[unethical_ban]

I won't argue that it can be used that way, and for "only" text, yeah, there are open alternatives that achieve most of what Discord can do.

My point is that it is reductive to say "Discord is just IRC with some addons" when those addons are critical to its success. If Mumble had video-conference and screen sharing, it'd be pretty easy to convince my friends to use Mumble. Other than the network effect of Discord being the entry point to multiple servers/friend groups, and Discord makes spinning up your own server trivial.

So again, it does more than "just" improve on text chat.