>I am not sure what exactly makes Discord so attractive. Let's for the sake of the argument say it is a low-latency noise cancellation technology.

Discord is not popular because the technology is advanced. It got popular earlier on because the UIs for alternatives were garbage and they nailed the ease of multiple servers/channels/etc.

The entire point is that discord could be easily reproduced from a software perspective. That won’t matter thought because the users won’t be on the new network and will have no incentive to switch.

If Microsoft buys Discord I think several people would be looking to switch.

If you've never used Discord before, then it just feels like another chat application with a "gamer" theme. In reality, it's so much more and I think startups could actually do a lot more using Discord instead of Slack/Zoom.

The UI is really simple to navigate. If you set up roles properly, it's really easy to automate certain things. There's a massive bot ecosystem. The voice, video chat, and screen share features are so much simpler to use than any other product I've used before. The thing that I find insane is that it's 100% free to use.

I did exactly this: initially I was going to go with Slack because the bots API was nicer and they had slash commands, but in the end Discord is just so much more pleasant to use, and it even started adding slash commands now.

My one wish would be an easy way to handle multiple accounts.

Can't deny Microsoft finally nailed the single identity. It shows in teams b2b use.

I thought they collect a lot of data with desktop clients, including what apps you use and when.

There is an optional feature that let's you share what game you are currently playing to other people. It works by listing the current processes and matching against a preexisting list of games. If it finds a match it will set that as your current game assuming the setting for that is enabled.

What was attractive is that it had extremely low friction to onboard new members into a community. Click a link, type your name, and you are now a part of whatever community.

Compare that to skype where you had to download a whole piece of software, register a new account, go to your email to activate your account, click the link for the community group chat, and then you can finally start talking in a single channel.

The next best thing IMO - Element - takes a few seconds to send and deliver a message and up to 10 seconds to initiate a voice call. Has no voice sub-rooms with auto voice detection, either.

It’s a free beer carbon copy of Slack except it uses single account for all instances. And they have the voice channel feature, but that’s kind of an aside.

I wouldn't call it carbon copy. Slack's performance is abysmal (while Discord is relatively snappy), and this is, interestingly, toxic to Electron, as Slack is frequently used as reference to assert that Electron applications perform poorly.