The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.
I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.
I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.
The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.
I host a Mattermost server for this purpose. It does what Discord does, just shittier, buggier, fewer features, and I have to pay a web host to have somewhere to run it. But it's -actually- private and our community owns the data, instead of whoever buys Discord next week.
I wish there were more self-hosting offerings to compete with Discord. RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, and Matrix/Element all leave something to be desired.
The appeal is for small private and semi-public communities. You are right that it is more like IRC than a web forum, but it serves much the same purpose for many people with its server channels and channel threads.
I'm a member of a small community about 25-30 people that know it each from either university or work. We chat about games, politics, software development, organising IRL events, and lots of other interests. The advantage of discord over IRC is we get better message persistence, video streaming and voice calls, sharing media (pictures and video). It lets us organise this content in a way that say a group whatsapp could not. Right now three people are in a voice and video chat room talking about and playing Street Fighter 6. I could just jump right into that conversation with a single click and might do so in a moment. They are also sharing videos and twitter links in a channel dedicated to fighting games.
I'm also a member of a larger programming community with a few thousand members and we have automated help systems allocating space to get help, evaluating programming expressions to aide conversations, moderation tools, url shorteners for programming playground - much of which is powered by custom bots using discord apis.
The thing it is closest to is MS Teams or Slack, but the difference being that its more focused on soical interactions and gaming intergrations than it intergrations for work tools. Its also just frankly a better product than Slack or Teams - it just doesn't have the business intergrations that make it viable for business and doesn't offer business plans.