Hey everyone - Jason (the CEO person) here from Discord. I lurk a lot on HN and wanted to just chime in and share a little context since this thread is about my

Hey everyone - Jason (the CEO person) here from Discord. I lurk a lot on HN and wanted to just chime in and share a little context since this thread is about my startup! The user in this linked thread has likely triggered our anti-abuse system. Unfortunately, Discord is constantly under attack by people trying to spam or do malicious things. Instead of just outright banning everyone who our systems identify as trying to violate our TOS, we sometimes present an option to verify that you’re a human via a phone number. We know it’s not ideal and it’s still a cat and mouse game to mitigate spam, but it has been shown in our system to reduce spam plus help people keep their accounts. Check out this post from one of our engineers if you want waaaay more detail about how and why we use phone number verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/dl9y94/the_truth_about_discord/f4pkxnb/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/dl9y94/the_trut... In addition, we have a whole transparency report that walks through some of the work we are doing to try and maintain the safety and integrity of Discord for you all https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-transparency-report-jan-1-april-1-4f288bf952c9 https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-transparency-report-jan-... I also want to just mention that we do not sell user data. People keep bringing this up, reasonably so, because of the lack of trust in tech companies and how US law effectively requires terms of service to be written. You’ll notice we only ask for the rights we need to operate and improve Discord itself. We also voluntarily rolled out GDPR compliance globally, not just in the EU. It’s important to me that we build a business where our incentives are aligned with the people who use our service - not advertisers. That’s why we make money by selling Discord Nitro. (And thanks to everyone who subscribes and supports us!). And lastly on the topic of Tencent, they have a very small stake in Discord and have absolutely no ability to control what we do or access our data.