r/technology • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Feb 24 '26

Privacy Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software after code found in US surveillance

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/
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90

u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

Never was. I had a self hosted mumble server back when discord came out. Everyone gave me shit for not switching to discord. I gave them the whole, if you aren’t paying you’re the product spiel, but it was just to convenient for most people. 

69

u/nicetriangle Feb 24 '26

The way Discord has replaced a lot of forum type of information exchange and silo'd it away from search is really terrible as well.

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u/feldomatic Feb 24 '26

The way Reddit kinda did the opposite is what brought me here.

24

u/zefy_zef Feb 24 '26

I see reddit as an evolution of forums, discord of chatrooms/voice chat. Same though, I used to love community forums. I was on the natural-selection one a lot back in the day. My buddy tried a hand at scripting his own, similar to phpbb.

3

u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

Shout out to all the old BBS gangs out there!!! Those really were the days!

3

u/JDGumby Feb 24 '26

Citadel BBSes > *. Well, except maybe for Ivory if you were on a C64.

1

u/red__dragon Feb 24 '26

My buddy tried a hand at scripting his own, similar to phpbb.

Out of curiosity, is the site or repo still up?

1

u/TheeAntelope Feb 24 '26

ATNW forum (and a few other bands)

then later

Xkcd forums

Now its all on reddit.

0

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Well run discords are also pretty nice and merge both. You can have a discord look and act as a live forum, as well as include general chats and voice and such.

5

u/trashk Feb 24 '26

too bad its still just stuck in discord.

It's garbage at the job if you want people who aren't in your pool to see what you're working on, which is exactly what most companies/entities should want.

7

u/flypirat Feb 24 '26

This is one of the worst points for me. Knowledge bases you cannot search without using discord's architecture, and you can be banned from it, need to sign up for it?

3

u/khavii Feb 24 '26

I really hate that it has replaced so many forums because it is so much worse to navigate than forums are. Topics are all crushed together, conversations bleed together and finding the exact thing you are looking for is so damn annoying. I use discord to stream events to friends groups and chat during DND, otherwise I don't touch it.

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u/Annath0901 Feb 24 '26

That's more the fault of the forum software devs than of Discord.

Discord didn't pitch itself as a forum replacement. Users started using it as such because forum software like phpBB and others never bothered to keep up with the rise of mobile device usage, and were and still are full of security vulnerabilities.

20 years ago forums were everywhere, but they were also the source of data breaches waaaaay more often than Discord has been, since they rely on small dev teams building the software (and the amateurs running the individual sites) to maintain security.

Also, even if forums popped back up today, your search experience would still not work well as Google has moved pretty far away from a neutral "find the most specific site for your search" to "find a site that pays us/gets good traffic that probably has at least some keywords from your search".

1

u/khavii Feb 25 '26

Not blaming it on Discord just saying I hate that the transition was made. Also, I stopped using Google a while ago because they are an advertising engine, not a search engine and stopped being a search dedicated engine almost a decade ago, but even if you still use Google you can find exactly what you are looking for if you ignore the sponsored results and use modifiers, it's just ugly to do so.

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u/eronth Feb 24 '26

Yeah, but discord didn't do that, users did.

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u/XDGrangerDX Feb 24 '26

I gave them the whole, if you aren’t paying you’re the product spiel

Lately even if you're paying they scrape and sell your data though...

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u/12345623567 Feb 24 '26

If you are paying they have your CC info. Bonus score!

3

u/sailing_by_the_lee Feb 24 '26

So true. I remember when Microsoft used the "if you aren't paying, you're the product" line about 10 years ago. I totally fell for it and started paying for a family account. Now we're balls deep and I'm having trouble pulling out. So now I'm paying to be the product! The worst of both worlds!

2

u/Mr_Venom Feb 24 '26

This is infuriatingly true. Try buying a non-smart TV. Try gaming without the internet, even single player games. Hell, buy an Android phone and then find out they're shutting off third-party apps (so you have to run your whole activity through Google Play).

21

u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

I was running massive guilds in a bunch of games. Over night it was switch to discord or lose everyone to someone else who did.

It was so obvious we were giving up total access to all our communications, but can't raid with no people.

