Yeah, I think right now Discord has the advantage of inertia (not meant in a bad way -- people are already there, so more people will go there), it's fairly easy to use (if BADLY designed), stable, and free. I think it might take up a lot of the "whisperground" or whatever it's called informal conversations that took place on Tumblr in tags, PMs, and twitter DMs. I know there are fanartists already there, but not what their policies on adult content might be. It's not a good place to share fic or meta, but it could be a link hub. It's sort of a hybrid between realtime chat and message boards -- what intrigues me are the pinned posts, because apparently you can have a lot of them, and some channels use them for intros so you can scroll through months' worth and find people more easily. BUT, it's also walled in the sense that you need invites, and there's that IRC feeling that the person talking momentarily has the spotlight. You can't have a lot of different conversations going on in the same channel the way you do in comments to a DW post or on an actual messageboard, or even somewhere like reddit. And maybe it's just that I haven't seen a lot of fanart Discords, or that I know, like, Yuletide and two others, but there also seems to be an emphasis on using it for writing fic -- brainstorming, headcanons, writing sessions, speedwriting, &c &c.
tl;dr it's already filling a lot of needs but I think most people are right, the Next Big Hot New Platform is going to be something new. But it also has to be established enough for people to go there -- like melannen points out, LJ's demise didn't cause Tumblr's rise, but Tumblr definitely did pick up after people started leaving LJ. I think theres a typical pattern where early adapters leave, well, early, and start staking out space and using pre-existing platforms and testing them out; then there's a gradual buildup; then as more people get unhappy with the existing big platform, or kicked out even, there's a bigger and bigger exodus. I would ordinarily think we're not anywhere near the exodus yet. BUT, Tumblr is a ghost town right now, and people are pissed and upset, and that Dec 17th timeline is ticking away like a bomb.
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tl;dr it's already filling a lot of needs but I think most people are right, the Next Big Hot New Platform is going to be something new. But it also has to be established enough for people to go there -- like melannen points out, LJ's demise didn't cause Tumblr's rise, but Tumblr definitely did pick up after people started leaving LJ. I think theres a typical pattern where early adapters leave, well, early, and start staking out space and using pre-existing platforms and testing them out; then there's a gradual buildup; then as more people get unhappy with the existing big platform, or kicked out even, there's a bigger and bigger exodus. I would ordinarily think we're not anywhere near the exodus yet. BUT, Tumblr is a ghost town right now, and people are pissed and upset, and that Dec 17th timeline is ticking away like a bomb.
....LOL the tl;dr was tl;dr, whoops