Discord's key features are chat and VoIP. File sharing is barely meaningful, except that it means not needing to use external image hosts for gifs/memes/pet pics.

Discord's initial pull was from gamers who were using teamspeak/ventrilo/mumble + twitch chat and maybe IRC.

If it doesn't do VoIP then it's not a viable alternative to Discord.

It'd be like if LibreOffice couldn't save new files or if Firefox couldn't render images or video.

Not all use-case requires both chat and VoIP though. I basically never use chat in my friends servers because we're on VoIP. Mumble is an alternative in that case. On the other hand I never use VoIP on servers I'm in for open sourced projects or other general hobby servers because it's a bunch of strangers and people asking for support.

I’m someone who uses Discord but (almost) never uses voice chat. To me it’s a text chat platform. This isn’t true for everyone but I feel like it is for a lot of people

But think about why you're now using Discord instead of IRC or a forum: it's because of the users who were also pulled in for the core VoIP feature and because users would rather use one program than multiple.

I didn't stop using Mumble or IRC because they couldn't, combined, meet my needs. I even prefer them to Discord on a principle basis.

But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers.

>But everyone I wanted to communicate with moved to Discord because it was easier -- as it had both core features which are necessary for gamers

That's the real reason why you use Discord. Peer pressure.

Discord is in no way a replacement for a forum

The network effect is obviously a big part of it, but it’s also that IRC is extremely barebones and difficult to use even for messages.

I’m quite a techy person and I even wrote my own frontend to Discord a while ago, but I’ve struggled with things like bouncers and authentication to the point where it’s just easier to set up a bridge to Discord and use that when I need to use IRC, and then I miss features like editing and profile pictures (there are proposals to add these things to IRCv3 but they aren’t widely supported)

IRCCloud seems to have a good solution to some of this but is paid

> If it doesn't do VoIP then it's not a viable alternative to Discord.

It is, however, a potential alternative to one common use case for Discord, namely: "What we really wanted was a web forum, but this is easier."

This describes all 15 of the Discord servers I'm currently on.

If you really wanted a (I am assuming free AND 0 setup) web forum, why not use reddit instead? It is at least an actual forum, that is also web searchable. And like discord, it is free and you don't have to bother with the hosting/setup.

What does discord offer that reddit doesn't? (In terms of being a web forum)

That's a good question - I suspect the answer might be "trendiness".

(My only experience of Reddit is from Boogle searches landing there [an immediate point in its favour over Discord] and it appears to be pretty heavyweight, loads down the browser even more than Discord, and has ads everywhere - maybe the experience is better if you actually create an account and log in?)