The Discord server for Midjourney is said to be one its biggest use point, the source of its largest audience, and one of its biggest sales funnels. Even as other image models have grown more powerful/capable, Discord has been suggested (or blamed, depending on perspective) for keeping Midjourney one of the most popular ones.

I would not be surprised if some PM at Microsoft heard about that and made it a box to check without understanding why the Midjourney Discord became so popular/remains so popular (I've heard it is basically a "Gen Z meme farm" and full of nonsense even "worse" than the term "Microslop"; so far I've managed to avoid that Discord and have only heard second-hand tales).

There are communities who gobble up anything Microsoft produces. People in the Microsoft MVP program are usually in this camp - if you want to find examples. Me and my coder friends were part of the fandom, but with just me and my biased N=10 sample set; this fanbase is evaporating quickly (but I still know some hardcore "azure thumpers").

I'd imagine that there's some discussion about how to make the most out of the tool as well as discussion of experiments and capabilities. I'm not even sure what exactly "Microsoft Copilot" entails anymore because of the multiple rebrands, but having a place where you can discuss exploring plugins and other adjacent features seems useful.

Not quite the same, but recently I was recently looking around for communities centered around Claude Code for discussion about people's workflows as well as discussion about what plugins people are using and if they notice it making a significant difference.

Since the technology is still evolving, having an active community can help you discover new patterns and explore the space more effectively.

They saw other successful AI products with discords (like midjourney) and then they probably just copied the idea thinking they would get similar success from it.

That's a lot of what big corp america strategy boils down to -- copy your competitors.

Don't get me wrong, creating a passionate community around a product is a great strategy for many reasons, but microsoft never had passionate users in the first place.

And it is telling that they are banning humor and criticism form their community, it shows they do not want have any criticism for their product, which is one of the benefits of community (fast and honest feedback loops). Its sort of like north korea where saying anything bad about the "great leader" or else. That's not a fun community, that is a community people want to leave but can't bc they will get shot at the border.

The same as every other Discord server: Giving a few people the feeling of power over dozens of channels with memes and unsearchable low-quality "discussions".

An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.

I have been in similar groups, and trust me, there are a lot of very enthusiastic users sharing their tools, success stories etc.

I stopped paying attention after a while as they get repetitive.

How do you do, fellow kids?

I have Copilot through work.

I haven't used the Discord, but having a place to ask for help using it doesn't seem farfetched.

It's for this audience: https://www.theregister.com/2009/09/14/verity_stob_abigails_...

(Microsoft _actually_ encouraged 'fans' to have Windows 7 Launch Parties...)

It needs a Discord Server because MS Teams is just that good X_X

It reminds me of the US army and their fabulous idea to open a Twitch channel. Went as well as you expect.

Someone wanted to get paid to be a Discord mod.

It’s just another checkbox in someone’s performance review, no need to think too hard about it.

Maybe all the users are OpenClaw instances?

For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.