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What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works i

What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord?

lapcat 2y ago
"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht... Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it. They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.
suddenlybananas 2y ago
Not open source.
pjc50 2y ago
It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.
- steezeburger 2y ago
  I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit. I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
- optionalsquid 2y ago
  The web client is fairly well behaved and does away with the need for constantly installing updates: https://discord.com/app https://discord.com/app
- windward 2y ago
  An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.
harryf 2y ago
That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data? Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place. Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data. So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.
- Lanolderen 2y ago
  Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
- concerndc1tizen 2y ago
  And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages. And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
  - culi 2y ago
    Even lower-level Discord admins can basically any user's entire chat histories across all servers ever. There is zero encryption
short_sells_poo 2y ago
Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff. The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole. I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web. 15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search. Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.
- Brybry 2y ago
  Even IRC was better for data archiving and searching. We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
  - Mashimo 2y ago
    > We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. But only IF you are good at regex. On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
    - Brybry 2y ago
      Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases. The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.
drpossum 2y ago
> there's no ads This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads. https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to-increase-revenue/ https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...
- didntcheck 2y ago
  A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity
  - drpossum 2y ago
    Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim that there were no ads, though your username suggests the reason.
    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      Why are you belligerent?
      - drpossum 2y ago
        Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion. "Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
        concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        That's fair. But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising. The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.
nickitolas 2y ago
> What do people find upsetting about Discord? These are the most common complaints I see from people - They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage) - Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account. - Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" ) - Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders - Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server - The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.
oxcabe 2y ago
> What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool. I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it. > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord? If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord? I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revolt-have-federation https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo... Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.
Ukv 2y ago
Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in). It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.
footlose_3815 2y ago
Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads and popups almost every time you launch.
finnjohnsen2 2y ago
Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.
- wigster 2y ago
  indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.
throwaway9386 2y ago
They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in. They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well. They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package. Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit. > What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible. > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord? The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.
ziml77 2y ago
There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and the notifications for them can't be turned off.
t-3 2y ago
They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.

lapcat 2y ago

"Discord in Early Talks With Bankers for Potential I.P.O." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/discord-ipo.ht... Enshittification is inevitable, indeed mandatory.

PaulKeeble 2y ago
They have been trying to get to IPO for a while. 2 years ago they deleted a huge swathe of accounts to cause those people to create new ones to boost their growth stats and frankly having been caught up in it that was the push I needed to get off Discord. It caused a huge discontentment at the time as it wasn't clear if it was a bug or intentional but Discord didn't fix it. They will do anything to get to a successful IPO including cooking the stats but they aren't there yet.

suddenlybananas 2y ago

Not open source.

pjc50 2y ago

It's very, very badly performing. And yet every time I want to start it, it requires another 15 updates.

steezeburger 2y ago
I agree about the updates, but I'm in a shit ton of servers and performance is fine for me. Can you talk to the issues you've had a bit?
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Sounds like your average web development project though; frequent releases are a good thing, although I suppose for each individual they'll want to slow it down a bit. I just wish there were more native applications instead of all the web desktop stuff. But, visual design options and developer availability is a huge factor there. Native iOS designs come the closest to what I'd like to see on the desktop.
optionalsquid 2y ago
The web client is fairly well behaved and does away with the need for constantly installing updates: https://discord.com/app https://discord.com/app
windward 2y ago
An example of the worst-of-both-worlds 'always needs updates' like a website but 'takes over your screen (while strobing your taskbar) so you can't multitask' like a desktop program.

harryf 2y ago

That's exactly the question - how does a free communication app achieve a multi-billion dollar valuation despite not having ads or directly selling user data? Discord's business model relies on attracting a massive user base to secure substantial investments and potentially a lucrative acquisition. We've seen again and again and again what happens once acquisition takes place. Also a big existing investor in Discord is Tecent which, under Chinese law, could grant the government access to Discord's extensive user data. So yeah.. it's not about features it's about freedom.

Lanolderen 2y ago
Data on Discord has never been safe really. I don't know how it is nowadays since my memes have gotten less edgy/dank but you could get banned for private messages for a long time.
concerndc1tizen 2y ago
And there's no way to delete your chat history basically. You can delete your account, but that doesn't destroy your messages. And as for privacy: Your username is anonymous, but your email isn't (to Discord), so the % of users that didn't create a separate fake email, or ever connected with a trackable IP, basically aren't anonymous at all. They also record your voice. Every user's voice is recorded in isolation and can be used as training data for identification algorithms. Including unusual characteristics like breathiness, diction, accent, and so on. Probably it can estimate your age as well.
- culi 2y ago
  Even lower-level Discord admins can basically any user's entire chat histories across all servers ever. There is zero encryption

short_sells_poo 2y ago

Let me preface this by saying I use Discord daily to keep in touch with friends. It's a great digital campfire where you can relax with people, talk with them over voice and video or just post random stuff. The issue is that Discord has replaced things which it shouldn't have, the internet forums. Discord is the epitome of a golden cage. It is a prison for information, a black hole. I'm not even talking about the absolutely atrocious search functionality, but the fact that information inside the Discord walls is impossible to find from the outside. You can't search across discord communities, none of the content there is indexed by web search engines. Entire communities have FAQs and knowledge as pins inside threads inside Discord servers. Things which used to be on the web. 15 years ago, these discussions would've taken place on forums and on IRC to a lesser extent. IRC itself was a really bad information black hole, but at least the forums were great. They supported long running discussions and were easy to search. Now everything disappeared into effectively hidden Discord chats and youtube videos where you need to watch 8 different idiots bramble on for 10 minutes before you find the 30 second segment of information that you were actually looking for and could've been a single paragraph.

