If you have any hope of replacing Discord, you need to actually understand Discord. Among many other things, people use Discord because it has persistent history, integrated images and videos, video and audio calls, and screen sharing.

If you can't think of good reasons for why someone might use discord over IRC, you probably haven't thought about this enough.

IRC sucks tho. It doesnt have half the features that make discord enjoyable.

it’s not that simple. many (if not most) people would rather be where everyone already is, even if there’s less privacy