Discord

Discord is a great place to make communities and grow communication with others around them, but there comes a time when a company needs to listen & get their act together in hand when things get serious. It's been one heck of 2020-2021 (in a bad way). Even though I rate this 4 stars for having everything original, I am still disappointed in their lack of support to help get a ban reissued due to a self-promotion bot "Server Scam". It was a HUGE fatal & accidental click that turned to the worst back in May. Idk why this is a thing, but something needs to get done with these advertising bots that randomly appear in my dm's and provide no information on what servers thereon. It sucks and it stinks. All of this leading to getting my phone number whitelisted & gmail whitelisted too. I still TO THIS DAY disagree with the whole blocking phone number thing, I can get from the email system, but the phone number has nothing to do with anything. This limits me from having to join specific servers that have a system level to an extreme point ((meaning to verify and phone number in order to get in)) In my opinion, it's stupid and pathetic to have a server do that. I rate the app a 4 star, but their support is a middle of 2 & 3 or just flat out 0 the way how they handle accounts. ONE screw up, and you're done for. I recommend to everyone that is just starting to use Discord to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL & AWARE of what is going on. But I'll give it this, their newest feature release regards of the Banner Profile & Stickers is extremely well done and would love to see more features adding to their $9.99 Subscription on Discord Nitro. They're even adding an Integration Feature where you can identify yourself as someone completely different on this specific server which I really love that type of concept & to see happen. I'll give it that extra star because of their newest features that there revealing out to the public and making the application extremely fast and quick, with no lag and glitch.

Easy to use. Easy to add bots for automation.

The privacy policy of this service is atrocious. Not only does the company own your password, e-mail and the contents of every message you send, it also lays claim to the ownership of your sphincter. Furthermore, the Discord app demands to know EVERY program your computer is running!

Why?

So they can give a cute little status update saying "X is play Y game"? More likely they are doing analytics and datamining. They reserve the right to sell your data and the blood of your firstborn at their discretion. Even worse, your porn browsing habits and your accompanying personally identifying information they scoop up is never deleted. So if the company ever folds, they can just sell it for a mint and the next company will have more info about you than you do.

This is particularly alarming as the CEO of this company has a history of doing exactly the aforesaid.

In conclusion, if you use Discord you are a sucker and every company with an analytics contract, and therefore every employee of said company, will know you spend an unhealthy amount of time watching Japanese cartoons about little girls, waste your money on erotic VN's, and that you still don't know how to get past the sadpanda on exhentai despite trying since you were a teenager because you aren't particularly bright, which is why you're using discord after all.

Piss poor customer support, bad users littered with bad people, shitty subscription services, actually useful features behind a payway, there are better alternatives anyway, and toxic userbase

The good: It is available to pretty much any platform and allows many people or large groups to communicate well, including via voice chat.

The bad: They may eventually ask for your mobile SMS, kicking you off the platform if your phone number does not support SMS, is a virtual number, is a real number but someone used it already (very common), or if you do not have any mobile number at all, you will be unable to use your account anymore.

They will also not give a valid reason as to why they are doing this. When it happened to me, I only ever logged in from one single location, never shared password with anyone, never used a VPN, never connected on a public network, never spammed chat, never acted rude or otherwise misbehaved, and never did anything else malicious.

I don't even understand how providing SMS will even do much to stop most bad things. Bots and such can get numbers for quite cheap if they really want, or they can just create a new account since it took many years before Discord ever decided to lock me out. It's stupid.

At the moment, I hate discord. I shouldn't post a score, because to me, it has a negative value. It takes up space, and it pretends to offer a service. However, I have to turn OFF most of the crap it offers as "features" because in my mind, they're security holes, and they're ON BY DEFAULT. That's right, it's the old Windows security model. Ship the app bent and spread, and then sue anyone who comments about it. One star, but the true rating of the app is NEGative.

The good
Free, quality is good, barebones forum/ newsgroup, best real time high quality screen share, can automate stuff and/with addons.

The bad.

1. Central servers, who knows who is doing what with your text, images, voice and video data. Since someone must pay for the massive data use, be sure your data is sold.
2. Defaults capture a lot of what you do on your PC. Process monitor!
3. They trick you to pay for stuff, it is called bump. Would be fine if the data was not sold.