i disagree, as a very early adopter of discord. early discord was rough around the edges, but it was still 10x better than any competitor because of how atrociously bad teamspeak/mumble/skype/ventrilo were. using skype was one of the worst communication experiences i have had on a computer - the fact that discord voice connections were semi-stable, not a complete hassle to set up, and had individual servers as well as DMs already made it better than any of its competiotors.
I think you're both right at the same time. Discord didn't need to be perfect to gain momentum, but it needed to be better. In a way, not only was Discord better; it also added a new use case.
I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups.
I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.
