Disclaimer: I'm not saying you can't/shouldn't use Discord for things that are actually convenient/useful to you. That isn't what I'm going for.
I've been getting increasing weird pressure to "JOIN THE DISCORD" in so many places in ways that are just an increase of background noise that I will never be able to keep up with but the norm seems to be to continue cranking up that background noise.
In a recent undisclosed PVP game that I otherwise enjoy, someone was spawncamping and griefing me (used to that, it happens in that game) and even that griefer kept messaging me to "JOIN THE DISCORD" with a link. Why would I want to join the Discord of someone that is actively griefing me?
Even weirder, I asked that griefer that question, and they seem genuinely baffled about why that would stop me from "JOINING THE DISCORD."
I already make sure Discord is off by default and only turn it on when I'm actually using it to communicate with people for something like my tabletop games. Even then it's kind of annoying background noise and I don't like how intrusive and data-miney it gets.
Yeah I'm old and that makes my take on Discord solicitations invalid. Guilty as charged.
It seems like Discord is catered a lot to making internet friends, which is fine but something I have zero interest in. If that's all it was used for I couldn't care less, but I hate that niche communities are increasingly putting information that used to exist on public, easily archivable forums behind the veil of Discord where the signal-to-noise ratio is awful because of the aforementioned internet friend stuff. I get that it's useful for real-time collaboration, but there's no need for it to have subsumed the slower-pace activities.