For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.

Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.

That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.