The Tragedy of Darth Discordus...

Discord launched just shy of 11 years ago (May 2015), and brought with it a revolution in gaming communities and how they interact, both with each other and amongst themselves.

Previously gaming communities, be they guilds, clans or just loose groups of friends, would've been using forums, Mumble servers, Teamspeak or some combination of the above. It was disjointed, but it worked and it worked well. There was no invasive or predatory practices involved, and people were able to sign up to services and remain completely anonymous.

Then Discord came along and tied together both Voice and Text chat channels into one attractive package. It was great.

People loved the convenience, and they joined in droves, leaving behind their Mumble/Teamspeak servers, online forums et al en masse.

Then they launched their premium offering, Nitro. Starting with their initial offering for a few dollars a month to "help support Discord's growth". Sure, why not? It's only a few bucks a month and the Discord product was worth supporting.

Then, later, came their gaming offering, with a shop and free games. That lasted a while then was shuttered, presumably when it was costing them too much.

Their shop started offering profile customisations for your avatar, banner, profile card the whole lot, and they also began offering a higher Nitro tier, and that's where we are today.

An over-bloated, commercialised mess of monetary predation, advertisements, "tie-ins" and server boosts.

Enshittification Complete

Then came along age-verification.

And you know what I think about that.

Unless you now "prove" to Discord that you're over 18, you will be barred from interacting or seeing media in certain servers, channels etc, and basically treated like a child.

You'd think having a payment option on file, and an account that's over 10yrs old would indicate that I personally am an adult, but no. I get their "Teen by default" treatment because I'm in the UK:

This is what I now see when I try to enter a channel that's flagged as NSFW, or for Adults.

So now they want my biometric data, or my passport information:

Except for one thing: The above "assurances" are a lie.

Less than 4 months after a data breach which saw over 70,000 users' data leaked after a cyber-attack, Discord want, in a global roll out of their "teen by default" setting, over 200 MILLION users to submit their personal data?

Nope.

Furthermore, the UK will be involved in an "experiment" where they will be subject to submission of their data to a company named Persona, involved with/run by Peter Thiel and Palantir, and who WON'T have their data scrubbed.

I said Good Day Sir!

Enough is enough

After being a Nitro subscriber for over 9 years, enough was enough. Earlier this week I cancelled my subscription and removed my payment data from the platform.

Then, earlier today I spent a good 30 minutes leaving a ton of servers I'd joined previously, either because they were things/communities that I'd been involved in previously or had joined the server for their emoji's so I could use them on servers I was active on.

So I went from being on over 150 different servers down to less than 40. And I will try to pare that down even further over the next week or two.

Going forward I only intend to use Discord to keep up with several communities I'm still a member of, for either Linux/FOSS stuff, a few music servers, some class discords for WoW, and of course my WoW Guild.

In fact if it wasn't for my WoW Guild, I'd be half-tempted to just dump it altogether, such is my disgust with Discord now as a company.

Dystopia, it's closer than you think

As always, state surveillance and authoritarian governments are ruining the way of life for millions, nay, BILLIONS of people around the world, and this whole shit-show is just another tiny step in that seemingly inevitable march towards the dystopian nightmare future the ped billionaire class would love us to be in already. One where corporations are more powerful than governments, and ordinary citizens are completely powerless to change the status quo. Not without some sort of uprising. The French had the right idea back in the day...

Next thing you know they'll be wanting our ID's to be able to use VPN's!

Oh wait, they've already started down that particular branch of the authoritarian surveillance tree...

sigh

All of **gestures vaguely** this is becoming incredibly hard to stomach.

Freedoms that we, as a people, have enjoyed for decades, if not centuries, are being slowly eroded, fuelled by the rise of AI, enabling authoritarian and fascist governments around the world to surveil and track their enemies (hint, it's you). It also enables corporations to sack workers, and replace them with AI systems that they don't have to pay precious funds to, thereby increasing their bottom lines.

It's all becoming too much, and we're going to hit a breaking point soon.

Not soon enough.