking system, Berezin created the world's first word processor. Realizing that because of her gender she wouldn't be able to move up in the industry, she also founded her own company, Redactron, to get her inventions on the market. While working for NASA, Askins was tasked with finding a way to improve the quality of photos taken from space.

Her method of enhancing photo negatives was far more widely applicable, as it could be used to clarify photos after they were already developed.

Her technology has been adapted for use with X-rays and historical photo restoration. The International Space Station relies on solar power, but for a third of its rotation, the earth blocks the sun's rays. Gonzalez-Sanabria's long-life nickel hydrogen batteries keep the International Space Station powered up during that dark portion of its rotation. At only 12 years old, Zimmerman invented software that allows people with speech disabilities to communicate non-verbally by using symbols on a touchpad that are then translated to written language.

Bath's patented Laserphaco Probe allows doctors to dissolve cataracts quickly and painlessly before applying new lenses to patients' eyes. This technology is used worldwide to prevent blindness due to cataracts. Grandin's innovative designs in the field of animal husbandry have led to calmer livestock and fewer injuries. She has developed numerous ways to handle cattle based on how they naturally behave, rather than on brute force. Her center track cattle restraint system is now used to manage about half of the cattle in the United States.

A vital breakthrough in cancer research, Tsukamoto's co-patented process of isolating human stem cells found in bone marrow has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Before Fox's innovative plant-breeding work, naturally colored cottons were rare, temperamental, and could only be picked and spun by hand. Her work has led to cottons that grow in an array of colors and that can be machine-harvested and spun.

This allows for a drastic reduction in chemical and bleach processing, and the need for synthetic dyes. Facebook Twitter Email. Who invented the dishwasher, windshield wiper, caller ID? Women created these 50 inventions. Are these some of mankind's greatest inventions?

From the wheel to the cell phone, mankind has created some pretty cool stuff. But which stuff is the greatest invention? Share your feedback to help improve our site!