alt Hacker NewsDiscord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc.
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
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It also needs users, the network effect aka lock in is gigantic with discord, I don't see discord ever going away. Or anything else gaining traction.
Discord for sure has way more features and use than IRC.
On the other hand, IRC lets me /ignore a user and my client renders channels without ever showing a hint of that user's existence.
Meanwhile, in Discord both ignoring and blocking a user still shows a "3 ignored messages" or "1 blocked message", etc.
There are always going to be pros and cons to one or the other.
And video calls + screen sharing.
No alternative platform does this.
> People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
I think it's probably that Discord has such a range of use cases.
I only ever use Discord for open source projects that have communities there. Discord supports a whole load of stuff around voice chat etc, but I've genuinely never used it.
Open source projects I've seen mainly just use it as a text chat, so they could in theory switch to something else with only a tiny fraction of the features.