A lot of people make comparisons to vent/mumble/teamspeak/irc, but I think Discord is quite a bit different.
I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:
1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting
2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy
3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people
Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.
All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.
Obviously discord is different than only mumble alone. Discord is not very different from mumble + IRC, which is what we are comparing to and what I said in my post. IRC of course does have history if you keep your client open which most people do.
Most organized gaming groups used mumble/ts/vent and some combination of IRC and forums. The only difference here is that they're physically in the same app, and of course, there's embedded stuff which is just generally technical iteration (some IRC clients had it). Otherwise IRC always had channels and DMs and mentions and multiple servers. Only setting up your own server wasn't free -- you could easily hop on any network and create as many private channels for you and your friends as you wanted. Yes, older technology wasn't as accessible but at the core it's the same feature set.
I know very few people who leave their computer on 24/7. I agree forums is actually probably closer to replicating what Discord has, those were definitely a big part of pre-discord communities.
And yes, my main point was that it has become a lot more accessible and free, leading it to blow up.
Nearly everyone I know has a 24/7 irc bouncer that is connected and stores logs. It does indeed raise the complexity of using irc but you can bet for sure that some subcultures on irc behave this way
I used to hang out on vent/mumble all the way from ~2008 to ~2015 when I switched to Discord. While voice chat is great:
1. Hanging out in voice chat for hours and hours can be exhausting
2. There's no history, so it's hard to have conversation/hang out with people who are busy
3. #2 leads to a lot of FOMO especially in younger people
Whereas on Discord, I can leave messages for people, have a channel where I post funny stuff throughout the day, share music and videos. I can have multiple threaded conversations, have multiple servers each with many channels, etc.
All of this was technically achievable with irc and advanced enough client/plugins, but it surely wasn't accessible to everyone, and definitely not free.