The Discord Situation

In light of the recent news about Discord's introduction of the teen-by-default experience on their platform, I feel like I need to get this off my chest somewhere.

Did I create this blog only to vent about what used to be my favorite communication hub? Maybe.

Do I keep using this blog for other things that mildy annoy me about the push towards a progressively more deanonymized internet? Maybe.

What happened?

A few days ago, Discord announced that they would introduce new Teen-by-Default settings globally, starting March. This experience, in a nutshell, limits the access of users of an unknown age group to all-ages servers and channels and restricts their capabilities to send direct messages to strangers. According to Discord's blog post, this restriction can be lifted by "[choosing] to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to [Discord's] vendor partners".

While this sounds like a good thing on the surface, the implications regarding online anonymity and data ownership are grim, to word that optimistically. After Discord started a regional age verification experiment for users in UK and Australia, it did not take long for a hacker group to obtain 70,000 users' ID photos (which Discord ensured to us were deleted immediately after the verification was over).

The damage has been done, but that does not seem to phase Discord in the slightest, as they are progressing with their plans to enroll ID verification. They have tried to back-pedal with their wording and added some additional context on a post on X, now stating that not everyone needs to complete the above procedures, as "for the majority of adult users, [Discord] will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have".

And this information is not new. Allegedly, Discord has been tracking user behavior for years at this point, while estimating potentially delicate parameters about them, such as age range, gender, sexual orientation and more.

To retrieve additional info about users of unknown age, they have launched an experiment and partnered up with Persona, a company receiving generous funds by Peter Thiel, co-founder of the highly controversial data analyst software Palantir.

As to why they collect all of this user data, anyone can make a guess. It's certainly not to improve services for you, the user. As Discord currently prepares an IPO filing, they will need to show themselves as a trustworthy, valuable company. They are currently estimated to be worth over $15.6bn, and that's only the data they have on you right now.

On a personal note, I fail to see how Discord can even suggest that their business model is unsustainable, as they have launched various monetization options for users over the years, with Nitro being their primary source of income, followed by server boosts, Quests and Orbs (which are esentially gamified advertisements), their cosmetics shop and, in some regions, server donations.

I am inclined to believe that Discord does not care in the slightest about the experience of their users anymore, but rather about their perception of shareholders. They are betting on most users to just not give a damn about all of their data being collected, because, let's be real for a bit, most of the general public still doesn't. In an age where people have become complacent with Smart TVs observing everything that's ever happening on screen, Windows Recall secretly sending screenshots of your usage to Microsoft servers, and home camera owners being spied on by the government (which has been ADVERTISED IN THE SUPER BOWL), what harm does it do if yet another company knows who I am?

So, what can we do?

The honest answer is getting out of the comfort zone and leaving Discord. If you have Nitro, cancel it. If you have server boosts, cancel them.

I cannot overstate how simple it is to be conscious about your own data, espacially regarding messengers. The real issue of every messenging service that is not WhatsApp, iMessage or, in our case, Discord, is that nobody you know uses them, too.

I could advertise Matrix as the end-all-be-all solution here, but I realize that this messaging protocol is too much of a hassle for normal people to use, with encryption breaking, clients being wonky and just outright being a hassle to set up if you want to use your own federated server.

However, there are still a few valid contenders that make you feel right at home, which I'll briefly showcase.

Stoat (formerly Revolt)

Being in the game since 2021, Stoat is a long-running alternative to Discord. Its Open-Source nature and its beautiful desktop client make them a compelling choice for Discord communities to just switch over. You can even self-host your own instance, too! It's worth mentioning that development is a bit on the slower side and many things are not yet implemented, like screen-sharing, so new communities will have to be patient while Stoat is working on the finer details.

Fluxer

I am sorry for this comparison, but Fluxer is literally open-source Discord. While Fluxer has only launched fairly recently, I am personally impressed by how mature the service already feels. If you are used to the administration of community servers in Discord, you will feel right at home with Fluxer. While you can also self-host your own instance of Fluxer too (with federation currently on the way), on the official server, you will experience nearly the same restrictions that you have with Discord in regards to message size, file upload size and screen-sharing quality. You can subscribe to their Plutonium tier for $4.99/mo to access everything this app has to offer, which matches the price of Discord Nitro in their good old days.

TeamSpeak 6

Yes, I'm being serious here. TeamSpeak 6, while also on the slower side of development and not being as accessible for free users as you basically have to rent a server to host this, is still surprisingly versatile in how they handle voice calls in larger quantities. If your focus is mainly to use a voice chat, maybe consider TeamSpeak 6.

Conclusion

I am sick and tired of the enshittification of basically every service to ever have been good and companies need to realise that their initial success and reputation is deeply tied to their userbase. While billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaires) are still playing the highscore game with their assets, everyday people are being priced out of everything eventually. Privacy is not supposed to be considered a secondary currency, you're not supposed to pay with your data. And I hate how normalized this approach has become in pretty much every facette of everyday life, too.

However, we need to act, if we pretend to care. Whining on the internet (which is what I've been doing for half of this article) is not going to stop multibillion dollar companies to continue to track our asses. We honestly should ask ourselves, once again, if making ourselves as transparent as a cup of water is truly the most convenient option any longer.

If you give a shit, convince your friends to switch platforms with you and assist them in setting everything up. After all, we're only strong, if we're together and don't discord.