From what I have seen, it is Discord's closed nature, their decision not to police their own communities very much, combined with the fact that it's a great product.
edit after 1 upvote: I should add that I believe that Discord has an immense amount of moderation-debt.
Due to its closed nature, there aren't external eyeballs on the communities so things can really fester. At some point, that can boil-over into IRL, like they appear to have just done in Turkey.
I don't want Discord "policing" my community, nor do I want "external eyeballs" on it. In any case, this is not specific to Discord at all, which was my original question.
Policing was the wrong term to use, I was too late to edit it.
What I meant was moderation. And they do moderate, whether you like it or not. CSAM, conspiracy to murder, and terrorism are beyond the pale for nearly everybody. All of those things require moderation if a company wants to stay in business.
Well, that sounds… good? They don’t meddle in the communities unless child abuse and other straight up no-doubt illegal content is involved, in which case they do.
Feels like a less centralized reddit, which sounds like something for which there definitely exists a decently large market.
