Comment by stackghost
8 hours ago
Back in the day you needed a bnc if you wanted chat history. The mobile experience has been abysmal until very recently.
Also when discord came out there was a certain appeal to having voip built into the same app, and not having to maintain a separate vent/mumble/ts.
The voice thing always sneaks up on me as a requirement, because I never, ever personally want to use that. I'm not saying it's not a good feature, just one that doesn't occur to me. You're probably right, though.
Discord was originally for gamers so most communities I was part of had their own voip servers.
In the 90s it was in game chat, forums, VoIP, possibly an IRC channel. That was a lot of infra to juggle and usually it wasn’t all hosted by the same person. So if xXxDarkNinja69xXx got his feelings hurt he might take down the teamspeak and then your community is up shit creek without a paddle until you can find someone else to host it.
Discord does a merely-okay job of all of that, and possibly Reddit has supplanted the forum bits that discord can’t, but it’s less overhead for the administrators of each community.
I don’t really do any gaming these days so I too don’t use the VoIP, but that was a big part of the allure when discord launched.