Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.
Discord's logging is shitty because:
1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.
3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.
4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..
Discord's search is painful because:
1 - There's no regex search.
2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).
3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.
I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.
My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.
But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
>But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface.
Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be.
That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open.
History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach.
And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.
I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).
Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc).
But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?
Why not PHPBB? Not discourse, the UI is still endless scrolling based and obnoxious.
Using chat as a forum is... Just not a great idea. It seems most remember a strong sense of community on forums. We talked about actual interests and learned things and it was great, and stuff didn't get buried or too disorganized , nor did it feel like any kind of time pressure thing where you had to be on at the right time... Why not just... Do that? It was amazing.
Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with.
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
I've just started adding logs to notifico (ex: https://n.tkte.ch/c/1/2023-07-28), which is very barebones. Don't get much time to work on it, but I'm working on implementing search in a cost-effective manner. If the ~3000 IRC channels that use Notifico opt-in to logging they'll get it for free permanently, and I'll be offering nightly dumps to an SFTP server of your choice to make sure there's no lock-in.
You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku, Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC network discourage logging, and many communities are outright hostile to it.
Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed.
Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've already been making changes to make it more difficult to log or export your data.
Thanks for hosting a service to help host the logs in a public manner.
As far as logs hosting though, this only works for as long as you're willing to host though. It seems unlikely that Discord will disappear overnight -- or if this was a risk, I'd assume they'd be acquired with a large userbase.
I've written IRC and Discord bots and don't think Discord bots aren't much more difficult. One of the best strengths of writing a Discord bot is that if your bot goes down, you can query and fetch lost history fairly easily. This isn't doable in IRC unless you put a bouncer in front of your bot or the server is set up to feed clients with history.
I've already run it for more than a decade, it's not going anywhere :) The project is also open-source, and the daily SFTP log exports can be imported into another instance. I hate lock-in.
Ultimately, it uses an irrelevant % of resources on a dedicated box used for other projects, so it's not a financial or even operational burden. One of my favorite things about IRC is that if all you want to do is a JOIN a channel and PRIVMSG some people, the same code I wrote a decade ago works fine today. The project went almost 6 years without requiring a single code change from me, other than accepting 3rd party feature PRs.
I may have missed something last time I looked at it, but Discord was making it harder to react to all messages and wanted to force you to only use slash commands. The whole discord.py saga - https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028....
If you have permission, nobody has been suspended for using a dedicated discord bot (one where you must be an admin to invite to a server) to run this Discord Chat Exporter, at least based on the GitHub issues/discussions of that repo.
I don't think anyone believe otherwise. People still choose it because the feature set it provides addresses their needs and makes online chat, voice, and live streaming to friends a wonderful experience.
For 99.9% of users, they don't need to worry about Discord terminating their account or their friends' account. If Discord somehow fumbles this by randomly suspending peoples' accounts for no reason whatsoever, and on such a wide scale that everyone will know a friend affected by this, they'll quickly lose marketshare.
Perhaps if you directly contacted support and said "hey I am using a log bot come and get me" but in no other circumstance is a reasonable fear. They have no way to track what you do with on message events once they have been delivered.
IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return.
Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.
I worked for a company who interviewed someone who turned out to be a habitual scammer.
He somehow managed to know enough technical information to get past a phone screen, and in the in-person interview claimed to be the second coming of Christ. When he didn't get hired, he sued for religious discrimination.
Fortunately, all communications with and about him were entirely professional and didn't include a reference to his claim, so (iirc) the case was tossed in short order.
That being said, you don't need to do anything to get sued- you just need to have something worth suing for.
Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter....
As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.
People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.
If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.
Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.
If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.
The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work environment.
I don't think any Discord server I'm in expects people to pay particular attention to the history of the server--the affordances are for chatting, not working. They've done some pivoting to add work-responsive features, but it's a WoW guild chat room at its heart.
They added threads recently (within the last 2 years), so your server can emphasise using threads when appropriate, but the channels are much more focused on IRC-style message chat, not thread-based siloed conversations.
You're right, this is a solved problem. On the other hand, mobile access on IRC not being unpleasant isn't and won't be, though, so the search for something better for users will continue.
(To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-good. The search continues.)
Thank you for linking this--this is cool! I'm not in a place where I want to run software to solve the problem of chat, but this looks like a really good One Of Those for those so inclined, and I'm going to keep it in my back pocket for the future.
