Discord. Its' a company, an app, and a song by The Living Tombstone.
It's been a solid 7 months since my last post, and I am fully aware of that. I've mostly been busy
touring the US Southwest and rewriting the entire damn website (if that wasn't obvious already, I mean, look at it).
However, I have also been busy with dealing with a harassment campaign from a certain individual. I won't name names, but this ties into the main point of this post.
To catch you up to speed, on 27-08-2024 my Discord account was flagged for "communication abuse". Now this alone is highly unusual, as I have never been one to
harass or abuse anyone on the platform. I have always been a person to not throw slurs or get involved in pointless drama. However, Discord decided to strike my account
down to a point where I couldn't DM people, marking my account as "suspicious".
The following day, I wake up to find my account terminated facing deletion. I was in shock. I had been using Discord since 2018, and I had never had any issues with
the ToS or community guildlines. As well as that, Discord did not provide any email or reason as to why my account was terminated. I was left in the dark.
I had to contact a friend of mine who interns at Discord for any plausible reason as to why my account was terminated. They told me that it was due to "communication
abuse" and that they couldn't provide any more information. Hence, I was left to the one place I could go - Discord's page of doom and gloom - the Trust and Safety
contact form.
I had to wait 2 days for a response, and when I got one, it was a generic response. I was told that my account wasn't going to be reinstated as they "couldn't verify
my identity from my email", still not stating *why* I was terminated. Another day passed. At this point, they were providing bot responses, always copy and pasting
from the same script, never providing any real information. Which well, isn't surprising from a company that has decided to start giving passionate head to
try and become a publicly owned company.
Day 10. Support hasn't responded in the past week now. My account was now on it's final day. 06-09-2024. I had given up. I had lost all hope in recovering my account
that I had owned for 6 years. Later that day, the account was deleted. All traces of my account were gone.
Great, now you're caught up to speed. Now, let's talk about the leading reason as to why my account got striked in the first place. A whistleblower (a mutual friend
of mine and the individual who harassed me) came forward and told me that the individual had mass reported my account for "harassment". Now, I would've thought
that Discord would've seen that the reports were false, but no. They decided to terminate my account without any real investigation. And I mean hey, I can't say I'm
too surprised from a company that laid off 17% of their staff despite
having a huge surplus of income from their, frankly, forceful Nitro subscription service.
I mean seriously, they're trying to become a publicly owned company, and they're treating their users like this? Do they expect to think they'll survive in the long run?
I mean probably, Wall Street is full of idiots who'll invest in anything that has a pulse, especially a company born and bred in Silicon Valley thats "hip with the kids"
and has a huge cash surplus. At the time of writing as well, their employee reviews are
in the gutter. Crunching staff to burn-out, toxic work environments, abuse from management, the list goes on. And yet, they still lead the market in terms of
communication platforms. It's a shame, really.
But, I digress. Obviously toxic work environments are a standard in the tech industry (looking at you, Amazon), but it's a shame to see a company that
didn't start off as a corporate entity turn into one. I mean, Discord started off as for gamers to just chat and have fun, and now it's turned into a cesspool
of corporate greed and abuse. The memes of Discord not giving a shit about moderation unless the user is under 13 really seem to be reality lately, and its saddening.
At the time of writing as well, the Discord Datamining community recently discovered their plans to lower the free file capacity limit back down to 8MB from 25MB.
Eight. Megabytes. That is barely enough to send a screenshot in 1080p. Which brings me back to the forcefulness of Nitro. Sure, you can argue "but Robyn, you use
Telegram, they shove their subscription service down your throat as well." But at least I can upload an entire damn screenshot without paying 10 dollars of my
hard-earned cash to a company that feels like they force it for their own gain. Their reason for this downsize is laughable as well - with staff indirectly
confirming its' "too costly to run the storage".
For context,
- Telegram: 2GB free, 4GB paid (5US$)
- Signal: Undisclosed, 200MB according to Reddit.
- Matrix: Depends per federation, often 100MB under Cloudflare.
And Discord, a company that has a huge surplus of income, is very much double the size of Matrix and Signal, and okay sure they're not as big as Telegram, however
Telegram is mostly used by the Russian and Middle Eastern communities, and provides a lot more security and privacy than Discord does. And yet, Discord is the one
who downscales for "cost reasons". Now, let's try and do the math here.
