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I don't see the similarity you draw between IRC and Discord, other than the fact they both have text chat. If you think nobody was really in control of IRC then you must have missed out on some of the structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_operator#Operator_types

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IRC is federated. Most of the ops were volunteers. They were technically in control of the network until troblemakers launched DoS attacks and caused a split in order to take over channels. Discord has a very similar interface to most IRC clients.

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