I am well aware it isn't "an app". I was using IRC in about 1997 and stopped in about 2017 because other options that were better suited to my needs, and had the people I wanted to talk to, arose.
The second part of your response isn't helping you move towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I have things that work for me already? Like, this is the Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X. You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you like when the thing I use already works?
Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something new in seeing https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it later!
I did "solve the problem". I use Slack and Discord to talk to the cohorts who used to be on IRC.
Your behavior in this thread is really strange. Discord's a fine tool. So is Slack. I have nothing to fix, and my posts in this thread have been explaining why for me they're fit for purpose when IRC isn't. Why would I "do something about" a situation that isn't a problem for me?
Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app? Just seems like a problem you can and should solve for yourself, but is otherwise wholly unrelated to the protocol.
One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.
You don't have to take responsibility for fixing something just because you criticized it.
Fixating on the term used is a tad disingenuous. I think most people reading hacker news understands that the IRC ecosystem is being referenced here - not the protocol itself. IRC has been around 30+ years and it still doesn't have any great clients.
If you wanted to build a featureful chat client IRC wouldn't even be a good choice because there is so many things missing from the spec.
Let's put it as simply as possible, because there's the genuine possibility that you don't understand, rather than are just being an acrimonious troll.
You wouldn't be Linux-on-the-desktopping as hard as you are if you didn't want people to use it. As such, if you, as an advocate of a thing, want other people to use it when the alternative is "continue using other things", then the least effective response is "fix it yourself".
I don't need to fix it. I have alternatives that already do what I want. If you want to hector people to use the thing you want them to do, then you had best come correct.
> Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app?
Because...I was expressing why it isn't fit for purpose?
> One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.
If HTTP was functionally unusable in the application model provided by mobile operating systems, you bet people would complain! But HTTP is stateless. IRC isn't. As such, HTTP is not inherently incompatible with a quality mobile experience. IRC is.
And that's not incumbent upon me to fix it--I have no stake. I'm happy with the tools I have. That's incumbent upon people who want other people to use it to fix: the necessity of making something people want to use in order to get them to use it. You get that this is really basic human-interaction stuff, yeah?
You either have a problem or you don’t; since you complained, you do have a problem, and it absolutely is on you to fix.
The “basic human interaction” you are failing to understand here is that you’re refusing to accept your role in fixing your own issues. Nobody is obligated to help you, and it’s frankly insulting to presume someone else ought to do anything about your problem for you.
The open source community doesn’t owe you shit. Your entitled attitude is toxic.
I have participated in open-source communities for over a decade now. It is likely--not guaranteed, but pretty likely--that I have written more open-source code, both for money and not, than you have. And I am befuddled how you are so toweringly angry about something you're interpreting so directly backwards.
I am not saying that IRC has to change to suit me. I never said that. I am saying that IRC is unfit for my purposes. You, as somebody who is advocating for its use, are taking the latter and inferring the former when it was never implied. I don't care if IRC changes, because I have options that better suit me--the net result if nothing changes is that I continue to not use IRC.
And I'm fine with that! I'm not over here bemoaning it. There is no value to me unlocked by pulling up stakes from Slack and Discord and going to IRC that is being kept from me because of bad mobile experiences on IRC. My initial post, which has apparently spun you off to the moon for some reason, was pointing out that it remains unfit for my purposes, and that's why I don't use it. Nothing, and I mean literally, nothing else.
But you're the one pushing the thing.
If you (or other IRC advocates) want me to use it (for whatever reason, network effects usually chief among them), then perhaps you have a problem to solve pursuant to LOE and other needs and all that. That's not my problem, because I have a solution. Usage of your pursuant-to-network-effects protocol of choice is...your...problem. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, you have product-market fit problems. And it's not other people's responsibility to make the thing you like fit them--they have other choices.
If you insist that don't care--well, to me that's also fine, but advocating for the use of something that is unfit-for-purpose and then having an extremely normal day of responses to mild feedback about why other people use alternatives instead is...I mean, if you want to talk about toxic, find a mirror. Your behavior in this thread is shameful.
None of this changes at all the objective fact that IRC is an open source protocol that you can either adopt in the form of writing a client that's to your satisfaction, or propose changes to the protocol sufficient to resolve your remaining issues with it.
