Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
Sadly I think the end result of this won’t be people leaving discord, but people giving up liberties because it’s easier than fighting it
And they’re banking on that, it’s part of why they intentionally gave zero warning…1 month is nothing.
With more time a dedicated set of people could pull the alternatives up into solid real options
Or kick up such a huge ruckus that discord back down and undo it.
This was a very intentional and malicious choice to go “oh, yeah we’re doing this next month, kthnxbye”
Fundamentally the problem with leaving discord is no other platform has fucking remotely any kind of quality of life close to discord. Matrix is a flaming pile of shit that basically is an insult the very concept of user friendlyness. It also is missing about 70% of the features your avg gamer/internet deweller actually wants.
Teamspeak 6 is a barely functional trash heap that still doesn’t have a bunch of quality of life your avg normie expects. There’s been open feature requests for years that are unlikely to ever manifest.
Stoat is a half finished poorly managed train wreck that would be good if the devs actually had anything resembling a decent pace of development. Feels like Wayland moves faster then them for basic functions they should have had two years ago.
Discord is basically 5 apps in one and you can’t convert people to go from 1 universal app back to like 5. It just won’t happen.
You need actual cross platform support for voice chat on desktop ios and android, text chat, screen and window sharing, gifs, emojis, dms, group chats and THEY HAVE TO BE SIMPLE AND UNDERSTANDABLE to computer illiterate normies.
And that’s just the basics. People expect customization and personalization. You need to be able to jump around, colab, hop in and out of calls and basically have digital mobility. Which while it sucks from the outside. Inside discords walled gardens it’s a VERY open space.
Matrix gets close but it’s just so user unfriendly and 90% of clients have one or the other half of the feature set people expect.
It’s just a mess.
Anyone with sense saw this coming when they did the same thing in Australia and the UK but I otherwise agree with your point. I think this is a very calculated move.
When the deadline gets here in a month, 80% of the group that would’ve migrated out of disgust won’t be affected because they just use Discord for group voice chats anyway, and the competition isn’t ready. The rest have been trained to put their personal info out there to anyone who asks for it. And, when (not if) they eventually roll out “IDs for Everyone”, the outrage won’t be nearly as detrimental to their bottom line because it’s already happened before.
I agree, convenience wins in this case, this is why twitter is still “bulletproof”.