Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.
I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.
Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.
There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.
But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.
I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.
Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.
Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).
Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.
Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.
But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.