It used to be significantly better on every single axis. Now it's primarily the best of a lot of bad options, and pretty much everyone is still using it.
Not excited to use it, or happy to use it, but -still using it-.
It works fairly well as a group chat system that's less intrusive than signal ( I like signal but it's more of a point to point, discord lets you trivially do tons of segregated channels).
Primarily they just won the lowest barrier to get people to install it.
@aphyr What people like: they already have it (mostly from when it was less bad), voice chat works and is relatively pleasant to use, infinite scrollback
when it was aiming to replace roger wilco and teamspeak I think it was a clever and well-designed product, but then they won that fight and still had to Grow.
@aphyr custom emoji and gifs, I can mute all the servers I don’t care about and pretend they don’t exist except when I need to be there, I like the reply feature as well as threads being different (vs slack for example), infinite scroll back as someone else mentioned, voice chat built in…
But I only like it for friend group chats with channels for different topics (usually different games). I do not like big servers or “documentation” servers. Those suck ass and it’s Too Much.
It's really horrible and I don't understand why people like it and want to base their communities around it.. I can barely tolerate it.