The discord shit sucks, it's also not Discord's fault. Governments everywhere are pushing for this, and barely anyone has been talking about it. You're focusing on the wrong enemy.
If you don't mind, I have something to add. Please forgive any inaccurate information, the numbers aren't the point I'm trying to make, I just have a vested interest as you might be able to tell (my url).
I live in Australia. We recently had legislation hastily thrown together to blanket ban youth from social media as a knee-jerk reaction to a young, teen boy's "ai psychosis" induced suicide.
As it turns out, that legislation was pushed by the owners of the largest gambling companies operating in the country. They had been pitching it to the government for months prior, and this kid's suicide was the perfect excuse. (Not sure if that was misinformation in the end, but it certainly lends itself to my point. Hooray for logical fallacies!)
Why would gambling ceos turn away their most impressionable targets?
To lay the foundation of control, and to keep their own shady practices out of the limelight.
Kids will circumnavigate a ban if they have to. Proven by the use of the old man in gmod to fool facial recognition in the UK.
The gambling ceos know this.
And it's illegal to advertise gambling to children, right?
They know this, too.
So what if there was a legal way to shift the blame off of the gambling ads and onto the kids?
"We'll they shouldn't have been on <insert platform>! You have to be of legal gambling age to be on <insert platform>! It's not our fault this young adult is gambling all their money away!" - This is called plausible deniability.
The children never mattered.
Almost all major social media companies are now legally bound to follow this legislation or face consequences: something to the tune of millions of dollars per infraction (that's per child, not per class action lawsuit). This should ring alarm bells. Who likes money? Who needs money to survive?
Trick question. No one *needs* money to survive.
Money is a convenient way of trading for all the grain and meat that you actually need.
Social media companies all have their own sketchy stream of revenue to shift the limelight off, primarily, gambling ads (in Australia at least).
In the case of discord, their microcosm revolves around the current standard capitalistic practice of making you pay for features that were previously free and adding cosmetics, while not actually adding anything useful to the app. Once they find an excuse to implement ad space for external products, I guarantee they will.
If running as many live services as discord does costed them nothing, they wouldn't charge nearly as much to put the same amount of wealth in the pockets of the ceo. They would still charge, to be clear, though the ratio of wealth distribution would differ.
But that's beside the point.
The fact of the matter is that it's far more profitable to obey in advance.
The loss of revenue withdrawing entirely from a country as large and "first-world" as Australia is simply too great.
"Teen-by-default" is discord's solution to this problem of it's potentially illegally wide net. It's plausible deniability. It's a child lock that you have to pay to remove. It's... not actually an issue for them atm? The kicker *is* the potential fines implemented by the government.
Not to mention that the supposed idea the Australian Government wanted to use to enforce the ban was to have users send a photo of a legal document with identifying information to a third-party. Lends itself handily to the framework of a surveillance state, imo, but I digress.
So... Why not double down? Why not future-proof the tried-and-true ad-roll?
Down the line, everything goes to shit and everyone pays up. If my government ends up finding a way to actually enforce this half-assed attempt at virtue-signalling, then the rest of the capitalists and authoritarians around the world will take notice and follow suit.
Domino, butterfly, ripple. Call it what you want, but it *is* that deep, even if you haven't heard about it.
I recognise the Streisand effect of saying this could be detrimental, but who even cares about this unprofitable hellsite enough to drone strike my music career.
This is a joke in recognition of my relative privilege, but it actually segues into a very good point.
Tumblr has already outlived a few ceos because we're just on here using our imagination. There's nothing they can make you pay for that isn't baked into the identity of the site. Images and text are the sticks and dirt of social media, why do you think there are so many dog-girls on here?
Facebook was once the same, but then they started selling ad space, and their user base was dumb enough to care about buying random products they don't need.
We're not that stupid. Even if we were, it'd be like trying to sell cars to toddlers: We don't have the money, nor do we care.
Tumblr isn't profitable, that's why it's lived for so long. Also the general lack of streamlined programming in the back end simply makes it far too easy to use ad blockers, but anyway.
All in all, discord is not a person and can't be "at fault". You can't eat a Wumpus, so eat the rich instead.
It brings me no joy to announce that noted civil rights activist and former member of the t'ieves guild Remy Etienne "Gambit" LeBeau lost his greatest battle today to a 2005 Toyota Corolla
It brings me no joy to announce that noted civil rights activist and former member of the t'ieves guild Remy Etienne "Gambit" LeBeau lost his greatest battle today to a 2005 Toyota Corolla
this is my last self reblog not to clog my profile but: but it's important to have my black pride bunny on my account, he's a representation of something I learned to love abt myself. my blackness is to be celebrated.
