The combo of ease of use and rich feature set makes services like Discord hard to resist for users and hard to compete with for FOSS software/services which prefer to take more focused, more technologically-inclined approaches.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.
It’s a major factor in what made Reddit big, too. Spinning up a subreddit is effortless and takes practically no knowledge and similarly easy for users.
IRC doesn’t seem terribly complicated to me, but I came of age when using computers seriously required a higher level of knowledge. I don’t find it restrictive either, but when I started communicating with others online, being able to send “just” plain text was amazing. Things have changed since then… the communication styles popular with young people haven’t been strictly text in many years and the overarching expectation is to be able to start using services in seconds after discovering them with as few clicks and as little research as possible.