.Donuts

That looks amazing, thanks for sharing sag!

There are plenty of legit things to get upset about. Malicious bots, prolific scams, CSAM, customer support having an abysmal rep, and that’s not even talking about how foundationally incompatible Discord is with FOSS.

So no, I’m not here to defend a proprietary company. I’m here to address the pointless fear mongering that distracts from the real issues.

You see a couple of orange lines. You think, well that’s okay, it’s up most of the time? This isn’t helpful. Discord needs to be up all of the time if it wants me to take it seriously. I understand that writing code is hard, and I’m aware that I sound demanding here, but I just cannot adopt Discord for communicating if I cannot rely on it to be available when I need it now. If it’s down for half an hour, that’s not a long time in the big picture, but it’s a long time in the moment when I have a message that I need to send right then.

(emphasis mine). Ah yes, another blog by a user that thinks everything revolves around their experience.

I would love to act in good faith, but you’re not making it easy linking this drivel. Because I don’t want to make you feel like I’m fishing for sources, let me expand some points in the original link to talk about:

Discord contains features which allow integration with other spyware platforms

Discord contains the opt-in spyware feature known as “social media integration.” This allows you to sync your persistent user identity on Discord with your persistent user identity on other spyware platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. In its privacy policy[1], Discord has confirmed that if you opt in to this spyware feature, Discord will obtain an undisclosed amount of access to information obtained about you by the spyware platforms that you choose to sync with.

Ah yes, very scary. Connecting your account with other platforms to show your profile.

Discord uses its process logging for advertising

That the process logging features of Discord are now being recorded on Discord’s servers as a form of telemetry (spyware), and removes speculation about why this feature exists. It is clarified by Discord that this spyware feature is used for advertising to its users.[8] This means that Discord is recording the programs you have open to build a statistical model of what programs you might buy/license in the future.

The “advertising” in question:

We use certain information to personalize our services. This includes features like customizing your experience on our discovery surfaces, highlighting activity on Discord that may interest you, and surfacing Discord features and promotions from us and our partners that may be of interest to you. For example, we may use information about who you interact with to rank a Friend who you interact with often higher in the “Active Now” section of your Friends List.

Discord tries to force some users to give their Telephone numbers

Discord will lock users out of its service and will not allow them to continue using it without giving their phone number or contacting Discord support. This is especially true for TOR users. This kind of feature is designed to extract very personal information out of its users (phone numbers). The criteria for locking out users isn’t known

Usually this is a server (community) - side setting, but Discord also forces it when they think you are a spammer or malicious actor. Pretending it’s to collect phone number is a bit out there. Also, 2FA has been a thing since forever.

Lastly, there’s probably the argument of selling our personal data:

We don’t sell your personal information. Our business is based on subscriptions and paid products, not from selling your personal information to third parties.

We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.

We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.

No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA.

This is a legal document that they will get in trouble for if they were lying. They’ve already been fined hundreds of thousands of euros for GDPR violations but that curiously did not include a fine for “took people’s personal information and then sold them without consent whilst explicitly saying they didn’t do that”

Discord further has no third party advertisements which they can use to “sell” your data by allowing those advertisements to target you.

Which got worse? Feel free to show me an example. I’ll try to investigate and find out its merits.

It must be said that that site also considers browsers like Firefox and Vivaldi to be at a high level of being spyware. I think it’s important to understand that Discord doesn’t do things much differently than other platforms, other than not having any 3rd party ads.

These articles are very old and not super relevant any more. Sources of 2018 and 2019, while a lot has changed over the years.

I’m not here to “defend” Discord and pretend it’s all gravy, but if you want to make a compelling argument, I think it’s a good idea to stick to current, factual information.