My point was not that meeting people is at all related to alcohol(ism). My point was that both social media and alcohol can be used responsibly in beneficial ways.

Are you being sarcastic (serious question). Alcohol itself is chemically addictive and there are likely orders or magnitudes more people in the alcohol industry trying to make their alcoholic beverages more attractive (and thus spreading addictive substances further into the population) to consumers. It's an industry that easily tops over 1,000 Billion dollars globally.

I know what you're saying, but there's plenty of marketing behind alcohol, and it's already addictive to the point that withdrawal can literally kill you.

And Discord really don't much power over their userbase unlike Facebook (have massive networking effect) and Twitter (have popular personalities). If Discord ever going to mess with things like censorship or forcing people into paid plans users could migrate really fast.

* Gamers are either tech-savvy or always have friends who are.

* Gamers stick to their small communities and leaders. If you superstar and announce that you're leaving Facebook nobody will follow, but gamers always follow their group / clan / whatever leaders.

* Also there is at least few companies like Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games who hold huge part of the market and have extremely loyal customers. They could certainly manage to set competition for Discord if there will be opening.

The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necessary for these kinds of services. I would even go so far as to say that corporate entities using Twitter to provide their users a service (outage reports) they should pay for the privilege or be forced to set up their own notification networks.

A common observation, yet how have things really changed? When I was riding subways, buses, and commuter trains back in the 80s-90s, everyone had their faces in books or magazines the entire ride, and there was zero interaction with their fellow riders. Maybe in some non-East Coast region, people do/did interact more; I wouldn't know.

I would further observe that in a way, people have more of a shared experience today because of social media & internet in general.

We're still social creatures, just in a different way today. Admittedly, it's different from the days of yore, when people would hang out at the general store (or bar) and chat with the general community of people who passed through. But those days ended long before the Internet came along.