【Underwater Love】

If Reddit is Underwater Lovethe "front page of the internet" then Discord is its unofficial chat app for the many gamers and gaming communities that dwell there.

While it's not justused for gaming, the voice-and-text chat app was built with an eye toward unseating established players like Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. It looks and functions like a cross between Slack and Skype.

Now, days after the service's two-year anniversary, the company has reason to celebrate. It has seen significant growth, particularly in the past six months. More people are logging in to check out the new kid on the block, and they're choosing to stick around.

"As Discord grows we are seeing a steady stream of new and growing communities dedicated to specific games and genres, and more people connecting with friends than ever before," CEO and founder Jason Citron said.

"Because of the way Discord was developed -- browser-based and therefore requiring no downloading -- it is easier for people to jump right in and start playing/talking/connecting."

On its two-year anniversary, the company is up to 45 million users, almost double the 25 million that were using the service at the end of 2016. That's a huge leap, especially in the context of the other current usage stats.

• Concurrent users (peak): 4 million

• Daily active users: 8.9 million

• Messages (daily): 200 million

• Messages (monthly): 6 billion

• Number of countries using Discord: 231

The growing number of users also means that more messages are flying around on Discord's various servers. The company is seeing roughly 22 percent growth from month to month in the number of messages sent.

The voice chat figures are similarly huge. The company is up to 16 petabytes monthly of voice data bandwidth; for context, 1PB amounts to roughly 13.3 years of HD video.

The biggest hitch faced by a prospective new user: you need to know what you're looking for. There isn't a built-in search feature for Discord servers and the third-party options out there aren't necessarily giving you a complete picture.

That said, I can tell you I've gotten a lot of use out of Discord over the past year. Whenever there's a new Destinyraid or OverwatchARG, it's one of the first places I turn to for up-to-the-minute progress reports.

And that's just how I use it. Whether or not you game on a PC, there's a very active community of servers catering to different interests, games, and even specific influencers.

Discord is an increasingly big deal, and it's worth your time to take a look if you're seeking more ways to connect with the communities around the games you play.