Yeah, but the fee to join Gina was like 0.001 hive at almost no cost. It was the only option. The new cats on hive had the opportunity to join Friday or Gina and we only had the option of Gina back then, but Gina was amazing, a lot of the settings option was good.
As for discord, a lot happened back in the day, it's true that it's still a great hub, but it wasn't even as potent as we had back then. Steemit had this message option, but Discord was just better.