Thirteen-year-old Zoha Khan got on Discord in January this year as she wanted to play the online horror game, Among Us, with her cousins. “They told me about it, and it was a good idea, as it is a communication platform which enables overlay, and we didn’t need to switch apps to chat,” says the Kurla resident. Confused? Well, overlay is a Discord graphical layer that can be added to some games that enables you to interact with Discord while playing. And now, after talking to her cousins and friends on voice chat and text, she has been enjoying it so much that she is a regular on the app. 

For the uninitiated, Discord is a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform, where users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called ‘servers’. As of 2021, the service has over 350 million registered users, and over 150 million monthly active users. Most of them are pretty young—anywhere from 13 to 25 years old. When this writer, who is a ripe 39, installed it, it baffled her with its layout and interface, so much so that she quit even before she really started. But for these teen social natives, it’s a maze that they navigate seamlessly every day.