The twitch people (the gaming community) are on discord.
I think people under the age of 50 don't use irc any more..
Not exactly true to that extend but i get where you are coming from and you have a point. I relation to gamers it's not that much dependent on age though i guess. A lot of them had already moved to voice based solutions way before Discord even existed. Actually that was the original target audience for Discord to get a foot in the door but by now pretty much everyone and their dogs use it.
works much better for my type of IM usage than e.g. WhatsApp.
No offense but is "better than Whatsapp" seriously some kind of archievement these days?
Even MY chat history is no more mine, but belongs to these bullocks.
I am sorry but how is this going to be much different in relation to Discord? It's not run by a charity or anything. It's a company that sooner or later will need to recoup it's investments and likely even more than that. Now the only valueable thing they have is peoples data... Hmm... i wonder where that's going to lead.
a technically perfect software thingy.
I'll have to agree here. The realization is pretty nice. Sadly that doesn't change the fact that it's a proprietary fly trap. Actually one that has and continues to destroy what little personality there was even left on the internet by centralizing, monopolizing and mass producing what used to be the realm of many independent communities. But don't let that hold you back. This trend didn't start just yesterday or only in relation to real time chat applications and it's unlikely to be stopped let alone reverted anyways.
I am not that amazed about the new channel because it ist not clear for me who is behind this.
Does it really matter that much? It's a click-click-go solution so it's just natural people are going to do just that. Check it out if you feel like it and if it doesn't suit you you can always leave.
With places like Discord it's not really realistic to expect anything radically different anyways. Sure the channel owners can switch some knobs but as soon as boundaries are stretched it will almost certainly always come down to what's in Discords best (business) interests and given that there are no alternatives (like how you could switch to a different provider when you disagreed with the administration of an IRC, XMPP or similar server) there is zero reason for them to make compromises and also nothing to turn to. It's always a take it or leave it thing where oneself has no leverage at all.