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Discord Users Threaten Exodus Over Age Verification Face Scan Controversy (www.newsweek.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 132 points 7 months ago (21 children)

Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts (much like reddit did when they closed the apis), as the vast majority will stay and keep "threatening" to leave. There's at least the hope that the ones who quit now will establish communities elsewhere, on a (hopefully) better server platform.

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  • [–] 101 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Enshittification is not single step. It's more a "boiling a frog"-kinda process.

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  • [–] 58 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Discord itself was a big step of enshittification from the very start when communities moved from individual platforms to Discord servers.

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago

    Sometimes I like to remember when Nitro was like 5 bucks and gave a bunch of stuff, and now it is 10 bucks gives less AND they still try to sell me fucking cosmetics...

    I dropped my Nitro when they announced a possible buyout/IPO

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  • [–] 42 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    It probably also says something of the ones that stay: they can keep getting further exploited. And these are the ones they want.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago

    I agree, but, I see some parallels, a Reddit competitor that solved some of those issues, was hardly functional when they killed APIs. There was no competition. Look at us now baby! Still not competition, but, at least there’s an alternative.

    I hope I can say the same about discord in a bit. There’s really nowhere for anyone to go, without losing a lot of features. Well, hopefully, talented people are going to migrate to these platforms to bring an alternative to discord.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago

    Discord probably did the math and are willing to take a hit to the user counts

    I very much doubt whoever thought about doing the math did so, and if they did, that said math made it out of their department. This kind of decision is much more likely to have been a C-suite darling that no one dared speak against or the equivalent thereof.

    I’m saying thoughtful organizational decisions are less common than we’d like.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    Are there any viable alternatives? Last I looked they all kinda sucked

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I wanna start by saying I'm not a power user, I only use discord as a glorified chat manager for my immediate friends. That said, Stoat is everything I like about discord with a nicer ui and a public server seach function. I made an account when discord started ads and I honestly feel like it's a little further than Lemmy was when I came here from reddit.

    Right now sign up is slow because of the huge influx of users. That said, the team is handling it well and being very transparent about it which is refreshing.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    I've been hearing good things about https://spacebar.chat/. Stoat (formerly Revolt) is out there as well. Matrix is another possibility, but it's more for individual channels rather than whole servers, so doesn't fit some use cases.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Does it have video streaming yet?

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like it's experimental at the moment:

    Voice/Video when?

    Currently there is experimental voice/video WebRTC support in Spacebar. UDP connections are not currently supported.

    This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility, so if you find any bugs please open an issue in Spacebar server.

    We would also be incredibly thankful for any assistance.

    https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/

    So might not be ready for primetime. Voice is pretty critical to how I often use Discord. Video less so, but still important.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    The problem is, even if I am willing to deal with some inconveniences, many others aren't. How am I going to move a server with >100 active users and multiple thousand inactive ones? And what about the six others I have that fit that description? There's quite a few servers I could go without, but around a dozen that I'd much prefer not to lose.

    I've already been trying, but people don't like Revolt, Nerimity, Matrix, hell I tried Mattermost. Some people are fine with some of these platforms, but there is never any remote consensus.

    At least some have cancelled their nitro subscription, making them a net loss for Discord in the future.

    Discord has, despite everything, been my primary chat/social app and to switch to something else one has to uproot absolutely everything. That's sadly not feasible.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    It's absolutely feasible; it's just not painless. The network effect is real. This is something most of us here on the fediverse should be well familiar with: I'd wager we've all left a big proprietary centralized platform for a smaller one with less content that doesn't exactly fit our needs. Yes, it can suck; yes, you'll miss out on content and discussions that you would have seen before; yes, you'll be fine in a year anyway.

    That said, it sounds like Discord is doing some backpedaling at the moment, and that the vast majority of people won't have to do this. If that's so, there's some time before it enshittifies further. I'm going to use that to check out alternatives. My first step will be spinning up Matrix and a Discord bridge to see if that meets my needs. Then some of the other platforms, probably Stoat and Spacebar. I'm going to treat them as beta tests and give lots of feedback to the dev teams, which I hope will help incentivize development. I might even throw a few bucks at promising projects.

    The ultimate end of centralized platforms is decay. It's time to get serious about Discord replacements, at least for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Leaving reddit for Lemmy is a solo thing. It's a personal choice, it doesn't effect the others around you at fucking all.

    Leaving discord for other services effects everyone around you a FUCKING LOT.

    That's the problem. You HAVE to bring your friends or not only are you giving up possibly the only way to communicate with them effectively but also fucking them over by basically threatening them with the loss of your friendship if they don't inconvenience themselves to try some stupid new app over a problem they don't see as remotely worth even giving a fuck about.

    This is the problem most of us have right now. I have 3 servers with a total over nearly 2000 users combined. All 3 are talking about moving but the bare BARE minimum requirements in features and platform support doesn't exist anywhere.

    Discord works on every OS with all its features basically. Not a single other platform can say that. Someone somewhere gets fucked because this or that is isn't fully supported. Or some key feature doesn't work right.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I think they're already too big to fail. They captured the entire market. There's no real competitor with any kind of noticeable fraction of the market share.

    The closest thing to a competitor are business products similar to slack or teams. None of those have anything close to feature parity like high quality streaming at no cost.

    I would gladly host something myself, but I can't do it all. IMO this needs a lemmy equivalent with decentralized hosting or something.

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