Discord is hosted using Google Cloud Platform. For the sake of consistency, let's presume they host on us-west2 in Los Angeles. The cost of storage on GCP is 0.023 dollars
per GB. And now lets use Statista's 2022 data of 4 billion messages sent per day.
Now, let's presume that 1 in every 10 messages sent has an 8MB file attached to it. That's 400 million files sent per day. Multiplying 8MB by 400 million gives us 3.2TB
of data sent per day. Multiplying that by 0.023 gives us 9 200 dollars per day. Now, let's multiply that by 30. That gives us 276 000 dollars per month. Equalling to
3.3 million dollars per year. Now if we do the same for 25MB, we get 8.25 million dollars per year. They are saving 5 million dollars per year by downscaling the file
size limit, with a... 100 million dollar surplus. And they're telling me that it's "too costly to run the storage"? I call bullshit. And again, Signal, a company
that is smaller than Discord, has a 200MB limit. And they're not complaining about "costs". Hell, Signal is funded by donations solely, and yet they can afford to
run a 200MB limit.
Next up, the upselling of Nitro. I mean, I get it, you need to make money. Servers aren't free. I know that all too well. But the way Discord is doing it is just...
wrong. I don't think restricting users from sending files that aren't just two pixels or limiting users from using their own emotes unless they pay 10 dollars a month
is the way to go. Like hell, custom app icons? Custom app themes? Both can be sorted by just, installing a modified client. And yet, they're trying to sell it as an
exclusive feature. Another thing that bugs me is the fact you need Nitro to upload a banner to your profile. A banner. A simple image that can be uploaded to any
website. And yet, Discord is trying to sell it as a feature. When they added pronouns to profiles, I was genuienly surprised that they didn't make it a Nitro feature.
If they can make a banner a Nitro feature, they can almost certainly profit off people's identities. Well,
not like that hasn't happened before, but then again that also wasn't directly Discord. Then again, Discord also doesn't delete your data when you delete a message,
channel, or server. And with their recent bullshit "Clyde AI" that trains off messages sent on Discord, I wouldn't be surprised if they're selling intrusive levels of
data to the highest bidder. Again, I am fully aware that this is the tech industry, and that this is standard practice (hi Facebook and Google), but Discord isn't
a megacorporation. It's a company that started off as a small project by a few people, and only had a huge spike due to the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. And yet, they're
adapting the same practices as the big greedy corporations.
There's also plenty of videos on YouTube that go into detail about Discord's moderation and their.. concerning, blind eye for certain communities. I don't know how
much I can mention or if it's even safe to mention without being sued, however I don't think I should be giving my money to a company that is willing to turn a blind
eye to servers promoting teenage dating and... Well, connect the dots. The fact that they're willing to turn a blind eye to that, but terminate my account for
"harassment" is just concerning at best. The best video I can find at the moment is this one by
Canadian YouTuber "No Text To Speech", who covers Discord on their channel. I highly recommend you check it out.
I honestly don't know what to do at this point. It amazes me how a company that started off to combat Skype and Teamspeak has turned into a worse version of both.
And to clarify - this post isn't to try and force you to stop using Discord. I may use Arch but I'm not a Linux elitist. The sole purpose of this post is to inform
you of the practices that Discord has been doing lately. I'm not saying you should stop using Discord, but I am saying that you should be aware and act on your own
judgement. Hell, people still use Twitter despite... Melon Husk (you know who I'm talking about). And to further clarify, this post is not with intention to defame
Discord. Please don't sue me for defamation. You can't arbitrate me, I'm in the UK. There's a fun ponder, does arbitration allow for international cases? I'm not
a lawyer, I didn't even know what arbitration was until Discord enforced it on their US users..
At the end of the day, Discord lost me. I'm not going to be using their service anymore. Call me petty, I ain't letting a company have my data and money when they
can't even provide a decent service. Will me leaving Discord make a difference? No. Will me leaving Discord make me feel better morally? Yes. Anyway, it's 00:28,
and I'm out of iced tea. I'm going to bed. Goodnight.