In order to curb dissatisfaction the Discord CTO released a blog post. In it a lot of c-suite speak and empty words. They claim 90 percent of users won’t be affected. And with caveats I believe them. Most people’s experience probably won’t change. And they will carry on with their spied on lives.

Where I get upset is this claim that these age verification steps won’t at all infringe on privacy or identity. That Discord won’t read messages and won’t track things. I know this is a flat out lie. They already do all of this. It’s their whole fucking business model! I think it’s sickening in attempt to save face they just further lie. It’s like they pretend oh money just magically appears for us. And we offer this free service with no strings attached.

I fear most people will take that post at face value. They will move on and take a blatant lie and accept it. Further reinforcing they can do whatever they want and you’ll comply.

Discord arguably just doubled down on what they are doing hoping you will calm down and forget by launch. While I know the majority of people simply don’t care enough about this stuff. I still fully and emphatically advise everyone get off Discord asap.

companies/corporations will never backtrack... they will lie, gaslight, do illegal things then blame you and ask for government handouts.

stop listening/trusting companies. they have zero morals and never will.

The only thing they care about is profit and what would maximise it for them.

All they're doing is finding a new vendor, they're not backing down on this bullshit at all. And the gall to say "oh we have enough data on most of you already 🥰" is absolutely vile.

Requested my data archive already and getting ready to wipe and delete my account. What a shitshow.

They will move on and take a blatant lie and accept it.

People are on places where many other people are. They know that if they move away from Discord, they will miss out a lot. This affects them, too, resulting in them staying.

That's the main reason they stay. The other reason is that far too many people don't care at all about their privacy getting violated. "I have nothing to hide", they say. Words that I am very allergic to since privacy has absolutely nothing to do with hiding anything.

That’s the main thing I hear. I don’t post anything I care about. I’ve had CTOs I’ve had other engineers.

People are on places where many other people are

More on that idea here: Network effect

It's a reason so many big tech companies hate interoperability. Without interoperability you get locked into their system. Then they can enshittify their service to extreme levels, and you are trapped.

Unfortunately there is a harmful incentive structure. The more abusive a service is, the more money it makes from its malicious but profitable aspects which we all know. Meanwhile less harmful services struggle because they lack the monetization stream.

Yeah the mass majority will just accept whatever the rest of their peers accept, look at how many people still use facebook, tiktok, Instagram, twitter, reddit even with their yearly news about data harvesting selling to ads and now AI. Unfortunately discord is such a big package for gaming.

tiktok may be a new app but it will spy on you the most :) it fuelled itself by using the money they got from selling your data to advertise itself in every spare pixel of the internet

no app with an ethical TOS & other acronyms could rise to the top like that. even word of mouth is slowly dying, there's too much white noise around (bots)

they just further lie. It’s like they pretend oh money just magically appears for us.

No, they pretend nitro is actually popular and gives them a lot of money. At least it's an excuse that works if you don't think about it.

Nitro is pretty popular. I know a lot of people including myself that cancelled it over the age verification bs.

They still clearly make money through ads and at the very least they scan messages for spam prevention, but also the fact that they are able to guess users age based on discord usage implies they're profiling users. For which they probably also utilize message content.

Yep, Larry Ellison, the new owner of TikTok USA is absolutely no friend too Privacy. He got his start with a little database project for the CIA called Oracle.

TikTok got its hold mainly by being extremely addictive and using predatory dark patterns to keep you scrolling. That and being less censored compared to other corporate social media. While we can try to strive for the latter (with reasonable limitations), we shall not do the former, even if that means less users overall. "Avoid success at all costs".

Not only that, they keep all the voice calls, so they can profile just based on your voice