A look at how Twitch and YouTube gamers helped Discord grow to 9M daily active users, overtaking Slack's 5M daily active users
Six days a week, a 26-year-old videogaming celebrity who goes by the name “Lirik” regales his 1.7 million followers on the streaming service Twitch … Tweets: @jim_mills Tweets: Jim Mills / @jim_mills : Amazing growth at Discord, with 8.9m DAU (Slack had 5m DAU in Feb'17). Registered users up 4x y/y to 45m. Msgs / day up 5x. Now 6b msgs/mo. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2017 Discord is a gamer-only chat app whose growth engine is streaming culture: celebrities like Lirik, with 1.7M Twitch followers, funnel their audiences into Discord servers, driving registered users up 4x year-over-year to 45M and messages to roughly 6B per month. That puts its ~9M daily active users past Slack's 5M — a consumer product built on free voice and text out-scaling a paid workplace tool.
The arc since then validates the 2017 snapshot: Discord reported 250M registered users and 56M MAU by 2019, had already broadened from gamers to influencers and YouTubers running customized private communities, and by late 2020 was profiled as pushing to become a communication tool for everyone, not just gamers.
First-order effects
- Streamers like Lirik get a persistent home base for their 1.7M-follower audiences, making Discord the default community layer on top of Twitch and YouTube rather than a standalone chat app.
- Slack, at 5M daily active users, loses the raw-usage comparison to a free consumer rival despite selling to businesses — its growth story now has a counterexample attached.
Second-order effects
- Discord's creator-driven distribution model pulls in adjacent user groups — influencers, YouTubers, hobbyist communities — expanding its addressable base well beyond gaming without paid acquisition.
- Workplace-chat rivals face a new benchmark: Discord's 5x message-volume growth shows community-scale engagement that subscription-priced team tools aren't structured to match.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the chat market splits into two structures — free, community-organized platforms monetizing scale (Discord's path toward in-house games and broader communication use) versus seat-priced work tools — forcing each side to justify its model.
- Streamer-audience-to-community-server becomes a durable template for how online creators retain followers, with platform ownership of that relationship shifting from video services to chat layers.
The trend: Chat platforms are scaling through creator-led communities rather than enterprise sales, with Discord's gamer-first network growing into general-purpose communication.