It's a winning model.

Who would have thought that paying for something is correlated with positive expectation of outcome?

Someone should formalise this business model.

I'm just spitballing, but I might call it: Doing business.

I'm not sure what's going on with internet ads.

I've blocked them everywhere I can.

It's a failure out of the box for me, as it silo's information and once a server is gone so is that info.

The gatekeepers on some of the more popular gaming servers (where they know they are more necessary than usual) are reddit levels.

People focusing on the winning model are missing that none of the platforms fill identical social roles imo even if they copy features from eachother and that digitally immersed users seem to prefer it this way. I strongly doubt that TikTok would have been improved with the full feature set of Facebook even if it might benefit from integrative features for example. Discord in a similar fashion is where I go for real-ish time talk with friends or gamemates. Both of these are very different than Instagram which has largely become what my wall once was on Facebook but not to be confused for Facebook itself where I go to talk with people who aren't very cyber savvy and by extension join Groups targeted at non-cyber savvy demographics (like my HoA's group)

Discord is completely useless for socializing with anyone who isn't in the IT industry. My mom, for instance, is NOT going to use Discord, but I can get her to use Facebook Messenger.

Not just older folks, young people who don't game regularly don't bother to check it either. The UI makes it quite hard to find people on there, nobody uses real names, profile pictures are random game/anime characters...

I have 50% success. Mom is on discord in our family channel, but dad isn't.

A few things that make Discord unfeasible for general purpose messaging...

The need to host a server somewhere. It silos info, makes that info less permanent and less findable. I've gone to all iDevices at home, so can't self-host.

It also doesn't have great visibility outside the tech worker and gaming worlds. I'm happy to use it if somebody sends me a link, but it's not the default for most people I know (except for those that game). Slack is a bit more common, mostly because of broad adoption at workplaces.