In my estimation, that’s memetics and signaling to an in-group about who they want their audience to think their audience is.

That’s why I did it. Oh, and it’s nice to be able to chat with potential users. By why not Slack or Teams?

Not dismissing your first argument but we had good success hiring talent through Discord servers. If you want to reach the same audience that attends hackathons and such it's in my experience the best platform.

Do you mean Discord is a kind of community for young hackers? I’m curious about Discord because I’ve been asked about a chat app for teenagers who don’t have mobile phones.

Well, Discord is from a gaming lineage. Definitely lots of script kiddies and pros alike hang out in various servers. It’s sort of like the forums of yesteryear, but more walled-garden, for better or worse.

Probably goes without saying here, but gaming tends to be an on-ramp for getting young people into computers/tech/programming. I started reversing, hacking, and writing bots for old MMOs to try to avoid the grind. I ended up enjoying writing naughty code more than playing the games themselves.

You don’t need a phone to use Discord AFAIK, but in my elderly imagination every teen is already on Discord.

Yeah, I agree with that assessment too.

They've used discord for a while for things like GSoC but in general it's becoming more widespread seeing that even Copilot has a Microsoft owned discord server, Valdi from Snapchat as well.