I know Discord is enshittifying and I’m all for switching to open source instead.
But everyone’s reason for leaving seems to be:
“Discord wants my ID for age verification and I don’t like that.”
And the new apps will be subject to the exact same laws.
Are users just not realizing that (and therefore in for a rude awakening), or am I missing something?
It’s not just they are doing age verification, but the method they are using to implement it. ID collection is not privacy respecting, and further to that, they’ve already had a major data leak, including said IDs. For the facial scan method, they claim that it will be on-device only but given that it’s closed source software, they could change this at any time.
Seemingly, everyone are missing that Discord are very likely to go public soon https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/chat-platform-discord-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-ipo.
My guess is they will announce going public themselves as soon as they have normalized their ID collection and age verification AI programme. Big papa Microsoft or the like will buy Discord and make it an evergreen AI data set training ground.