before Discord there was Teamspeak 3, Ventrilo and mIRC. Discord at the time brought file sharing, video calls and more polished UI at the time when all of it was not found on TS, but Skype and facebook messenger was around. Me and my friends used TS, but jumped to Discord because it was better almost in every way (apart from sound codecs). If TS devs had not been so oblivious and inovated fast enough, we would have stayed

My impression—I don't use it myself and my few experiences touching it have not impressed me—is that the major selling point is that it provided several different forms of communication that gamers wanted to use in a single package. Like, instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, chat, etc.

You could set up all of these individually, but this was free and all-in-one, is managed, and it didn't require much technical expertise to use. Any user with an account has access to all the components.

And it didn't cost anything to set up.

If I were going to set up, say, a VoIP server, I'd probably use, oh, Mumble. I'd get my own VPS for it, which would cost something. I'd only have VoIP at the end of that. If I wanted to use say, text-based communication or have some mechanism for sharing files, I'd have to go cobble something together from other components.

It annoys me that a lot of Actual Budget stuff is on their Discord. Thankfully they have documentation on github and their website.

It's way better than slack lol that's how, i mean slack is straight garbage so it's not saying much