I feel like the IRC thing might be a product of how long it's been used - there are plenty of people I know from IRC that I still know today, but there are many

I feel like the IRC thing might be a product of how long it's been used - there are plenty of people I know from IRC that I still know today, but there are many many more that I "knew" but no longer do, and even more that appeared and disappeared. But that's over a time frame that is still longer than discord has really been around, or at least around in my life - so much so that I certainly would take the longevity of knowing people on discord as a measure of long term result. The other obvious factor is that discord is more popular for many more people, which means you get many more people coming and going. It's much like when starcraft2 P2P became free to play, there were vastly more players (at least initially) but I found it intolerable due to the huge increase in assholes - presumably account creation being free meant there were no longer any consequences for such - and just stopped playing. Maybe it's changed since, but I don't know as I have no desire to play anymore. :-/