Until you join a server that gives you a whole essay of what you can and cannot do with extra verification. This then requiring you to post in some random channel waiting for the moderator to see your message.
You're then forced to assign roles to yourself to please a bot that will continue to spam you with notifications announcing to the community you've leveled up for every second sentence. Finally, everyone glaring at you in channel or leaving you on read because you're a newbie with a leaf above your username. Each to their own, I guess.
/server irc.someserver.net
/join #hello
/me says Hello
I think I'll stick with that.
At least Discord and IRC are interchangeable in the sake of idling.
1. People don't understand or want to setup a client that isn't just loading some page in their browser 2. People want to post images and see the images they posted without clicking through a link, in some communities images might be shared more than text. 3. People want a persistent chat history they can easily access from multiple devices/notifications etc 4. Voice chat, many IRC communities would run a tandem mumble server too.
All of these are solvable for a tech-savvy enough IRC user, but Discord gets you all of this out of the box with barely more than an email account.
There are probably more, but these are the biggest reasons why it felt like within a year I was idling in channels by myself. You might not want discord but the friction vs irc was so low that the network effect pretty much killed most of IRC.
you can also invite a music bot or host your own that will join the voice channel with a song that you requested
When we get to alternative proposals with functioning calls I'd say having them as voice channels that just exist 24/7 is a big thing too. It's a tiny thing from technical perspective, but makes something like Teams unsuitable alternative for Discord.
In Teams you start a call and everyone phone rings, you distract everyone from whatever they were doing -- you better have a good reason for doing so.
In Discord you just join empty voice channel (on your private server with friends) w/o any particular reason and go on with your day. Maybe someone sees that you're there and joins, maybe not. No need to think of anyone's schedule, you don't annoy people that don't have time right now.
The big thing is the voice/videoconferencing channels which are actually optimized insanely well, Discord calls work fine even on crappy connections that Teams and Zoom struggle with.
Simply put it's Skype x MSN Messenger with a global user directory, but with gamers in mind.
Yes IRCv3 exists and can do the backlog filling thing. Nobody uses that.
If "privacy" was an issue for you, you do know that IRC server admins could and still can see every single message on their servers unless everyone is using an encryption plugin on the channel?
The thing that Discord replicates with IRC is limited audience. Unless the server is public, I know I can be more open because I trust the people in there not to be assholes and share private stuff with others.
