Discord Acquires Gas, An App Popular Among Teenagers

Discord, a chat app, recently disclosed that it had acquired Gas, an app well-known among teenagers for its engaging social media comment's function.

What is Gas platform?

Users of Gas register with their institution, add friends, and respond to surveys about their fellow students. The polls' questions, however, are meant to increase consumers' confidence rather than undermine it.

How does it work?

Teens may be asked to select one of four friends who has the most rude or is the best Dancer. An ambiguous "guy in 10th grade" or "female in 11th grade" sender will then send an anonymous message with a compliment to the selected individual.

Nikita Bier, who sold a similar app called tbh to Facebook in 2017 and founded Gas, has since shut down tbh. Gas has reached 7.4 million installs and nearly $7 million in consumer spending since its summer 2022 launch, according to Sensor Tower data. A paid feature known as "God Mode" lets users know who their secret complimenters are. Users can subscribe to this feature.

Discord made the following statement in an announcement: "At this time, Gas will continue as its own standalone app and the Gas team will be joining Discord to help our efforts to continue to grow across new and core audiences." Bier stated that Gas had four team members as of October.

The app has had a bumpy road to its demise, despite its rapid growth in popularity. Despite being completely false, a widespread sex-trafficking rumor about the app had an impact on downloads.

According to Bier, he and his team received hundreds of graphic death threats as a result of this hoax, according to the Washington Post. Unfounded allegations of human trafficking have also been leveled against IRL and WalkSafe, two other viral social apps.

Gas is one of a number of anonymous apps that have recently gone viral, some of which are based on compliments. However, apps like NGL and Sendit were using bots to simulate engagement, as TechCrunch discovered.

These apps, like Gas, charge users in order to use feature of who asked question. When it turned out that these questions weren't actually from their friends, some customers felt like they were being conned, which is understandable. In the meantime, the company behind Spark and Summer, 9count, is working on nocapp, a product that is similar to Gas.

Discord recently announced that it would incorporate a number of apps into its servers, despite the fact that Gas will continue to function independently at the moment. As a result, it's possible that the messaging platform will display these favorable community polls in the future.