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Comment by Dracophoenix | Hacker News Reader

> The secret is how did they get popular with young kids? Well they offered a free service obviously, just like Google, just like Facebook.

In 2015, when they first got started, they marketed towards gamers (i.e. boys and men in their teens and early 20's). Even though the company's tagline at the time was that it offered a better Skype, Discord was more inclined to be a better replacement for a moribund Xfire and an aging Teamspeak. Word of mouth marketing on Reddit didn't hurt either.

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They also have ties to Universities with their student hubs. This part is great if you're a student, as you can find clubs and people with similar interests. There is immense power in what an older sibling does, and soon the younger siblings are using it to chat with them. They can chat with their friends from any mobile device or a desktop without the dreaded green bubble or restrictions of SMS / iMessage. In groups, they can hide their identity.

It gives the server "owners" the ability to enforce rules, ban those who are disruptive, and has an impressive bot API. I can see why it is immensely popular.

Skype was also still popular among gamers when Discord was first available. That's what my friends and I switched to Discord from.

These days I refuse to use Discord for political reasons though.

What political reasons? I googled for discord political controversies but didn't find anything too shocking.

I don't like depending on a proprietary commercial product to facilitate my personal relationships. I don't like the fact that they can (and are likely to) ban / block me from talking to my friends for choosing to run a client other than their proprietary web browser wrapper on my computer. I don't like that it's a single point of failure (that often does) for something as easy to host as chat. These reasons probably fall under the "not too shocking" label, but they're important to me.

Curse was becoming more popular than TS at the time, but Discord offered a better quality of audio and stable connection. That's why my group of friends migrated to Discord around 2016.

TeamSpeak was usually the default option at the time (with some on Mumble). Skype had some presence, but was usually grumbled about beyond 1:1 calls. RaidCall was starting to gain some presence because it was free but otherwise followed TeamSpeak's UX, but was still pretty niche.

Curse Voice was absolutely nowhere to be seen.

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