Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun.

Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel.

The entire concept of a business using Discord for anything other than customer engagement is completely orthogonal to the very basis of the platform. It was built for gamers! It caters to GAMERS.

Repeat after me: DISCORD IS FOR GAMERS! People who want to have fun playing games with their friends. Any other use of Discord is secondary.

If you want to replace Discord with an alternative you must target gamers. What do gamers want? They want to have fun! They want a frictionless voice chat and super easy screen streaming. They want silly emoji and looping gifs in chat.

They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!

I swear, more teenagers (and younger) will scam the age verification system to see adult content than actual adults using Discord. Because the adults aren't there to see "adult content".

I think the reason discord got so popular is because of the ease of use. Being able to join a server with a link (and not even having to download a client if you don't want), being able to see who's in voice without "connecting" to the server like mumble or teamspeak, persistent chat. This is what is unique about discord; all those other things came later. This is the user experience the alternatives need to replicate. Custom emojis are not a deal breaker, the hangout experience is.

They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.

This is an interesting angle, actually. For me, IRC is the most fun out of the big three (free software chat protocols) of IRC, XMPP, Matrix. The variety of bots and their commands (I never see bots on XMPP or Matrix, kinda odd), being able to post shell command output into my chat window easily (e.g. `/exec -o figlet meme`), the culture around stuff like slapping people with a fish, pasting popular ascii stuff like the shrugging guy or the denko face. I don't really have anything like that stuff on the other platforms. They seem a bit sterile by comparison now that I think about it. I wonder how much is technical and how much is cultural. It's probably way easier to write an IRC bot than bots for the others.

/slap was perfectly enough fun for me without sacrificing the freedom of my peers and myself.

I use Discord all day and it's not for gaming. It's to involve myself in specific communities. And I'm not looking to migrate to a platform that caters specifically to gamers, because it will eventually make the same anti-user tradeoffs that Discord has made over the years, as ad money and payment processors and stakeholders continue to boil the frog.

This sudden news is very unwelcome. Unless something changes, I will begin the process of leaving each server, making whatever off-channel connections I need, then deleting my account, and either choosing or developing an alternative which suits my needs.

> They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!

Yes, and that's the problem. Manufactured consent cannot be used as a justification for further manufactured consent.