This comment is spot-on. Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at b

This comment is spot-on. Discord hasn't been 10x better than competitors - before Discord, there were numerous competitors offering large group voice chat at better-than-Discord quality (not talking about Skype here, but Teamspeak and Ventrilo) and with better-than-Discord administrative control over groups (especially Teamspeak had this nailed, with very extensive rights management that's even suitable to the largest and best-organized gaming guilds). What Discord nailed is ease-of-setup, especially of the server part: by offering free hosting that imitated the "one server = one guild" structure well-known to gamers while actually implementing a much-cheaper hosting structure serving thousands of users from one physical server they eliminated one of the typical pain points with existing solutions, which all depended on either having one technically-savvy gamer hosting the server on his own hardware (mostly virtual private servers were used here), or someone paying for hosted versions. This structure provided an opening for Discord: since gamer clans and guilds come and go in quick succession, each time this happens, the continued use of "classic" voice chat solutions like Teamspeak etc. depended on whether "the guy with the server" would continue hosting the voice server for the new guild. Often enough, the new guild simply wasn't lucky enough to have that guy, so they look out for solutions, and Discord offered them one: a free "server" providing a good-enough group voice chat solution. With regard to monetization one could even argue that Discord failed a lot in that department. The attempt to sell games was largely unsuccessful, and besides the Nitro program they didn't really find anything that works. And even the Nitro program had to be made into an actual "premium" program in order to lead to significant-enough adoption, offering better quality on core features of the service instead of purely cosmetic status-boosting, which is AFAIK not what they originally intended to do with the program.