[tyrfing]

I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way.

2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction.

Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people."

I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord.

Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.

[OrvalWintermute]

Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.

[elliekelly]

Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.