The Dark Side of Discord (And best Solutions and Alternatives!)

i want to start by saying i like discord seriously it's a great platform that i've used for years now and i even like the new logo and redesign yeah fight me it's actually properly centered now people i don't know why you don't like it and to top it all off my favorite community of ours is our discord community and i think part of the reason for that is discord is probably one of if not the best places in 2021 to host a community however there are some serious red flags about discord things that are easy to ignore but really really need to be talked about so let's bring it out into the open worst case scenario you'll just learn something new today best case scenario leads to actual change and make a service you already enjoy better two issues several things you can do to make those issues better and some discord alternatives as well that's the layout for this video it's a fun video let's start with issue one centralization trust and sketchiness discord's history starts with a company called open faint open faint was a mobile social gaming network that allowed app developers to add social networking into their apps including facebook connect integrations and other nifty things you might be asking why i'm talking about some random company it's because the open faint founder was jason citron who's the same person who was part of building discord the red flags already start as open faint was sold to a japanese company for over a hundred million dollars followed by a class-action lawsuit claiming open faint access monitored and stored the unique device identifiers for mobile devices along with personally identifiable information such as a user's exact gps location internet browsing history and facebook and twitter profiles this was all done in a way that bypasses technical and code barriers designed to limit unauthorized access on mobile devices which is a big note that's like they're going around the wall and doing things improperly lack of proper business models tends to lead to companies taking desperate measures like what happened with open faint fast forward to discord and its business model is a great conversation to have since there's no way the freemium model of discord alone can keep it going discord is heavily dependent on venture capitalist funding which alone is not a sustainable business model many of the early backers were counting on an acquisition from amazon or another tech company which was unsuccessful for years 2021 is keeping things a bit interesting as supposedly their talks with microsoft did fall through and sony ended up purchasing a minority stake in the company to help develop discord for the playstation i want to establish very early in this video that the founder of discord has misused user data has been accused of selling out his users then proceeds to start a new gaming oriented social network built with venture capitalist funding with again no clear business model really just waiting to be acquired by a massive tech company who's also unlikely to value you the users i don't think i need to further break down the obvious issues and red flags here nothing yet has happened but it doesn't mean it's not happening and it won't happen down the road aside from their business model and early history discord has also gone through a good number of scandals that are worth bringing up to start with story one discord has a trust and safety team with elevated privileges to take some executive actions on communities who may be violating the discord terms of service seems fair enough it's easy to forget though that there are real people doing this these are real individuals in 2019 a community on discord claimed a vanity url for their community which was then requested individually by a rival community who wanted the same url after denying them the url that vanity url was then revoked the same day with no reasoning whatsoever that same url was then quietly released shortly after which was then claimed by the rival community all points of evidence point to the user of the rival community actually being a part of the discord trust and safety team from similar profile pics to timing of the events and just clear motives it's kind of spooky to think about that they have that kind of control there are several more discord scandals i'll leave in the sources below but in the interest of time i'm going to assume you see where i stand on issue 1 regarding centralization and trust of discord since discord is a position of complete dominance over their users now all these issues are not necessarily even unique to discord most social media platforms and other places to host communities are through centralized services that also suffer very similar if not the same exact issues but you as a user of these platforms need to be absolutely aware that when you're using them you are at their whim of what is deemed okay or not okay on any given day you are handing over all control to a central entity who may or may not have your best interest in mind and i'm not personally confident discord is the correct company to handle this massive responsibility based on several of these outline issues i also personally feel that discord gets a lot of slack in this space because oh look oh so cute it says fun things when it starts up look at that but they are ultimately no different than the facebooks and googles of the world in fact i'm sure they'd love to be bought out by one of them one day now issue two is what i'm especially passionate about and it's the privacy and security of discord let's just break down the facts discord collects absolutely everything you do inside the program and application every single thing you touch inside the app is logged in an event containing your user id a unique event id a timestamp and a detailed description of exactly what you did this can be something as simple as switching a channel inside a server changing your username really anything every click is logged and stored indefinitely the worst part is even some things outside of the program are tracked as well like game executables and other system specific information and sometimes it can even include very personal information that discord never really needs to have in the first place so the telemetry and information about everything happening on your device is absolutely collected by discord cool noted the obvious next point is everything you send regardless if it's in a dm or in a public server is absolutely not private there is no end-to-end encryption whatsoever on discord more on this later and every image attachment or thing you say can be pursued by discord staff and even if you love discord staff because you love them oh their profile pics are so cute you should think of the possibilities of future data breaches discord is collecting mountains of valuable data from millions of people and this makes them a massive target for hackers and other people who see value in this all it takes is one breach for every message ever sent on discord to become public information perhaps the worst part about this is there's really no recourse for you discord has these oh so great privacy toggles but they don't have any impact on what's actually been collected by discord seriously they do nothing what they do is they tell the discord server to delete the data as soon as the server receives the data but that same data is still being sent from your device regardless of whether or not these toggles are enabled there's also no way to guarantee discord even follows up on their promise to delete that data on their end um there's just so many reasons that this is wrong i can't really handle it i'm amazed it's even legal to be honest under gdpr companies are required when requested to delete all associated user data through their service more specifically this is called the right to be forgotten if you delete your discord account you want to delete all data associated with your account discord will legitimately not do this rather than deleting all the thousands of messages you've ever sent they'll just make your username deleteduser in order to anonymize your messages this is just an absolute joke and in no way fits the requirements of being forgotten the wildest part is discord offers users no way of mass deleting their own messages in fact they ban users for using tools that mass delete their own messages so there really is no foolproof way to properly delete your discord messages discord