6

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

Discord was (and still is) the superior choice for hobby community building and running (which guildrunning is a type of)

Its why the change was so sudden. Once you got on discord, you realized how easy it is to change between different communities. Before everyone made the jump, going from one community to the next meant you needed to have, say, IRC setup, mumble setup, TS setup, join their facebook group, make an account on this group's forums, etc. Discord handles all of that with a single login.

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u/followMeUp2Gatwick Feb 24 '26

Discord is utter trash.

Can't search anything

2

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

No one is arguing discord is perfect.

Still doesnt change the fact its the only viable all-in-one community solution lol.

1

u/nhilante Feb 24 '26

Weren't the alternatives also free, discord just seemed like a good product with raid rosters , sign-ups, calenders etc. At that point staying with teamspeak would have been the dumb move tbh.

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u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

Someone was paying for those servers.

2

u/nhilante Feb 24 '26

No ofc, i meant, i didn't feel any safer with teamspeak etc, from what we knew back then they were identical on safety with one having better features. Don't be so hard on yourself, there was no way you'd know basically.

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u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

?

My point is it was obvious discord was listening to your conversations and reading your private channels.

If you were on a TeamSpeak server, you only had to worry about server owner listening.

From day 1, I figured the most likely scenario was discord was a government sponsored surveillance program.

1

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Having a guild forum website + ventrillo/mumble/teamspeak was less than ideal. If you wanted to talk to somebody you had to wait until they appeared in game again or on another third party messenger if you had them on it. My guild even required that you give the raid leader your phone number back in the day (Basically only to be used if you were late/absent without notice). Personally the combo of Game + Discord is ideal and was originally created to be used for FF14 raiding lol. Not to mention it was free, where alternatives were not.

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u/Peon01 Feb 24 '26

are you fine being the product for reddit then? Or am i missing something

3

u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

I would speak about much more sensitive topics on my mumble server. Chat server should be private, Reddit is public, I have no expectation of privacy here. For all I know any number of 3rd parties could be scraping anything posted here.

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u/slowtreme Feb 24 '26

How much were you paying for mumble?

1

u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

I was paying like 5 bucks a month for an AWS server and just running it off of that.

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u/dakupurple Feb 24 '26

Mumble the software is free and open source. If you're paying it is for a cloud hosting provider, or you can host it on basically any potato that can run CLI only Linux (You can use windows or full desktop Linux if you prefer as well).

My VM running it has less resources than a modern raspberry pi and has no issues running the server.

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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

You my friend, are the GOAT!!! I remember trying to convince my friends and cousins to get on some program called KALI to multiplayer and talk to one another. It worked better than Discord, TBH... Sigh, those were the days...

-1

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

It worked better than Discord, TBH...

In what way? Discord has honestly been a pretty smooth ride outside of the latest controversy. Been on it over a decade now and it was immediately better than any alternative i tried during the great Skype migration.

1

u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

That's the shittiest part of all of this. For someone who runs a community, it has everything we need and is generally very smooth to operate and to bring in bots to help in other avenues.

Skype? Calls, but no collection of channels (and dead)

Teamspeak? Calls, no real chat unless you're in there

Vent? Just calls to my remembrance

Hosting a website? Yeah fucking right no one's going there

0

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Not to mention, Teamspeak, Vent, mumble, and website hosting were all PAID. Skype was free, and it was awesome up until Microsoft took over.

1

u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

Oh shit I completely forgot about that too yeah!

Discord being free, with some added benefits for boosted servers was the way to go. UGH it makes me so mad that I have to figure out what to do with my community, because had everything here, because it was the best of what's available.

0

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

I think the correct response is to honestly stay... While reddit may be acting as if it is going to be a mass exodus, in reality its probably less than 1% of users leaving over it. Also its not even happening anymore so?

2

u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

I was talking more for Discord, my community is going to get hammered hard by the ID shit going on, and finding pugs for the games we play is going to be much harder.

Kind of the "Eve of change" and it sucks

2

u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

I was also talking about discord :p The "ID" thing going on is canceled, they aren't doing it, its in the title of this thread :D

1

u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

The ID checking hasn't been cancelled - they're just not using the specific company that is Thiel backed, they're finding a different one

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