Top all-time · #842
Discord Blog
Company blog · blog.discordapp.comprogramming
Discord Blog is the company blog at blog.discordapp.com, writing about programming. Since 2016, 79 different Hacker News readers have linked it 111 times, most often “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Discord's engineering blog for its Elixir scaling, Rust NIF and React Native posts, usually as technical references in discussions about those stacks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
Most-linked posts?
- How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2017-07-11
- Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-05-17
- How Discord Stores Billions of Messages – Discord Blog6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-01-21
- How Discord Renders Rich Messages on Android4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-03-27
- The Discord Store Beta4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-09
- Lessons from migrating a large codebase to React 164 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-10-04
- How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-10
- Why not 90/10?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-12-14
- Why Discord Is Sticking with React Native3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-26
- /tagged/engineering2 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-08-01
What Hacker News says?
Discord is a heavy Elixir user, and even uses it with Rust via NIF: https://blog.discordapp.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-1...
Comment linking /using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users-c6f19fc029d3
on “Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust”Submitted Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust as a story · 1582 points
HN discussionIt should also be noted that Rust interoperates extremely well with Erlang, which is the basis of Discord (via Rustler). https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
Comment linking /scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
on “Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust”Submitted How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users as a story · 802 points
HN discussionThe main issue with this viewpoint and your (arguably sensationalist) article is that it just finger points & blatantly ignores the reason those protections are in place. The number of people that consider Discord part of their threat model or an actual privacy risk is incredibly tiny compared to the number of users that get inconvenience by mass bot raids & people bypassing IP bans. I help manage a medium-sized Dis…
Comment linking /discord-transparency-report-april-dec-2019-7e6d43a9bcb8
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?”Submitted How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC as a story · 649 points
HN discussionI think while this is great, it is good to remember that your current tech stack maybe just fine! after all, Discord start with mongodb[0]. [1]. https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m...
Comment linking /how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7
on “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users”Submitted How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users (2017) as a story · 528 points
HN discussionThis is how we will make money. https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd... Aside from the money we already make from https://discordapp.com/nitro :)
Comment linking /the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fdd4
on “How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC”Submitted Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11M Concurrent Users as a story · 441 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is increasingly how gamers communicate. We grew from 11 million to 45 million users in less than a year. We have over 9 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 2 years old. We're hiring senior engineers pretty much across the board. Come solve interesting scaling problems and/or implement next generation features. ht…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2017)”Submitted How Discord Stores Billions of Messages Using Cassandra as a story · 438 points
HN discussionHopefully they won't provide chat data or metrics to others. If Discord were acquired or partnered with anyone shady, they are certainly in a position to Big-Data-AI (and other bs bing words) everyone. They brag about storing all messages. [1] [1] - https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m...
Comment linking /how-discord-stores-billions-of-messages-7fa6ec7ee4c7
on “Mumble – Open source, low latency, high quality voice chat software”Submitted How Discord Indexes Billions of Messages Using Elasticsearch as a story · 337 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is building a platform dedicated to connecting people through games. We grew from 45 million to 90 million users in the last 6 months. We have over 14 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 2.5 years old. We're hiring senior engineers in the key roles of fullstack, backend, and data infrastructure. Join an amazing t…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)”Submitted How Discord Resizes 150M Images Every Day with Go and C++ as a story · 303 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is building a platform dedicated to connecting people through games. We grew from 45 million to 90 million users in the last 6 months. We have over 14 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 2.5 years old. We're hiring senior engineers in the key roles of fullstack, backend, and data infrastructure. Join an amazing t…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2018)”Submitted Why Discord Is Sticking with React Native as a story · 278 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is increasingly how gamers communicate. We grew from 11 million to 45 million users in less than a year. We have over 9 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 2 years old. We're hiring senior engineers pretty much across the board. Come solve interesting scaling problems and/or implement next generation features. ht…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)”Submitted How Discord achieves native iOS performance with React Native as a story · 251 points
HN discussionDiscord is the most impressive one to me. They definitely didn't have those resources when they wrote their iOS app[0]. The Android version is just RxJava, iirc, because of some performance issues they couldn't get around. [0] https://blog.discordapp.com/using-react-native-one-year-late...
Comment linking /using-react-native-one-year-later-91fd5e949933?gi=9cca25724807
on “Proton Native – React Native for the desktop”Submitted Lessons from migrating a large codebase to React 16 as a story · 164 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is building a platform dedicated to connecting people through games. We grew from 45 million to 150 million users in the last year. We have over 20 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 3 years old. We're hiring senior engineers in the key roles of backend, native, data science, and data infrastructure. Join an ama…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)”Submitted The Discord Store Beta as a story · 90 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-two-and-half...
Comment linking /how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc-ce01c3187429
on “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users (2017)”Submitted Discord now has a store as a story · 75 points
HN discussionDiscord | Senior Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE Discord is increasingly how gamers communicate. We grew from 45 million to 90 million users in the last 6 months. We have over 14 million daily active users and that number is growing every day. Discord is just 2.5 years old. We're hiring senior engineers pretty much across the board. Come solve interesting scaling problems and/or implement next generation features…
Comment linking /tagged/engineering
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)”Submitted Why Reactiflux, Vue Land, Yarn, and other open source communities use Discord as a story · 64 points
HN discussionYes, and they wrote some interesting blog posts about it: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-handles-push-request...
Comment linking /how-discord-handles-push-request-bursts-of-over-a-million-per-minute-with-elixirs-genstage-8f899f0221b4
on “Elixir 1.5 released”Submitted How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017) as a story · 32 points
HN discussion
