[kaelinl]

While I'm fully in agreement that Discord has fundamental problems, this article doesn't seem of sufficient quality for HN. It is "unfinished", and in practice that apparently means "makes claims and doesn't justify any of them". So while we can choose to agree or disagree about the claims, we don't know what the author meant. That the article is written in a flippant and dismissive tone doesn't help.

I agree that discord has objectionable philosophical foundations around centralization, data retention and privacy. Additionally, the rate at which they're crapping out annoying, intrusive anti-features is excruciating — think "sound board", "super reactions", "clips", etc. It's profoundly clear that Discord is grasping at straws trying to find any way to motivate people to pay for their fully functional free product, and the way they've decided to do it is to add ways to annoy other users and count on the "meme potential" to entice people to pay get access to them. Overall, Discord is a very effective text and voice chat app, but now requires a lot of accessibility settings and preference toggles to make it usable. It's very sad the direction Discord is heading, given how effective it was as a tool not long ago.