People Love to Panic

So this morning I found out (as many others did) that starting next month, Discord will be requiring age verification for all accounts, either via facial recognition or submitting legal ID. This is obviously already a violation of privacy, but also comes hot off the heels of both recent and past data breaches at Discord, where they've infamously spilled hundreds of thousands of accounts' data and personal information. And now they expect us to trust them with our government ID and detail scans of our face. Fuck that.

Obviously this is bad. Discord is an incredibly popular centralized messaging platform that I and many others have been using for years. Some people have been using it for the better part of a decade. Some people have been paying money for the premium features of Discord Nitro for years, and none of this matters. Discord is ready and willing to dig their grave deeper, amid the failing monetization of their platform, by requiring you to turn over incredibly precious private data in order to use the fucking platform. Ridiculous. The obvious response is the protest, flood support lines until they can't handle it, make it obvious and impossible to ignore that we will not stand for the violation of user's privacy. Make it clear that Discord is not the only app on the market, and if they want to abuse our data like this, we'll leave. There is nothing that requires us to stay on Discord. Many of us, myself included, don't want to leave if we don't have to. Years of friend lists, DMs, servers, etc. is worth fighting to keep safe and active, in my opinion. I already submitted a support ticket, and I think everyone should. I'll include links to contact Discord support at the bottom of this post.

However, I think that people love to panic about decisions that platforms make. That’s not to say there aren’t real concerns to be had regarding various decisions that companies like Discord make, but I think that people just love panicking over them instead of doing anything about it. A company’s decision is not the end of the world. I know there’s a lot of people who will stay on Discord no matter what happens, and there’s a lot of people who are jumping ship regardless of if the age verification decision gets reversed, but in the middle there, that’s where I think most people are. We don’t want to leave if we don’t have to, but we also don’t want the bullshit that Discord is pushing according to this announcement. The two ends of the spectrum make it difficult for those of us in the middle who want things to change, to actually go about trying.

It’s not hard to submit a support ticket or send a feedback email or review bomb on app stores. It’s not hard to give pushback and hope that things change before next month. It doesn’t hurt to make contingency plans in the meantime, make backups elsewhere, etc. but it’s not hard to try. It’s the least we can do if we really care about keeping a platform that some of us have years of history with.

People love to panic over things like this. They love to fall apart and act like it’s the end and there’s nothing we can do about anything. The least we can do is try, right?

And can we be real for a second? All of the people going “Oh no! The centralized messaging platform is making a decision we don’t agree with! Our only option is to jump ship and go to another centralized messaging platform!” like, maybe part of the problem is the ongoing centralization of specific corporate social media platforms as the only centers of community on the web? Maybe we should invest more time into things like personal websites and varied messaging methods and platforms? Maybe we shouldn't rely on Profit Margins Inc. to run a normal messaging platform that will never make a bad decision we disagree with ever never forever? It feels just a bit naive to me.

Etchy made an excellent point similar to this idea on Bluesky, which I agree with wholeheartedly. I'll let him speak for himself.

We've been using Discord servers as though it's a followup or replacement for traditional forums or project documentation, when in reality, even a public Discord server is a closed, private environment that gatekeeps the flow of information. Making a website is not hard, and for the most part it's entirely free. Making information public and independant of fickle platforms like Discord is necessary for the preservation of things like this. Also go check out Etchy, he makes great content on YouTube and his website!

It should not come as a surprise that a company with profits in mind has made a poor decision that will negatively impact the users. If it did, then you are maintaining naivety regarding capitalism and the role that profit margins play in decision-making. Your first reponse to this should not be panic. Panic only serves to benefit the company. Panic makes it harder to do anything about it, to create any material response or ellicit any material change. Panic only immobilizes us. Your response should be action, it should be voice, not panic. You should be mobilizing against companies that want to exploit us for profit, against policies that violate our right to privacy, and against the forces that would control you, both online and off. That should be your response. It's the only response that matters.

Reaching out to Discord and flooding feedback/support channels with outrage at this decision and threats of moving platforms is the first step in pushing back. If you'd like to do your part in submitting something, you can log into this feedback portal and submit a ticket or a feedback thread. There is an official Discord support email that's floating around out there, but if you email it you just get an auto-responder that tells you they aren't recieving feedback via that email, and links to the feedback portal I linked.

Another important move to make is cancelling Discord Nitro if you have it. When a company like this is only interested in profit margins and disregards the user to reach that end, money speaks volumes when protesting those decisions that negatively impact the user. Cancel Nitro. Don't gift it to anyone. Don't buy any of the other microtransaction bullshit that Discord is peddeling. Starve them until they pull back.

We have to present a united voice and tell these companies what we think of this push for our private information. Make sure they know they can't walk all over us, and we won't back down. Stay strong out there. We own the Internet, and they cannot take that away from us.

~ Alex Amelia Pine