People always mention "marketing" as a reason for Discord's success, and I always wonder what they mean. It's a poster child of adoption through word-of-mouth, I don't know if they've engaged seriously with advertising. I'm serious, you have absolutely no clue what the average user values and how your suggestions don't meet that while discord does. Discord may go the way of the dodo due to enshittification but the successor will be another option that actually adresses most users needs, not IRC (which I'm sure will still be around: gopher's still around, people are still tinkering with 9600 baud modems and the like, a tech like that will never completely die but it's also delusional to expect that it's not mainstream just because the alternative has better marketing)

You seem to have completely missed tester756's point: Discord became popular because it bundled good-enough versions of all of those features with no extra hassle. No one has to keep track of which client you're using in order to decide which features you can interact with, no one has to spin up a new server for voice chat or anything else—it's handled for you automatically.

You might be comfortable stringing together a bunch of plugins for IRC in order to get the same functionality, but the average Discord user never will be.

> Discord is popular because of network effects, virality, and marketing

I don't think you are even attempting to fairly represent Discord if this is what you actually believe

>An IRC client with some bells and & some plugins that expand web-linked media would offer most of Discord's feature set.

And yet, this hypothetical client does not exist. Discord does.