IRC had networks and channels like that as well. A good rule of thumb is: the bigger the social group, the stricter the rules. My worry about Discord is the sa

IRC had networks and channels like that as well. A good rule of thumb is: the bigger the social group, the stricter the rules. My worry about Discord is the same worry as Android (though I am early adopter of both): its free as in beer, but we pay with our privacy. Sure, Ventrilo sucked as well given it was very strict and you could not run it on your own server plus high latency but low memory footprint. But we also had things like TeamSpeak and Mumble. These were alright, except it wasn't standardized, so you might need a different client per community. Its the standardization which abstracts the user experience, akin to people going to a site via Google or where the internet is Facebook.