But these are all marketing wins. The underlying technology (let people post shit and talk to one another) had been stable for like a decade before they came along.
No, they are product development wins. Discord is far more popular than alternatives because they provide a far superior product that also has many normal features that their competition somehow fails on, like voice chat, video chat, steaming, images and videos in chat that don't disappear, spam protection and good moderator tools, etc.
It’s an incredibly buggy experience with a user interface that fails many basic design cues (like not hiding things until you mouse over, not making the friends list icon inexplicably identical to a server icon and also the add server icon, etc.)
It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.
