Yes, I’ve vaguely titled this post. Mald.
So back in late 2016/early 2017 I got myself a discord account mainly for the purpose of playing online games with the 3 friends I had at the time. We mostly played a handful of indie games, unturned, terraria, minecraft, and a couple of others. Around 2020 was the last time I spoke to 2 of these friends, mostly due to some clashing of ideals, I still remain in talks with 1 (partly because we’ve known each other since birth), but less often than before. Nonetheless, I am fully considering moving away from discord permanently due to some recent thought. Ill explain my motivations for moving away from discord (even though literally nobody that reads this actually cares).
Recently discord has become what I can only be described as a cesspool of degeneracy. Being one of the “oldfag” discord users, I’ve seen the platform drastically change since I first joined in 2016. However, let me highlight the current state of discord by describing the people you’ll find.
Discord has grown to literally be the home of bottom-feeders the moment discord started marketing for a general audience ~mid 20191. Anyone who was on the platform before that point saw the huge decline of the community in quality when the majority of users flooded in. Along with that, there’s this sort of alternate culture of the oldfags and the newfags on discord. The latter hates the former, while the former doesn’t really care about the latter. Its a weird dynamic, but actively contributes to the degrading clashes between the two. You really can only sanely interact with the group that you are in.
To say lightly, if you aren’t in some schizo tech or fedposting guild, you are literally wading through excrement. Most of the popular servers are void of any meaningful interactions and post people larp to an uncanny degree. If you want to have some, you have to literally spend ages to find good chats.
Something not talked about in the circles of discord is how awful the terms of service are for any user2 and how the staff in general lack any form on professionalism. Mainly, discord’s trust and safety team are notorious for very arbitrary application of literally all community guidelines and ToS terms. Generally speaking, if you piss off a trust and safety janny, you will be banned. Also, they don’t seem to care about sticking to the rules. For example, illegal content was not only allowed, but actively encouraged, by discord trust and safety staff3. All of this literally going on when a majority of new users were joining the platform in 2019.
Along with that, discord forbids the use of customized/modified clients for interacting with the service. Of course I’ve broken this rule, but goes to say, if you are running a fully custom client like 6cord, gtkcord, or ripcord you have a high chance of getting the hammer compared to modified official clients (betterdiscord, powercord, aliucord). Big downside because discord ui design is not very friendly even for minorly vision impaired persons such as myself. The “desktop” app also takes too many resources.
Also, discord’s support team sucks from what I have heard. Never had to interact with them, thank God, but still concerning in my mind.
With all of what I’ve said, the biggest reason why I am leaving discord is because its just not interesting or fun to interact with anymore. 99% of the people suck, I cant do what I want on it, and there’s a large lack of interest in using the platform full stop. Sure, what I’ve stated in above sections is important, but I have fundamentally grown out of le discord. I’ve stopped using discord for what I originally got it for: gaming. If I cant do what I got it for then why use it?
There is also a growing privacy concern, and while public chat isn’t exactly private, I would like to have decently out-of-sight dms. To add, Tencent has a majority stake in discord, further driving the “there is no privacy” concern of mine. Discord has also morphed into a social media platform, compared to a more “communal” chat service. Pretty much worsening all interactions in the long run.
Well, considering that in my own words:
>Literally any other free-software chat service is either awful, or none of my friends use it
I probably wont be leaving discord fully, at least in the next couple of years. Despite its (gaping and large) flaws, it still is the most solid and reliable chat model that I have used. Ill probably move to xmpp, it has the most sane implementation, encryption isnt a pain to work with, and it just works. Matrix is so slow and buggy that I hate using it every time I interact with it. I have plans to work on my own protocol, but I don’t have the time nor patience to do that in $CURRENT_YEAR. And being that only 1 person I know uses discord, I doubt I’ll be on long.
It about time, discord is kinda garbage, and I’ve honestly wanted to move away from it for some time now. Now since I have more reasons in favor of leaving, it will probably be easier. Some of my friends are considering the move to xmpp/mumble or discord replacements, but still are clinging to discord.
To add, I haven touched discord in over a month due to untimely main rig issues, thus sparking this post in the first place.
Due to a majority stake from Tencent, discord was driven to become a more “diverse” social platform, Not just a gaming-chat service, in order to generate more return for its new investor. ↩︎
I know you can say this for literally any corporate service, but discord users tend to worship the ToS like its some biblical text. Its creepy. ↩︎
If you are the crazy freak that wants to know what went down, search “discord cub incident”. ↩︎
