There's complexity and then there's complexity. Your end user experience as a Discord user may be simpler on its face, but it's reliant on a lot of obfuscated complexity under the hood. You wouldn't be able to, say, send Discord messages using telnet, the way you can with IRC. Discord's simplicity in setting up an account, joining servers, having scrollback, etc comes at the cost of other types of simplicity.
People in this thread are talking past each other without realizing that they are expressing different preferences about where complexity belongs in a tool.
(For the record, I happen to be on the IRC / git mailing list side of the spectrum.)
Again, friction and velocity of what? It's a lot easier for me to write an IRC bot than a Discord bot. But other things are much harder to do with IRC. People are looking at different vectors.
That's surely hyperbole. You can just say "This is unnecessary" and it achieves the same purpose. Maximalist comments like this tend to amplify the tension in these sorts of discussions.
Clicking a link to open a chatroom directly, with no account creation process, is infinitely simpler than account creation, potentially with several layers of verification (CAPTCHA, email, phone verification to join a server...).
You mean cloning a repo and then simply pushing upstream?
I can’t fathom how anyone would think that is more complicated than e-mail push workflows.
It’s like someone telling you that IRC is “obviously” less complicated than setting up a Discord account.