Instantaneous creation of a server with an RBAC GUI, multiple text and voice chat rooms, voice chat, screen share, app share(game streaming), and for clients, a GUI that allows people to view the status of other servers while participating in one.
Again, it's made for voice/screen/streaming share, not primarily text.
May I counter that Discord effectively proprietarised the open standard that is IRC and then put all the bells and whistles such as shared screen streaming, voice chat etc on top? Similar to how WhatsApp proprietarised XMPP.
Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.
I won't argue that it can be used that way, and for "only" text, yeah, there are open alternatives that achieve most of what Discord can do.
My point is that it is reductive to say "Discord is just IRC with some addons" when those addons are critical to its success. If Mumble had video-conference and screen sharing, it'd be pretty easy to convince my friends to use Mumble. Other than the network effect of Discord being the entry point to multiple servers/friend groups, and Discord makes spinning up your own server trivial.
So again, it does more than "just" improve on text chat.
If IRC came with voice chat, I might agree. But discord didn't become popular because it was a reskinned IRC client. Seamless setup of a voice and text server was the value proposition. I still use teamspeak with some people, but discord is just so much more polished in the ease of setup area.
Discord was originally designed for gaming voice chat. It marketed itself this way, it was positioned this way in its public perception, and most of the early feature development reflected this. The move towards "online communities" only came later once they realized they had a broader product: they realized they had an alternative to Slack, while originally they thought they were an alternative to Ventrillo and Mumble. But make no mistake, the gaming angle was why Discord became popular; it made it vastly easier to host and create (and eventually, find) dedicated servers for specific topics, and the voice chat quality was mostly ahead of everything else (except Mumble, but again "not hosting your own Mumble" was a selling point.)
The fact it had text channels with (very, very limited) markup was less a ripoff of IRC and more "The basic thing everyone expects from a comms client, to have basic text channels where you can type words." It's literally the most fundamental thing a "communicator" can do is to have a text box that other users can look at. Otherwise you wouldn't even be able to organize people to get in voice channels! Sorry to say but nobody except nerds know what "IRC" is, but almost everyone understands online chat. This is not new. The fact IRC diehards think Discord "proprietized" IRC is a good example of not knowing or understanding your enemy at all and just romanticizing about what you think is important. Discord was not popular because of text chat. It was popular because of voice chat, and it did voice chat very well.
Every discussion of Discord has to have IRC contrarians who reminded you "it had text chat first", all while the fact of the matter is text chat isn't what made Discord popular to begin with!
> Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.
That isn't because IRC is some magical happy software that makes everybody using it sit in a circle and sing campfire songs. It's because what you are describing is the natural end-point of all online communication forums like Discord, IRC, AIM, or even Twitter or whatever: "community." What you are witnessing is a community of humans congregating, not some magical special sauce that IRC gave us in 1980 or whatever.
Community has existed in human society for a long time, in fact. Seeing it replicated in different mediums with similar features and form is not surprising at all. Your wording might imply IRC gave us this or something, or that the "communities" in Discord are rather ersatz in some way -- but I argue that's a simple confusion of cause and effect.
Again, it's made for voice/screen/streaming share, not primarily text.