The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.

It was an impressively fast decline too.

So fast that many people think they never actually intended to have it survive. They simply didn’t want to compete in the future, so they bought it before it was too big to compete with. But they had to reframe the massive purchase to shareholders as a potential profit-making venture, so they publicly stated that they were doing it to move into merch sales. And then they just nosedived it as soon as the purchase was complete, so they could shrug their shoulders and go “oops, well we tried!”

GameStop likely could have pivoted into something akin to the Steam storefront, or fully jumped into merch/apparel sales and become something like BoxLunch for licensed video game stuff. But instead, they clung to physical games for far too long, while only dipping their toes into merch sales. And now it’s likely too late for them to fully shift into merch sales, because competitors have already had a full decade to establish themselves.