Because it has significantly more features than IRC and it's dead simple to spin up your own "server" where you aren't beholden much to "admins" or whatever.

fancy IRC

IRC was already "caveman playing with sticks and pebbles" a decade before discord became a thing. It's really not a good point of comparison and questioning.

Discord became popular for one simple reason: anyone could make a server, share it with a crossplatform link, and others could then try out that link without installing anything. In other words, it became popular because it literally copied Slack and because the Skype era was atrociously bad customization and ease of use-wise compared to the preceding.

Every time I see Slack/Discord et Al. described as such, I wonder if any of these people actually used any of those. By use, I mean actually try out its features, not just treating it as IRC ("just" channels, messages and DMs for text convos).

I hate Discord with a passion, but pretending like it's just "fancy IRC" is IMHO pretty absurd.

If you legitimately don't understand why it's popular, you are seriously out of touch.

• Better moderation tools
• Easier to do voice/video channels
• Easy to create your own server
• Huge amount of useful bots created by the community
• Features like replies, threads, onboarding screens, and custom emotes

Don't get me wrong, I wish that we could use a FOSS platform instead of Discord, but 1: people are already using Discord and it's hard to get everyone to switch platform, and 2: there is no comparable alternative right now

I use it because some of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS that has Wiimmfi support use it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Too hard to regrow the, already tiny user base in those cases.