Discord got big in online gaming because they offered a VOIP and text chat browser cliemt. Just copy or type the short link and you're in in a minute. They also did free hosting which was huge.

Compared to Teamspeak or Ventrilo, literally just eliminating the steps of downloading a client, installing it, and typing in an IP address caused them to explode overnight. Also you could "host" without changing router settings (most kids/students have to ask their parents or jump through hoops for this).

Technically there was stuff like Skype but that never had the convenient team speak style chat rooms to drop in and out of freely.

Within months of suddenly getting popular, discord had a huge userbase that everybody was using already, and that momentum got us to the point where in some aspects its even replacing the role of wiki's and forums even though its terrible at it.

There’s no open source equivalent that does seamless audio and video streaming on every platform.

Its really convenient if you've got a group of friends spread out across the country for gaming. The voice channels allow people to jump in and out at will. No calling each other. That and bots are really eady to build for it. Sure its all unencrypted but im not putting anything of real value into it.

We've found it to be the "least bad option" for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you've just run into or organise the next session.

Completely agree that for anything "less transient", then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.

It's the place where things like game communities use primarily for instant chat.

My dumbass friends who work in tech thought IRC was too much of a hassle. So we ended up on dickschord

Back in 2016 I managed to get all of my gaming friends on discord simply by saying "It's like Skype but it doesn't suck"

We simply needed something that worked and let us do voip calls without having to jump through the hoops of setting up ventrilo, mumble or teamspeak. Skype was so aggressively bad that any alternative was like finding a waterpark in the middle of the desert.

I don't get it either. They aggressively try to sell nitro, they have ads embedded in their ui. I have no idea why people don't hate it.