(they’re technically in beta but a bunch of popular discords use them)
Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples. Start there and we can have a proper discussion, otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-said'.
In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.
Which is exactly why the IRC clones (Slack, etc) have taken off
The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I can mute channels and categories I’m uninterested in, but how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor discoverability?
We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it’s worth.
Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.
Some people like this kind of constant distraction, though.
I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.
Discord is leaps and bounds above all of those, for very different reasons.
About IRC you're obviously wrong :)
Discord is the best thing I’ve found. My group and I love it.
I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too.
For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.
Most apps have no good open source alternatives.
There are dozens of products and countless open protocols to base new products on. We could even just use IRC again.
The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people on shitty internet connections.
The client is always responsive and snappy.
Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more information on screen.
Their dark mode is much better.
Their code display/highlighting is better.
The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much better than others.
It's way easier to find where notifications come from.
Auto-archived threads automatically unarchive themselves when you send a new message. Locked-threads, on the other hand, require explicit unlock.
Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or something, because having to make a fake new thread just to comment on an existing locked thread would make me rage quit
Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to everyone in your server.
Slack does app integrations and bots pretty well.
To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @developers and add only those seven, not bothering the other 3.
You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read #project but not post, while those that are neither @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same people in totally different groups and with different roles.
Way more customizable than by just having public/private channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.
And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.