Oh that is so true!! Love it.

I hope you don't mind me linking https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1782:_Team_Chat

Mostly I think its fine for all that.

But there's a special circle of hell for projects that rely on it for "documentation".

I get the temptation, I really do. But once you're taking money or have more than a couple people involved and semi-organized you really need at least a small wiki/git-hub landing page with the basics.

I know documentation is a separate skillset and a lot of work in its own right but projects can also stagnate and die because there isn't any.

CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large trout

Sure, but when everybody's Discord content vanishes behind a paywall, or makes you watch a 2 minute advert to see a Wiki, what are you going to do?

Already I can't just browse the content on a Discord community without "joining" and all that bollocks.

Like I'm sure Discord is better than IRC, but it's not better than a collection of open standards so anyone can run a server.

Either too many people spamming so you can’t follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.

How is this different to Discord? You have huge, medium and small channels in both.

Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient

Your personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc

/me slaps Vlym about with a large trout.

This is genuinely the only problem why we switched to Signal for work communication. My colleagues wanted us developers to use Slack and other proprietary stuff but IRC was enough. Only issue was that you couldn't get push notifications on mobile.

everything is completely boring text, no images

You literally just listed some of the reasons IRC is better. That said, I don't see any reason an IRC client couldn't be made to support images, with the understanding that it would have to be done in a way that falls back to posting it as a link for people using text-only clients, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

can't message people when they're offline,

This functionality can be enabled on IRC servers or on a per-channel basis using bots.

it's not clear how I can easily setup my own server.

Again an advantage of IRC. Not every group of 2 people need their own server. And a simple 2 second Google search (or learning your IRC client) will show you how to create your own channel in seconds.

the discoverability with any IRC client tends to be in the negatives.

That really depends on the client. There are (or at least used to be) plenty of user-friendly IRC clients. How many alternate clients can I use with Discord?

And heaven forbid someone should have to think for more than 3 seconds when learning something new to them.

I swear I sometimes think that once all of us Gen-Xers are gone, there won't be anyone left who actually understands how the Internet or the technology that runs on it actually works, as prophesied by Idiocracy.

boring text, no images

Inb4 using an image to compliment no images

ICQ ... when you haven't logged in for a bit and then when you do your computer emits a fast-paced streak of uh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-ohuh-oh

Not centralised for a start. Think of it like 'federated Discord'.

I find it difficult to get started. I have the client and everything but had trouble finding communities on irc.

Which communities do you find are worthwhile? Like others have mentioned everything I've pursued has definitely felt like a ghost town.