From experience I can say Vent was (is?) pretty horrible. You had to run your own or pay for a server too, which was a huge deterrent to adoption. Skype is fine

From experience I can say Vent was (is?) pretty horrible. You had to run your own or pay for a server too, which was a huge deterrent to adoption. Skype is fine, but not focused around rooms / channels. Basically it was a ripe market with extremely bad products. I don't think Discord is anything amazing (seems fine for the most part), but they're clearly significantly better than what existed when they launched.