Discord says “How do you do, fellow kids?” with new emoji study

Every minute, more than 455,000 emojis are used on Discord.

The messaging service—home to over 150 million monthly active users and millions upon millions of group chats and interest-focused servers—has emojis wrapped into its core.

“On Discord, we know emojis reign supreme,” the platform says. “Increasing ’emoji power’ is one of the most popular perks of Nitro, Discord’s paid subscription offering, which allows people to boost their emoji library (or create and upload their own custom emoji!) with every new community they join.”

Nitro is $9.99 a month, but Discord recently launched an emoji-focused, lower-priced tier called Nitro Basic. It’s $2.99 per month and includes upload and use of custom emojis and stickers across all chats and servers.

Why double down on emojis and introduce Nitro Basic?

Well, Discord’s got data showing its users really dig those little pixel pictures.

It recently surveyed 16,000 users over the age of 16 in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Australia, and found that more than half of them (57%) would rather get an emoji than a “Like” in response to a post.

43% of people said getting emoji responses provided “more validation than a text or verbal statement.”

57% of users also said they feel “they can better express their personality through emojis than through words,” and 70% said emojis help make messages clearer. People also commonly use emojis to cut tension in conversations, Discord found.

“Emojis act as our positive reinforcement for online communication,” said Dr. Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist who studies the relationship between visual communication and language, and worked on the study. “Despite being graphics, we often perceive emojis like faces. And the sight of another’s smiling face is often enough to make us do the same.”

With all this data and its emoji-central platform, Discord thinks it can be “the go-to for Gen Z,” since “Gen Z craves authentic ways to show up as themselves in digital communities,” Connor Blakely, founder and CEO of marketing agency YouthLogic, said. (He also worked on Discord’s study.)

“With endless emoji options available—from characters from your favorite IP to community-specific references and jokes—using custom emojis allows my generation to feel truly at home in the digital world,” Blakely added.

You can see Discord’s full emoji study here.