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