won't do it and they don't formally allow you to do it discord here is in complete violation of gdpr and gdpr aside the fact you as a user have no ability to formally mass delete your messages is a horrendous oversight that even people like facebook get right the takeaway for this whole issue here is discord is proving they are a data hungry company with zero thought to user privacy and security even facebook again offers the ability for end-to-end encryption which would prevent the company from reading the messages and offering at least a layer of privacy but this is something discord has refused to offer going as far to not offering a way to delete all user data and even banning users if they attempt to do so themselves make no mistake this is designed purposefully discord is a data driven company and if you're asking why that matters it's because in the perfect world these are your communities and your data not some massive company who is surely abusing this information for profit influence and control if you say you have nothing to hide or you don't really care you're only a part of the bigger problem and preventing the world from looking like this so those are the two massive issues with discord that i feel are under discussed and wanted to talk about ultimately though discord is a great platform to be on and is arguably one of the best places to have a community so what can be done to address some of these issues let me give you some step-by-step solutions step one keep it inside your browser keeping discord in your browser inside its own progressive web app will prevent it from gathering as much system information and it'll be more properly sandboxed from other things you do we'll do more with this soon step 2 make sure to follow the basic universal privacy and security advice that's almost always given use 2fa to help protect your account use a strong password we have a video and password managers we recommend use an alias email simple login is phenomenal and we recently reviewed how great of a service it is avoid handing over your legit number if possible this is getting harder and harder but if you can use a secondary number with discord or none at all that is fantastic be cautious with the information you share and assume it'll be public even your dms discord again has full access to everything you do and rather than trusting a massive company like discord who will likely be bought out by another tech company who will then take over your data just don't post sensitive information in the first place and keep it to yourself disable the superficial toggles i guess though i would assume this doesn't do anything to be safe more on how to actually prevent some of this soon deny permissions especially on mobile discord probably doesn't need your contacts and locations so don't give it to them and finally you can use a vpn if you want to prevent discord from knowing your ip address but this is honestly one of the smaller concerns with discord step three stop the telemetry since discord lives in your browser right install u-block origin which honestly you should be using already and add the two routes they used to conduct telemetry inside of ubo there is still no guarantee this is everything but it's the best we've got and it'll surely stop at least something step four limit the number of devices discord lives on i think this is pretty straightforward less is more step five improvements are improvements if you can get even a single conversation with a friend to move to a better place then that's a win small steps forward are still valuable and we'll talk about alternatives soon step six proceed with caution here there are unofficial clients that are better for privacy as well as message deletion bots the effectiveness of either of these are up for debate and they can both risk your accounts being banned so they're not recommended by us but be aware they do exist though they very much break the discord terms of service and don't come crying in the comments when your account gets banned aside from solutions let's talk about discord alternatives again you don't have to completely ditch discord but moving even some things away from it can be an incredibly effective thing to do over time first true discord alternatives rocket.chat is privacy friendly and self-hostable which is incredible this is just great but usability is meh compared to discord and it is a lower key project which some of you may not be a fan of slack is an option that's incredibly similar to discord but more with an emphasis on the professional crowd the problem is it's not like slack is really well known for privacy and security either and they suffer similar issues to discord so you're just kind of migrating to something different not necessarily something better same story with gilded but like i guess there's still alternatives worth mentioning second kinda discord alternatives matrix is a federated protocol that recently got spaces in its elements client people say matrix is a discord alternative and i currently very much disagree with that assessment um it can be like reworked to be semi similar to discord but it's just not quite like it regardless it has spaces it integrates with jitsi for video and audio calls and communities are definitely possible which is great we actually bridge our matrix and discord communities together which is a pretty neat setup that i'd recommend trying out um xmpp and mumble are two other kind of alternatives neither of which i would truly recommend to people unless they're very committed to leading discord and these are their only options to do so for whatever reason i'm not going to talk too much about them since i don't really think they're super useful for many of you watching anyway finally here are great platforms but not really discord alternatives signal is about as good as it gets when it comes to balancing privacy security and usability in one package if you can move your discord dms to signal which does have a desktop client by the way that's impressive signal can also handle small groups like a champ which may be able to replace a server you open for just your small friend group or a school group or something like that seriously signal does group audio and video calls and the groups are pretty decent so try it out if you can because it can replace some parts of discord pretty effectively telegram is another option similar to signal but it's kind of gross there are other messengers in our messengers video that may work for you though i would definitely say signal is probably your highest likelihood of success and there we have it we talked about some issues discord has and hopefully that alone at least makes you more aware and educated that even what seems like a great platform has very legitimate concerns i'd be even happier to hear from some of you that you implemented the kind of advice to make your discord experience a bit safer with the privacy and security tips that were shared earlier and i will do my best to heart every comment from those of you who actually move off discord in one way or another thanks to this video also please please share this video around not only does that mean a lot to us and helps us out but it also helps get the word out about how others can improve discord and make it better for all of us to use if you really liked our content you can support us we post all our content for free and if you want some exclusive behind the scenes and other fun tidbits be sure to join our patreon where you can help support our mission in spreading privacy to the masses finally join our community which is on discord or matrix they're bridged together so you can join either and interact with everyone it's like one massive community between two platforms it's also a great way to test matrix for the first time we'd be happy to have you all our links are below and you have yourself a great day

Channel: Techlore

Views: 61,995

Keywords: openfeint discord, dark side of discord, discord alternatives, discord privacy, discord scandals, discord privacy concerns, discord privacy policy, discord alternatives for gamers, discord security breach, openfeint, discord problems, discord issues, discord exposed, discord security, discord trolling, discord security settings, discord privacy settings, matrix messenger, element messenger, discord alternative guilded, slack, guilded, discord breach, techlore, Private messenger

Id: oHCK3NKFBW4

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021