Either you agree with this and recognize your complaints as moot, or you disagree with this and your complaints end up being recognized as incessant, entitled whining about a problem you want someone else to solve for you.
What's shameful is that you're more likely doing the latter than the former, and seem to think you're immune to this because you've worked on open source projects in the past. You're not.
I don't personally give a shit about if you use IRC or not, I just saw your comment and decided to point out the entitled attitude it seemed to present. I haven't used IRC in years.
Generally speaking, when somebody wants other people to adopt a practice, they make sure that practice is fit-for-purpose themselves rather than expecting the people to whom they advocate to stop using things that are fit for purpose, then adopt something unfit-for-purpose, and then fix it.
Your implication that lots of open source communities have historically not done that is absolutely true. But also it's why people don't want to talk to them much, too.
No, you said third party and meant Discord, falsely presuming Discord stores the content of your private conversations in an accessible way, and in this context in a way that makes it… harder? To publish as documentation (you know, the original topic).
And since you’ve apparently never joined an IRC channel before, you don’t get any history of the channel at all, you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there, and IRC servers don’t log every message to some file. If you knew how these servers worked you’d know how that wouldn’t work very well.
> falsely presuming Discord stores the content of your private conversations in an accessible way
What do you mean presuming? I can log in from anywhere and access them, and they're not encrypted with any key I'm the controller of.
> and in this context in a way that makes it… harder? To publish as documentation (you know, the original topic)
You can't add a bot to an existing direct chat. You can only make new group chats. So you can't export it with a bot. So bots can't solve everything.
> And since you’ve apparently never joined an IRC channel before, you don’t get any history of the channel at all, you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there, and IRC servers don’t log every message to some file.
Sure? But I didn't say you got history on IRC.
Being a bot is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting every message. The real requirement is staying connected constantly, which is a completely separate issue.
> If you knew how these servers worked you’d know how that wouldn’t work very well.
It's not 1993 anymore, it would work fine. It's a good chunk of the IRCv3 efforts.
Private conversations are completely irrelevant to this discussion, so not sure why you keep bringing them up.
And you did say IRC logged without bots, which it doesn't. You were wrong.
And a bot would stay connected to get every message, regardless of the year, and no a "good chunk" of IRCv3 efforts aren't around server logging, that's hilariously incorrect and just shows you're randomly saying shit to try and be right.
> Private conversations are completely irrelevant to this discussion, so not sure why you keep bringing them up.
You said "Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord." to someone that was talking about Discord being bad at logging in general, which to me would include private conversations.
> And you did say IRC logged without bots, which it doesn't. You were wrong.
I said you can log it without bots. Every standalone client I have ever used did it by default.
A client can stay connected all the time. A bot may or may not stay connected all the time. You should not conflate the two.
On Discord you need a special bot account to log without breaking the ToS. On IRC you not only don't need a bot account, you can just connect your normal client and be done.
> and no a "good chunk" of IRCv3 efforts aren't around server logging, that's hilariously incorrect and just shows you're randomly saying shit to try and be right.
Specifically I was saying that in response to "you only get the messages that are sent while you’re in there".
I'd call this a good chunk. Every time I've seen someone list the features of IRCv3, servers buffering messages to send channel history to clients is one of the features they mention.
The client is the “bot” , which you know and are intentionally being obtuse.
And your links aren’t in any way suggesting the server logs messages, please try again.
But none of this is relevant to the original point that you can 100% obtain equal or better outcomes using Discord in all cases for conversation persistence. Complaining about Discord as a replacement to IRC is ignorant and pointless.
The biggest problem with discord bots is that you need a completely different kind of account to have a bot, and even worse that account can't join servers normally. You're not allowed to run a logger on your own personal account.
Because of that, IRC gives better results in many scenarios. Discord is not equal or better in all cases. If I don't set up a special arrangement with the moderators or break the ToS, all my channel messages are vulnerable to being deleted forever on a moment's notice. And if I get locked out of my account I lose all past private messages.
Just because you don’t know how to write a Discord bot doesn’t mean it’s meaningfully difficult due to it requiring a different account type, in fact that makes it easier in many respects.
And in the case we’re discussing, you run the server and can freely allow whatever you want.
Discord is superior or equal to IRC in every meaningful way here.
