Comment by iceflinger

I was a heavy IRC user in 2015 before Discord and even though I personally prefer using IRC, it was obvious it would take over the communities I was for a few reasons:

1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.

All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.

There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.