[Happily2020]

Exactly this. It is all about how they market themselves. If they had promoted themselves as a social media-ish platform, nobody would be causing a fuss about their encryption.

Neither discord, nor any of the popular IRC clients (HexChat, WeeChat, mIRC) even mention the word security or privacy to promote their products.

Moreover, as Mathew Green mentioned in his blog post, there are many instances where Telegram (or Pavel Durov) has gone out of his way to attack the encryption offered by Signal and WhatsApp. If he were pitting his messenger against discord, why would he be worried about Signal or WhatsApp?