Discord Feels Like the Internet Before Everything Got Weird

Social media is still where the world spends its idle time, but it stopped being social a long time ago. Nearly two thirds of the world’s population now uses social platforms, and the average user spends about 2 hours 21 minutes a day inside them (Smart Insights). 

Yet if you look around your feed, it is the same pattern everywhere: a small group of creators and celebrities broadcasting to millions of people who mostly sit in silence and scroll.

Researchers have been pointing out this imbalance for years. Multiple studies estimate that lurkers people who consume but rarely post make up somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of users on social networks and online communities (Northeastern Global News+1) In other words, most “users” are really viewers. They watch, they read, they react privately, but they almost never contribute anything that shows up in the feed. A lot of people can probably trace their own behaviour here: regular daily usage, almost no posting.

At the same time, the way people use these platforms has been drifting away from conversation and towards something more like background noise. Long running tracking from GWI, summarised recently by John Burn-Murdoch in the FT, shows that average daily social media use has actually fallen by almost 10 percent since 2022, with the sharpest drop among teens and young adults. More telling than the time drop is the behavioural shift underneath it. Since 2014, the share of people using social media to express themselves, stay connected to friends or meet new people has fallen, while “habitual” and purposeless use has risen (Financial Times) People are not logging in to talk. They are opening TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook out of reflex and because the algorithm is too powerful for their willpower to beat.

The result is obviously the well-known doomscroll. There is now a whole body of research on the health impact of compulsively consuming negative or emotionally intense content in feeds. Doomscrolling is obviously bad for your mental health, and it is quite possibly the best way to waste your life.

None of this is unexpected when you realise that the primary loop on most big social platforms is now “open app, get hit with whatever the recommendation system thinks will keep you there,” not “open app, talk to people you care about.”

There is also a quiet cultural backlash. Deloitte’s 2025 media report notes a 15% decline in social media use in Australia, especially among younger people, as they touch grass and step back from feeds they increasingly see as low quality or full of AI slop (The Australian). The same GWI data set behind the “peak social media” argument shows falling engagement and growing fatigue in many markets. People are not rejecting the internet - they are drifting away from the big public stages that used to define it.

All of that is the backdrop for why Discord feels so different, and why it has quietly become one of the only places online that still deserves to be called social media with a straight face.

On paper, Discord is a messaging and VoIP platform that lets people talk in text channels, join voice and video, and share media inside invite-only communities (aka servers). In practice, it’s where a huge slice of internet culture now lives. Discord reports around 200 million monthly active users in 2024–2025 which is most likely higher now, spread across more than 28 million servers, with hundreds of millions of registered accounts in total.

Crucially, its architecture pushes behaviour in the opposite direction to the big feeds. There is no global “For You” page filled with strangers, stuffing 3 second videos into your poor little brain before you’ve had a chance to think. There are servers, channels and roles. You join because you care about something: a game, a fandom, a sport, a creator, a protocol, a shared identity. Once inside, you are not performing in front of an invisible mass audience, but you’re talking to a finite group of people who share that interest.

That shift from follower graph to interest graph sounds abstract, but it produces something important: people actually interact. They ask questions in channels, they post screenshots, they jump into voice for a few matches, they help each other out or recommend products. Participation is the norm rather than the exception. The same “lurker vs poster” imbalance exists everywhere online, but on Discord the default context is a room where posting is not like a performance, and it’s not a “look at me” app, which is the key difference.

Personally, I absolutely believe that the “look at me” apps are simply just really bad for society. 

It also matters that Discord never built public clout mechanics into the core experience, with no feed or algorithm hunting for your “high performing” content to keep strangers glued to their screens. Stripped of those incentives, the social pressure flips. Instead of “how will this look to everyone,” the question becomes “will this be useful or fun for the people in this channel.” That sounds small. It is not. That mindset is what early Facebook and MySpace felt like, when most of what you posted was for friends, family or people you knew from school.

Because the environment is built for interaction, formats that ask people to participate instead of passively consume tend to fly. Personality quizzes are the perfect example. On old Facebook, quizzes and small social games spread like wildfire (sorry) because they combined a low barrier to entry with a social reward: answer a few questions, get a playful result, post it, see what your friends got, comment and compare. Early social media was full of this lightweight, almost silly self expression. It was fun because the people seeing it actually knew you.

That mechanic mostly died in the modern feed. A “Which character are you” result feels juvenile if your audience is strangers, and the platform is tuned for polished video content. But inside a Discord community that is built around one specific game or show, the same idea becomes a social object again. Now you are not performing for the algorithm. You are sharing something with people who share your obsession, with no incentive attached. 

You can see it directly in how quiz style formats behave inside servers. When we run a personality quiz around a game or IP in a Discord community, the result is not just an answer on a landing page. It turns into a role, an in joke, a badge that lives in the server. People compare outcomes, tease each other, ask what certain results mean, and sometimes even rerun the quiz to “fix” an outcome they disagree with. The content is the catalyst, but the value is in the conversation it starts. That is very close to how “old” social media worked when prompts, memes and chain posts bounced around networks of real relationships.

From a brand perspective, this isn’t nostalgia, it is a hard pivot. If the big public feeds are in decline as true social spaces, and a lot of usage has slid into mindless scrolling and algorithmic entertainment, then the real opportunity is to go where people still talk and opt in. 

The data already shows social fatigue at the macro level a 10% drop in daily usage in just a couple of years, falling use for connection and self expression, measurable mental health downsides of feed based doomscrolling (FT). At the same time, Discord continues to grow in absolute scale and in cultural importance for gaming, fandoms and niche communities.

It is easy to say “Discord is like what social media used to be” and leave it there, but the real point is a bit more specific. Open feeds trained everyone to think in terms of audiences and reach. That era is ending. What is replacing it looks more like clusters of dense, high trust groups. In those groups, interactive mechanics like quizzes, polls, challenges, community events and collective formats like this make far more sense than fighting for another viral clip in an overloaded feed.

Ultimately, actual conversation in a live environment is clearly more social than a video and a comment section.

So when we talk about Discord being actual social media, it is not just a soundbite. It’s a description of how people are choosing to spend their time online in 2025. 

If you want to design for that reality, you create things that people can do together inside communities, not more content for them to watch alone.