I’ve often taken a keen interest when I see tech companies voluntarily shooting themselves in the foot with decisions that do nothing but upset and infuriate their users. Or they use practices that are inherently anti-consumer, such as decisions made around the Nintendo Switch 2. But that could be a blog post all its own. Today, I’m focusing on Discord. If you didn’t know, Discord is a chat app used by a millions of gamers to communicate as well as various other communities. You can’t follow a tech site without them trying to sell you a subscription, which includes access to their Discord community, for example. Oh frabjous joy! I know I always rush to put in my payment details to be added to a group of strangers with hot takes.
Discord has been around for a great many years, but in the year of 2026, they decided that happy consumers weren’t their focus anymore. Who needs them? Am I right?! What they have chosen to do is implement age ID verification for users all over the globe. What you will need to do to prevent your account from being locked down to a teen account is either provide them with a copy of your government ID or even a picture of your face. This all rolls out in March. Not to be a spoiler here, but it was met with an overwhelming amount of ire from its users. Who could have seen that coming?!
What happens if you elect not to give a company who had a massive data breach last October your sensitive information? Let me quote ZDNet’s Kyle Kucharski. “Unverified accounts will be blocked from servers or channels with age restrictions, unable to speak in livestream “Stage” channels, and unable to respond to DMs from certain users. It also won’t let you change certain settings and will blur age-restricted content throughout the app.“ Doesn’t that sound like a good time?
All this backlash has put Discord into crisis control, which those among us who subscribe to logic would think that means deciding not to implement this. But that would require a modicum of critical thinking. What they’ve done instead is basically shout to anyone who will listen “Wait wait, I promise you can trust us with your data this time! Forget that whole data breach last year, we got this ish on lock now!” It’s amazing that hasn’t worked. I know I’m flabbergasted.
So what has resulted from this? Well there’s a massive search spike when it comes to people looking for Discord alternatives. As a Discord user myself, I’ve been amongst that group. I encourage you to look into it, and I’ve personally settled on Signal. But there are quite a few options, and you may find one that works better for you.
One thing that the fine folks at PC Gamer have pointed out is the fact that a major investor is a venture fund led by Peter Thiel. If you don’t know him, he’s the critical thinker who is of the mind that democracy and freedom aren’t compatible. If you don’t believe in a democracy, that automatically means I don’t take you seriously in any capacity, no matter how much money you may have. Congratulations, Pete! I rank you up there with Spongebob. He lives in a pineapple under the sea, you know?
What this all amounts to is that we get to watch in real time as users by an order of magnitude leave Discord entirely. Not because of any reason other than some of the dumbest decision making in tech history, and that’s quite the achievement when we still have Microslop (a popular pet name for Microsoft.) So join me as we watch Discord flail and flounder and, quite possibly, go under when it loses a huge majority of its users and all that investment money they got from people like Thiel burst into flames.
S’mores, anyone?