Well you don't need to know anyone to test it. There's a lot of public servers you can join. It's mostly used for text chat ala IRC but each server has multiple channels for text and voice. Mostly game related but you can find some for anime, programming, reddit, even an online radio server that streams music via bots. You can search some public ones here:
https://www.discordservers.com/ and
https://discord.me/servers/
- I don't know about the tray icon one. Could be OS related. WFM.
- Yeah that's to bypass admin restrictions or UAC stuff. Let's the program silently update. With the nature of the program being dependent on centralized servers. Being outdated would probably cause it not to work well. So doing it the google chrome way seems like a necessity.
- Yeah the program starts up via update.exe "Update.exe --processStart Discord.exe". If you run Discord.exe directly then it can't update at all.
Discord is more for larger scale videogame or large community chatting much like teamspeak/mumble/ventrilo/IRC. Stuff like skype/hangouts/viber/slack/whatsapp/tox might be more tailored for private, business, or mobile environments. From what I can see, the main advantage over other clients like teamspeak and mumble is that you can easily and instantly create a chat server for free.
If you don't play online multiplayer videogames or do any online hobbyist stuff then it might be useless to you. Though I can see some neat uses for it. Like create your own server then at that point forward you can connect to it from anywhere that has a web browser.
Also smaragdus, I noticed you're having issues with some other programs your testing. There might be some other unrelated things that is not working with your configuration.