I was in the military. Chat apps made it easy to keep up with friends and family even when we weren’t all in the same country. (Poor international communications is definitely a downside of standard phone services). But all of us all are back stateside now and it’s mostly been a gradual slide towards texting for my social group.
I abandoned WhatsApp for Discord after meta got its greedy hooks into it. Do they think people won’t just make a new account elsewhere and move on? Millennials have done it every two years ever since MySpace imploded after Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch bought it. We have been conditioned to let our accounts go.
(Also text messaging, group chats, phone calls, and video calls are things that come standard on smartphones without need of an app. Texting stupid memes to everyone I know has never been easier. Maybe it’s my age, but everyone I regularly talk to on discord is also in my phone. Oh noes, I’ll have to “text” instead of “chat.” The horror.)
When we all switched in 2016-ish whatsapp and discord were pretty like-for-like for what my social group needed (and I agree, old discord had a much better UI). At the time Discord also had the added benefit of being easy to cross-platform with pc, which made online voice chat easier. (Vent had always been persnickety, and skype went from being great to trash almost overnight.) I don’t/didn’t have a problem with lag/bugs on discord but I tend to stay in smaller social circles, and actively avoid the unholy number of giant af chat groups that discord has spawned. Likely I simply benefit from not using all the app’s “features.” Doesn’t surprise me tho that with all the nonsense they keep shoveling in that people are experiencing slow downs and other problems. Textbook enshittification. Even if this latest debacle doesn’t do discord in, it’s only a matter of time.