

It wasn’t. It just copied slack when it was becoming popular in the dev work world with a marketing blitz. It coincided with team speak sudden death. Slack did most of the marketing and discord bandwagoned on it as the fun slack for video games. Which in essence was just “what if IRC but with voice chat rooms.”
Video game support wasn’t part of Discord intent until people started using it for it. Then they hacked the UX nightmare that is their solution for something the app was never meant to do.
Story wise, they retell some things and tell a brand new story from the books for the most part. But still very closely follow the book’s characters, relationships and settings.
The show feels like it isn’t even on the same universe. And the characters are aliens cosplaying as the book characters but who never actually read the source material and don’t understand what the story is about.