You can’t create a Discord account without doxxing yourself. Signups not from an IP that discloses your location demand a dozen captchas and a telephone number. Using a burner number is not supported, and your carrier number is reversible to name/address/location just as your IP is.
The main issue with this viewpoint and your (arguably sensationalist) article is that it just finger points & blatantly ignores the reason those protections are in place.
The number of people that consider Discord part of their threat model or an actual privacy risk is incredibly tiny compared to the number of users that get inconvenience by mass bot raids & people bypassing IP bans.
I help manage a medium-sized Discord guild and we were randomly targeted by a bot raid whereby ~100 bots joined in the span of 1 minute and proceeding to spam various channels and the DMs of our users. Enabling Discord's requirement for a verified phone number stopped the raid in its tracks and allowed us to clean up without further issue.
In the same way, Discord's automatic content scanning is designed to protect the large percentage of minors on the platform & proactively deal with potentially exploitative material + guilds (per https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-transparency-report-apri...)
Removing these features & restrictions in order to appease your extreme edge-case privacy views does not help the average Discord user in the slightest.
You're absolutely right when you offer that the majority of people are not directly harmed by practices that are discriminatory. Discrimination is almost always aimed at circumstances that affect a minority of people.
It seems that you believe that you benefit from Discord's gatekeeping. I'm glad it seems to be working out for you. If it wasn't, however, how would you know?
Sorry, but no, you don't get to play a discrimination card here, because if we do, we're almost mocking people who are under real discrimination.
You don't agree with Discord's practices and lack of privacy, something which, by the way, I agree with you, and as such, decide not to use it. They are not discriminating against you, you're the one deciding not to use their service. To me, it sounds the same as if you don't like McDonalds because it's unhealthy, then accuse them of discriminating against you because they won't serve you some lean chicken salad.
The people doing the discrimination are the groups that choose Discord as their communications tool.
They are excluding all users who can’t get Discord accounts, such as those who can’t agree to the Discord TOS, for example. Free software projects and other public benefit groups should not be discriminatory.
They’re also banning political cartoons within their group’s
communications, by implicit inclusion of the Discord TOS which bans several common, normal, reasonable types of communication.
I’m a paying member of a local nonprofit organization; they use Discord exclusively to communicate. I am excluded from all of the discussions as a result of my not being able to safely get a Discord account. That’s discrimination whether you like to acknowledge it or not.
But that's the thing: You CAN agree to the TOS, you just choose to not, unless I'm severely misunderstanding your situation and you're in real, physical danger if you create a Discord account. For the sake of a better argument, can you clarify if you're in danger, or physically unable to create an account, or if it's a privacy choice, please?
Let’s set aside my personal circumstances: why must someone be in imminent physical danger for it to not be discrimination? Everyone has a human right to privacy, regardless of whether or not they are a famous person with a stalker who wants to track them down.
The presence or absence of threats against one’s person does not legitimize or delegitimize their insistence upon personal privacy.
I agree that it doesn't delegitimize your insistence upon personal privacy, and in fact, I'm in your camp with that, privacy is vital. My issue with the term is that, when you think in historical terms about discrimination, it's people being forced out of places/positions/society because of who they are.
The difference, in this case is that you're not being forced out of participating in conversations because you're, let's say, black. Instead, you, on your own, are opting out of communication channels because of your own beliefs.
There are API services that let you identify the type of number provided by the user. VoIP lines don't identify the same way as landlines which don't identify the same way as actual SIM-backed mobiles. They blacklist lots of providers and number types.
My first account I was able to get was via a number I rented on dtmf.io. The account was suspended (across all "servers" in Discord) in a few minutes when I linked a few of my IRL friends in a Discord chat to that Discord article on my own website. I've not been able to sign up again since, despite having blown something like 40EUR on numbers from different countries/providers trying to get a new one.
Even when it works, it's at least 10 minutes of solving CAPTCHAs to log in, each and every time, and sometimes the Google CAPTCHA hits some other exit node rate limit and just tells you to fuck off entirely, making login impossible even with a working account.
