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How to get the most out of Discord.
Discord is the best way to talk to friends on the internet. Between voice, text, bots, and streaming, the free program has come a long way from a simple TeamSpeak alternative. I love that I can easily hop into a voice channel with friends for hours, but I don’t love how complicated it can be to adjust Discord’s billion settings until I’m satisfied.
I use Discord every day and still get lost scrolling its many options, but my years on the platform have produced a handful of go-to tweaks that anyone can benefit from. Here are my best tips to get the most out of Discord in 2022.
There was a time when it was necessary to fiddle with Discord’s many voice options until friends couldn’t hear my keyboard clacks or the fan blasting in my room, but now I can skip most of this hassle with a single toggle. If you plan to forego push-to-talk and let Discord openly broadcast your mic, you should definitely flip on Noise Suppression. You’ll find a dedicated button for it in the lower-left panel while connected to a voice channel (you can also turn it on in the Voice & Video settings).
Just know that the AI isn’t flawless. I’ve seen it randomly stop working or cause weird static for a few moments, but the hiccups are worth it.
Noise Suppression will use extra CPU power while it’s on, but the difference shouldn’t be too noticeable if you have a moderately powerful PC. Discord will actually switch off Noise Suppression automatically to preserve resources when your PC is topping out. You’ll have to remember to switch it back on later if this happens, which is kind of a pain. Noise Suppression also works on Discord mobile now, which means I’ll never have to hear car horns blaring while my friend is walking his dog again.
Head over to settings and scroll all the way down to Activity Status. The green box up top displays what app Discord can see you running at the moment, with an option to turn on its overlay for that app (I usually keep it off because it can cause performance issues with some games). To add a game or app that Discord doesn’t already detect, click the little text below the box that says «Add it.» This will bring up a dropdown menu of every program currently running. Select which you’d like to add and you’re set.
I mostly use this feature to add old or new games Discord hasn’t added to its database, but the one non-game program I stream the most is Google Chrome. Firing up a stream is handy for quickly sharing weird internet finds and especially great for synchronized YouTube watching.
Discord has a huge library of bots that can do all sorts of niche things like roll dice for a D&D campaign or post news on certain topics, but the one bot that almost any server can benefit from is a music bot. Music bots appear like normal members of a Discord server and can be summoned with simple text commands to stream ad-free music based on what you search (usually from YouTube, but other sites are supported). They’re a nice way to play music in sync with every user in a channel at once, and the closest thing to an internet jukebox.
In the case of most bots, adding them to a server is as easy as clicking an «add» button on a website and allowing access to the bot when a popup appears on Discord. Music bots are so convenient that Google took notice in 2021 and shut down two popular music bots for breaking YouTube’s terms of service. There are a few working music bots still out there (my server uses Vexera), but they may be a dying breed, so enjoy them while you can.
Other cool bots to try
I used to set servers so only mentions at me will send me a notification, but Discord recently added new mute options that will also squelch «@here» and «@everyone» and I highly recommend using them.
Discord selects regions automatically by default, but you can freely swap to a nearby region to move everyone to a (hopefully) less laggy server until the usual one is fixed. My server uses US West, so when it lags up I switch to the next closest, US Central, for a while.
If you have a Discord server full of friends who like streaming games for each other, I think a Discord Nitro sub is worth the cost to boost a personal server (especially if you split it). I have the $10/month sub that gives our server two «boosts.» We have random perks like animated stickers and more banner options, but the only thing we care about is 60 fps streaming for all users at 720p. As the Nitro member boosting the server I also get 1080p streaming, but 720p is perfectly fine on our «Level 1» server. You can unlock 1080p for all users at Level 2, but that’s not worth an extra $25 worth of server boosts to me.
It’s a minor thing in the grand scheme, but we stream for dozens of hours every week. I appreciate the smoother video when friends are playing super fast games like Overwatch or Rainbow Six Siege.
Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn’t pay him. He’s very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he’ll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don’t, though.
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