Comment by est31

> It's about linking your account to a real person identity, so they can sell that to someone - either live, or later when they get bought out

Yeah, this can't be emphasized enough. Phone numbers are established as universal identifiers. Discord is sitting on a giant heap of personal information including DMs from millions of young people. It is all centralized, both in terms of data, and in terms of accounts (instead of them having to correlate an account between multiple forums, most of which volunteer run and they don't turn over non-public data for money), and also associated with phone numbers. Making multiple accounts for different areas of life is made hard. Beautiful for whoever has access to the data.