Right, so it has nothing to do with the software and its value is entirely the network momentum. Reddit is a perfect example of how software can be made worse and worse while maintaining user growth.
Discord is 5 years old. The reason more and more people and projects use it over competition is that it offers better experience. It's not about some magic momentum they luckily got. I use it and moved my project to it. Last time I played a video game was about 20 years ago. Quoting one other commenter here: it's much better than Zoom, Slack and Teams combined and it's not a small margin. They delivered while everyone else failed. That's why people love it.
Yeah, the open-source project I'm on moved all of our dev communications (†all of them) to discord, several years ago, and gladly left IRC without the dignity of a burial.
† Email and mailing lists were something we forbade from day 1. There are a variety of sociological reasons why they're vile, but I think a lot of it has to do with bikeshedding, via "low-cost involvement" - people who care more about potstirring than actually getting work done have a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on big announcement and pick fights. I've experienced a huge number of people who've earned a 'stake in the discussion' by making some small contribution, and then jumped in on every discussion trying to exercise some informal kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto (insofar as such a thing arises naturally from the basic human decency of giving people the benefit of the doubt). What I like about realtime comms - especially ones with nice, logged discussions in multiple, visible rooms, is you don't have to be plugged-in 24/7 to keep up with stuff like you would on IRC (without a bouncer), but at least you have to have some real "skin in the game" of paying attention and being involved - which generally biases towards the folks doing the real work. Decisions get made without the armchair generals; occasionally they'll show up after some big decision got executed on and something was built, with an angry assertion of "Why wasn't I consulted?!?"††, but usually the existence of the actual finished work, fait accompli, tends to to stifle that nonsense real fast.
After multiple decades of dealing with that petty squabbling on email, I don't miss it at all. It was a huge source of burnout.
Of course it does, because software is part of the overall customer experience that built that network momentum and is inexorably linked. Users would not have tolerated, promoted, and evangelized otherwise. It may not be the primary ingredient, but in Discord's case I think it helped.
