Yes but compared to things like Zulip it loads pretty slow.

that's like selling email with gpg as easy to use compared with newgroup.

anything win when compared to the ultimate underdog. but that's hardly a valid comparisons.

discord only win from other opensource forums because you don't have to own a domain, i guess.

Like reddit or Facebook groups? Discord being realtime chat is an important part as well. I don't think it was necessarily competing with traditional forums that are post and thread based.

Do you though? Do you drop everything to answer notifications as they pop up, or do you answer them at your convenience?

discord as opensource support forums compete with irc (the ultimate underdog) and discourse et al (all which require a domain)

the real time part of irc was taken over by matrix.

I mostly use Discord for real time chat. And around that time Discord got big it was IRC that filled that roll. Or skype for some.

The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.

It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.

IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.