When you get down to it none of that matters. The people driving uptake, the actual users, have their lives made easier by the Discord set up.
I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.
Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.
You're mostly right but you're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is search. Not even public search engine crawlers, but search within a Discord server by the server users. On a busy server, it's nearly impossible to find anything after the fact, especially so in a topical server where the majority of threads are talking about largely the same subject matter.
The thing is, for many communities public search is an anti-feature. This is obviously true if the community is private, but most public communities are centered around something that's monetizable. The incentives to create promotional content in established communities where there's search is much higher.
Volunteer mods then have to deal with people who's entire job is monetizing their community and eventually give up - causing the community to rot.
Search just isn't worth it for anyone actually making the content.
zoomer here. that's the thing - I use Discord because when chatting casually, shitposting, and sharing memes I don't want my message to show up on Google tomorrow
I think that’s what’s missed here. People take the path of least resistance towards info or participation. It’s not surprising that Discord became the go to in comparison.
Two of your points require users to make new accounts for each service. That’s an active detriment to usability. A major one. The alternative is clicking a link and you’re in with your identity already set up in an app with a nice looking UI with all the features people know. Unless that ease of use is available an alternative just is not going to compete.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons type situation where people trade away genuine long term benefits like discoverability and archiving capabilities because that doesn’t factor into the day to day experience which is what drives actual uptake.