I feel like it very much was better at the beginning, though?

Discord kinda came around as an alternative for IRC and Teamspeak all rolled into one, where people could get the rooms and servers style of IRC with voice and chat all rolled into one, with the convenience of persistent messages and self-administration. Not much else was doing that at the time.

So we’ve ended up with Slack being IRC for business, Matrix being IRC for nerds, and Discord being IRC for gamers and everyone else.