They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
But at the same time, Discord is also built with Ventrilo-like features, which I think helped them gain foothold among many gamers. Lots of people are on voice chat in Discord while playing games together, just like people used to use Ventrilo. And Discord is more like IRC than like Reddit, except unlike IRC it has native rich text and media embeds. But what I mean by how it’s more like IRC is that it’s rooms with text conversations happening in a timeline, instead of mainly threads with comments. Reddit sorts comments by votes by default.
Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits.
And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
> And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts.
"More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example.
If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you.
If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen.
I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