> Just because you don’t know how to write a Discord bot doesn’t mean it’s meaningfully difficult due to it requiring a different account type, in fact that makes it easier in many respects.
The difficult part isn't writing it. It's getting in a situation to use it.
> And in the case we’re discussing, you run the server and can freely allow whatever you want.
You seem confused. The very first complaint in the big post you responded to with "Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about" was this:
"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever."
It's not just about servers you're running. It's also any channel/message you join.
Sorry but you've completely lost the plot here. We're talking about using Discord vs using IRC as a means of capturing company documentation, and in this task Discord is superior in every meaningful way.
You could use a bot to push everything to a persistent, searchable location, and as a corporation this would be braindead easy. Obviously you wouldn't want to push private convos, so your continued reference to them isn't relevant at all, and your concerns about how "hard" it would be to add a bot to the server to do this is moot considering you control the server in question.
Why would you be banned from the server? Why would you ban yourself? Why would Discord ban you? Why and how would Discord banning you remove your ability to write a bot that pushes your content out to a storage place you control?
You keep trying to find a way to be right, but you keep stumbling.
> Sorry but you've completely lost the plot here. We're talking about using Discord vs using IRC as a means of capturing company documentation, and in this task Discord is superior in every meaningful way.
No, I just double checked all the way back to the start of this thread, that's not right.
People made very general complaints, and you said bots solve all their problems. You also said that Discord matches or beats IRC in all situations.
I agree that discord bots will solve that particular problem.
General logging was in the specific list of problems. Servers you're not in control of were an explicit part of point number 1.
Bots can possibly solve the issue of "I need to get logs of arbitrary channels I'm in", but discord in particular makes it difficult in a way that IRC does not.
Discord is in some ways much worse than IRC for logging.
It's also better in some ways. But there are important differences in each direction.
Discord could largely solve this with a ToS change. But until that happens, it's a problem.
Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded.
It's also very bad at URLs.
And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.
Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months.
Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.
I don't know if you ever used IRC to get help on technical issues, but I've done that a lot, and going back to figure out what the solution was to a particularly thorny technical problem that someone told me about years ago has been something I've done multiple times.
If you have the logs as text files, then there's literally nothing you could be doing better. Want to index them? Turn them into a database? Use fuzzy search? Grepping? Everything is possible.
Therefore I don't understand your sarcasm. What's the alternative? If you find Discord's search feature good, you could implement it on top of the text logs.
Why would it take 30 minutes? Maybe in the worst case, but most of the time it would maybe take a couple minutes to find the right thing to search for. And grep is pretty fast.
And even if it _did_ take 30 minutes, that's _way_ better than blowing a day, week, or even more time rediscovering the information contained in the log.
This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are comfortable with that lack.
But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.
I worked in a global team. When I got booted off VPN I would have my irc connection drop and I would miss critical conversations. IRC sucks for collaboration.
I disagree that it's merely a UX deficiency, but I agree that it's not a protocol deficiency. Yes, indeed you could just use an IRC bouncer: the problem is that many users don't have easy access to such a bouncer. What IRC "needs" is a network of open bouncers that users can subscribe to.
"Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web"
Camfrog video chat has been around since the beginning '00s. You could put as many video feeds as you could fit on your screen, with 20-30FPS streams, and good sound quality. Granted, resolution was 352x288, but for seeing and talking, you don't really NEED much else.
Discord, meanwhile, can't keep a reliable WebRTC stream going.
I used Roger Wilco and Ventrilo until Mumble came out. I haven't given Discord a try because it's smothering, obsessive integration just rubs me the wrong way, like Teams.
Once every 5-10 years, I look through the logs I have that aren't on textfiles because the statute of limitations hasn't run out and relive a little of the history of how certain things came to be.
Those chats are an ethnography waiting to happen. You'll wish you had yours one day.
No, you definitely want the IRC log from when a vendor was helping you troubleshoot the frobnosticator with the wonky LED panel, because 10 years from now you'll still be using that same tired old frobnosticator and the LED panel is going to go wonky again.
Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.
I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats. The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but overall I would value the benefit of everything getting deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually search for something older than that.
"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever surfaced and your anonymity were compromised.
people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
Discord's logging is shitty because:
1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.
3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.
4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..
Discord's search is painful because:
1 - There's no regex search.
2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).
3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.
I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.
My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.
But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.