If you’re familiar with Discord, you’ll know one of the many boons for server owners and casual users is the use of bots for menial tasks. If you aren’t familiar, Discord has an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows server owners to manage their servers and automate many tasks with bots, kinda like the ones you interact with on some websites.
According to Discord, around 430,000 bots are used every week by the 150 million monthly active Discord users. The company has obviously noticed this, or maybe it was the plan all along. From around Q2 2022, users will be able to search for specific bots or browse to see what’s out there with a new app discovery feature. Devs can opt-in to make their bots discoverable, potentially allowing them to reach a much wider audience.
The power of the Discord bots might be something to watch
Bots bring a whole host of customisation options to the servers they’re a part of. Server owners can use them to moderate their servers, offer mini-games, provide notifications to the whole server when games are free, post memes to a text channel or even stream music to a voice channel.
That last feature recently became a little harder to do for bot developers. Popular music bots Rythm and Groovy were forced to shut down by Google because they streamed music from YouTube to Discord servers.
This is definitely a good move from Discord. Providing support in-app for bots will promote devs to create more and improve the ones we have already. Well done Discord, this is a much better idea than integrating NFT wallets.