The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.
Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.
While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.
In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.
That’s what Discord did. We have free ways to talk to each other, but they made a way that they own.
With Discord you have to make an account with this one company.
There are no other “products” like this, “mandatory” products, outside of the internet. It’s even illegal. Antitrust laws date back to the Roman Empire. But we tolerate it online for some reason (and that reason is that we have to because it’s mandatory).
You might’ve heard this slogan before, but with Discord’s business model, “you are the product”. We’ve known about this stuff since 1973 but people still get sucked in (because they have to).
While the people who participate in a forum on Discord don’t have much of a choice, the people who start the forums do. If you are a community organizer, don’t choose Discord. At least not only Discord. The normal, classic internet tools like email, IRC, Fediverse or XMPP still exist.
And if you’re a lawmaker, a policy-maker, it’s time for you to step up.
I get this a lot from people who have a bad client for email or IRC or XMPP or whatever it might be. Yes, there are bad ones. But there are also good ones.