To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API unde

To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API under the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-SPAM, bot oversight, etc. On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users. There is a long and well-written discussion from the former developer of discord-py regarding their feelings: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1 https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028... Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…