I think you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.

I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.

An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.

i think a certain brand of hackernews user just likes being completely obtuse in a bid for superiority.

how could anyone possible enjoy x mainstream thing, i only use y hyper niche thing that signals my status to tech nerds.

queue the guy talking about the most obscure linux distro you can possibly imagine.

> low-friction

is the key here

the same reason WhatsApp and Telegram won on their markets

[dead]

It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.

Right. Many communities and project teams saw a real need for an IRC replacement, whether literally or not, and Discord was the least bad choice simply by existing. And IRC channels were of course just as un-googlable without setting up a logging bot and a crawlable archive.

Not necessarily because they were scared, but probably a lot of them got banned or saw their friends get banned from Reddit, and couldn't get back on because Reddit has quite strong detection for ban evaders, so after the initial anger period, Reddit just disappeared from their mind altogether.

But they sure are upset now that Discord bans accounts based on reports to its thought police.

Both things can be true.

I'm on 3 high school and 5 college servers. It's not just for games. Most companies won't use it for work because they have a pretty bad security record and no enterprise features, but it's perfect for any small to mid size community.

I'm in 1 Discord for Gaming, the rest (about 45) are all non gaming related (though discussions sometimes happen). Including AI, Development, Art, Music, etc. I think Discord has a wider audience that many aren't aware of.

Your response is the "Chef's kiss". It's exactly these kind of policing actions that drives content away from the masses.

No one said discord wasn't popular. It's substantially popular with gaming communities. It's also very popular with non gaming communities, many of which found it an an alternative to Reddit and others.

This is true but I think it's both.

The popular predecessor to Discord was TeamSpeak. It ran on your own servers and that made it hard to set one up. That's why Discord groups are called "servers", they were hijacking established teamspeak terminology their audience would be familiar with.

And reddit died around the same time by extreme over-moderation.

"How dare you make a claim I don't agree with. Your opinion should be flagged and hidden from the view of the public!"

It's like you custom designed your post to make his exact point.

> This is such a far fetched/reactionary comment, that it's frankly surprising it hasn't been flagged.

"This is such a wrong thing to say that I'm surprised you haven't received reprisal for it"

Proving his point in real time

On Reddit for example most of the popular subs would ban you for saying Israel's doing a genocide, even if it's relevant to the thread topic, e.g. if the topic is a news post about USA sending money to Israel.

You also can't call anyone or anything fascist, or say anything that an LLM can twist into being a call for violence. For a while they were banning anyone who said the word "Luigi".

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