Brybry 2y ago
Even IRC was better for data archiving and searching. We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. It's really insane how much information is on Discord that is both impossible to discover and will silently disappear at some point.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > We usually had local logs we could grep and web-indexed/searchable logs from bots. But only IF you are good at regex. On discord you can easily filter by date or date range, if it has media, if it contains an URL or what user/roll got mentioned.
  - Brybry 2y ago
    Only if it's in the discord search index, which sometimes doesn't include all history, and it does some fuzzy elasticsearch query that works ok for most cases and awful for anything that isn't most cases. The metadata filters are nice but they're also what keep it usable at all.

drpossum 2y ago

> there's no ads This is a patently ignorant and ridiculous statement. They absolutely shove their own store garbage every release and upsell Nitro at every opportunity. Here's an article from last year about them explicitly introducing third party ads. https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to-increase-revenue/ https://techbriefly.com/2024/04/01/discord-introduces-ads-to...

didntcheck 2y ago
A freemium service advertizing it's premium offering hardly seems surprizing or objectional. They're not a charity
- drpossum 2y ago
  Is this apropos anything? I was pushing back on the claim that there were no ads, though your username suggests the reason.
  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
    Why are you belligerent?
    - drpossum 2y ago
      Well, concernedc1tizen, I don't like it when people spout of misinformation. Especially when it comes to deep societal issues like pervasive advertising. Making thoughtless and inaccurate blanket statements hurts the overall discussion. "Belligerence" as you call it is direct, unambiguous, and will probably be remembered.
      - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
        That's fair. But I've never seen these ads myself, so it's surprising. The Americans do take pervasive advertising to the next level though, with product placement, "influencers", and other deceptive tactics. Their behaviors are a major cost to the legal system, because more legislation has to be introduced to govern against their obviously anti-social and exploitative behavior.

nickitolas 2y ago

> What do people find upsetting about Discord? These are the most common complaints I see from people - They don't allow third party clients and some people have various complaints about theirs (e.g resource usage) - Some people think discord is too popular, to the point some things that "don't belong there" have moved to discord. This is usually about being search indexable and requiring an account. - Fear of monopolostic behaviour ( "enshittification" ) - Some people are mad that they killed public urls for files uploaded to discord. Mostly this is people running into links to images online and being unable to see them, usually not the uploaders - Discord is centralized and you cannot host your own server - The only client they allow you to use (See above) is propietary, and some people would rather run something open source As for me personally, their search functionality drives me insane. I feel like the exact same query gets completely different results depending on the time of day and phase of the moon, making it super unreliable.

oxcabe 2y ago

> What do people find upsetting about Discord? It's free, there's no ads, it's reliable, it has many established communities, it's cross-platform and even works in the browser, supports voice chat and screen sharing. It's an information black hole, as someone else mentioned in this comment section. Otherwise, it's a nifty communication tool. I personally come from running and using {TeamSpeak,Ventrilo,Mumble} servers. Started using Discord in winter 2015, it was just trivial to open a browser tab and join a group session with your friends. The audio experience was an order of magnitude worse when compared to other solutions, but the overall UX and ease of use made up for it. > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord? If you'd allow me to, I'm going to address this question from a different perspective, as this post is about Revolt: What could Revolt do that would make me, at least, start using it alongside Discord? I'd love it if I could self-host a server, place it online and let people find it and join seamlessly, similar to how Fediverse works for other social networks. They don't seem to be interested in adding this: https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revolt-have-federation https://developers.revolt.chat/faq.html#admonition-does-revo... Other than that, I'd see myself using it to run a workspace. Having used Discord as a work-related communication platform in the past, I've come to find voice-based channels very useful, these seem to transmit a better feeling of productivity somehow. Other tools (e.g Slack, Teams) make me feel kind of "alone" when working. Even if it's just for body doubling, I'd argue voice channels are underrated and actually quite helpful for remote workers.

Ukv 2y ago

Many platforms have followed the trend of first offering a legitimately good product to build up a userbase, then squeezing out profit with increasingly anti-user changes, exploiting the fact it's difficult to switch (network effect and intentional lock-in). It's not impossible that Discord stays more or less as it currently is, with a few features locked behind its paid subscription but generally a good experience, but it seems prudent to have a backup option for if/when things go further downhill.

footlose_3815 2y ago

Closed-source, dumb stuff hidden behind premum,and premium ads and popups almost every time you launch.

finnjohnsen2 2y ago

Discord is American. For many in Europe this is a downside now.

wigster 2y ago
indeed... Made in Europe, motherland of GDPR.

throwaway9386 2y ago

They use your messages for AI training, even if you disable the AI summaries "feature". I kept seeing events related to AI summaries on a custom client, even with them turned off in the only server I was in. They'll hold your account hostage until you give them a phone number if you happen to trigger their "anti-spam" detection. And sending a message with a number below 13 might be all it takes for Discord to withhold your account for age verification as well. They basically track every click, every action you take on their client. You can see that if you request a data package. Abuse is rampant. There's no way to report servers, channels, or individual users. Things that were all possible in the past, through the Support form, until they made in-app reporting the only option, which relies on reporting individual messages and has a very low rate limit. > What more could you ask for? Or, are you asking for too much? Let's see...blocking that actually prevents you from seeing messages from the person you blocked. A native client. Better reporting tools. Better message deletion tools - you still can't delete every message along with your account. The ability to opt out of having messages fed into AI. None of these are unfeasible. > What I mean is: What innovative functionality is missing to such a degree, that if it was introduces, would make people abandon Discord? The network effect is the reason why technologically inferior solutions like Discord are still thriving.

ziml77 2y ago

There are ads in discord now. They just call them Quests and the notifications for them can't be turned off.

t-3 2y ago

They want my phone number and email address just to look at a forum I don't plan to participate in yet which information I would like to access is siloed in.