Discord

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.

Discord reserves itself the right to sell all your data, including everything you say, share or upload, to third parties. Read the terms of service before you use it!

Not a very good product if you're a free speech absolutist, as they censor taboo art, and at one point tried to ban saying "kys".

Your information is not safe with this company. Staff and various 3rd party data mining organizations are monitoring everything that goes on on this platform. Look up investors who have invested in discord in the past 2 years.

"Discord is spyware because it collects all information that passes through its communication platform. As Discord is a centralized communication platform, all communications have to go through Discord's official servers, where all of that information can potentially be recorded. The vast majority of said information has been confirmed to be recorded, such as all communications between users. Discord has also been confirmed to use other spyware features such as various forms of telemetry. Discord's main source of income is from investment, from which it has received over $279.3 million dollars[4]. Discord cannot be built from source and the source code for Discord is unavailable."

"Discord confirms that it collects large amounts of sensitive user data
Discord explicitly confirms in its privacy policy[1] that it collects the following information:

IP Address
Device UUID
User's e-mail address
All text messages
All images
All VOIP data (voice chat)
Open rates for e-mail sent by Discord"

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html

Closed source

Uploads personal information

Hooks into system to monitor other apps

Comical privacy policy

Nope

It used to be alright, but I'm not a fan of it anymore. It overstepped some boundries, and added a few "features" that I'm not keen on.

Not only does discord do whatever they want with your private information, they also have the worst trust and safety team possible.
I got banned 6 times with no good motives except that one guys in their team doesn't like me and my opinions
Bad app, use something else

The desktop program is spyware that scans all your running programs. Look it up.

Always log in to discord from your browser.

Great UI, not so great if you like free speech or decisions regarding what goes being in your hands.
Uses Google Recaptcha pretty aggressively too.

I would still use it over Skype for what it's worth, but that aint saying much.

There's no such thing as free. Discord is an amazing service, but it comes at the cost of your privacy. If you have a problem with companies mining your personal data (you should) then please, use alternative software. If you can't, sign up with false information and a throwaway email, and try not to have private discussions during chats or calls. There are plenty of other options to choose from: Jami, Jitsi, qTox, Mumble, to name a few.

Great for communities and easy to use but for a pure voice comm app I prefer the lightweight and reliable TeamSpeak.

I always used the browser version as I had a bad feeling about downloading the client which turned out to be an accurate instinct. The installer gives not so much as an option to control install location. I clicked the executable and the app shortly opened. It had immediately rummaged somewhere to find my existing account used in the browser. Unlike the browser version, the app was keen to know if I'd like to add existing Facebook contacts... Also auto enabled itself to launch on startup.

When I came to uninstall the app, it was not listed in the ControlPanel->UninstallAProgram but in the Windows10Settings->Apps->Apps and features. Uninstall did not remove all folders and files. I spent some time hunting down all content, almost entirely in the AppData. Had to restart the PC as despite having used the uninstaller, the folders were in use by an application.
Felt more like I was dealing with a virus than reputable software.

If you don't like applications doing things for you and prefer a high level of control, stick to the browser version. If you want voice comms in a browser, this seems to be the best option. There are favourable alternatives if you're willing to download.

I will continue to use Discord as a browser-based hub for communities.

Discord collects huge amounts of data on its users, there is no privacy at all, as everything is hosted on their servers and monitored by them. The desktop app monitors everything that's running on your computer and sends it back to Discord as well.

The program itself is good, it allows you to chat to your friends and easily create your own server.

However, the development team does not listen at all to the community, they continuously update the layout and make it more and more clogged with things you do not need and make the whole process of chatting with your friends more complicated.

The UI looks nice at first glance but isn't very comfortable for use on a desktop.
Light theme has light text and hurts your eyes