There's complexity and then there's complexity. Your end user experience as a Discord user may be simpler on its face, but it's reliant on a lot of obfuscated complexity under the hood. You wouldn't be able to, say, send Discord messages using telnet, the way you can with IRC. Discord's simplicity in setting up an account, joining servers, having scrollback, etc comes at the cost of other types of simplicity.

People in this thread are talking past each other without realizing that they are expressing different preferences about where complexity belongs in a tool.

(For the record, I happen to be on the IRC / git mailing list side of the spectrum.)

For most channels you don't need an IRC account. And there are web interfaces like https://web.libera.chat/.

I'm trying to subscribe to Discord. I'm currently stuck in a captcha loop.

You mean

- cloning the repo in github to your own fork

- cloning your fork locally

- pushing to your local fork after you've made your change

- opening a PR

Which is the expected flow for any project you're not already part of, ie all of them.

The email workflow:

- send an email

I can't fathom how you can say the email workflow is more complicated.