Disclaimer: Excuse me if my statements are possibly utterly wrong due to me not having ever used Discord.

Wikipedia says:

> Discord is an American VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities.

Don't we have a metric fton of instant messengers which support VoIP and some file transfer?

What's so special about Discord?

To me as an outsider it merely seems like the kids have decided TeamSpeak isn't cool anymore and now Discord is cool.

Perhaps in a few weeks they will flock to the next voice chat which they decide is now cool. What's the big deal?

Settings up new "servers" is trivially easy and can be done without payment. You can join any number of servers with same account and retain separation (i.e. other users can not see a list of servers you are on). You can change your nickname on server-by-server basis. "Everyone" is already on Discord and by everyone here I mean every gaming community and many tech communities.

For TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble (which were the big 3 in my youth at least) you have to have different clients, you have to pay for servers, and the chat support is very rudimentary and bad. Channels aren't as easy to create and admin. Lastly they don't support inlined links/images or emojis. Which makes them just as user friendly as IRC.

Discord took what was good about Slack's UI and added on top good VoIP. It might not be perfect but it quite literally covers most what anyone could want and it scales really well. To beat it you must have 100% feature coverage + another killed feature. First part probably isn't that hard, but the second is. There needs to be a reason to install yet another communication program on your PC/tablet/phone because all of the communities wont just uproot and leave to a new platform over night.

How will they be able to pay the bills with this approach?

Datamining the users and then selling the data. Also probably have some governments paying them to spy on certain users.

How does Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc finance themselves? Selling data and also having subscriptions. If you pay $5/mo you get higher quality video streaming and you can use custom emojis cross the servers you visit.

I think The issue with teamspeak and Ventrilo were...cost. Kids couldn't afford hosting a server.

Additionally, it was stupid easy to evade bans on those platforms and troll for hours if Admins weren't on.

The value of a network is exponential in the number of users/connections, not in the technical features available. See Voat vs Parler or old Digg vs old Reddit.

There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it.

And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.

Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums.

Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP.

As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.

I'm not a user of screencast, but I don't remember aim having that. Am i wrong ?

I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it.

There's not much left from that specific era.