Discord: Unveiling the Dark Side of Business
As an avid gamer, Discord first came into my life as a friendly way to chat with friends while playing. But over time, this cutesy little app revealed major dark sides I now want to warn fellow gamers about.
Discord may still help connect gaming communities. However, its rampant security flaws, privacy intrusions, content harms and shadowy China links should concern all users worldwide. Here‘s why it‘s time to reset expectations on Discord and other unicorn startups putting growth above all else.
Growth Above All Else
Discord captures why the Silicon Valley model of hypergrowth at any cost needs rethinking. Instead of prioritizing safety, ethics or civic duty, Discord‘s entire existence fixates on inflating its user base to maximize speculative value.
With zero ads or profits, its multi-billion-dollar valuation stems purely from securing colossal engagement then selling the promise of data, surveillance opportunities or censorship capabilities. This hits hard as a gamer wanting an app that cherishes user experience – not just use and abuse.
CEO Jason Citron milks his cool gamer image while the platform aids extremism and systemic harassment. Its rocketing network effects actively help vileness multiply faster too.
Remember classic innovations like radio and TV also began bright-eyed before their innate addiction and peer pressure models caused mass polarization. Unchecked, Discord may similarly devolve into an amplifier for societal darkness rather than light.
Tencent Ties: Enabling Tyranny
Discord top brass can ignore ethics in chasing capital as they expect China‘s Tencent to buy them out anyway. Tencent owns 48% of Epic Games (makers of Fortnite), 84% of Supercell (Clash games), and chunks of Activision, Ubisoft and Paradox.
Now Discord is its latest gaming chat conquest, continuing the compromise of this artform so meaningful to countless lives. Perhaps Citron cares little if he hands Chinese state cronies limitless gamer data or censorship powers. As a gamer, this makes my stomach turn.
Through its gaming stakes, Tencent has already enabled mass surveillance and enforced Chinese Communist Party diktats. Gamers tasted this directly when Tencent-owned Riot Games globally banned an esports player for supporting Hong Kong democracy protesters. No dissent allowed.
Imagine China‘s gloved hands in Discord‘s workings. Any anti-regime jokes or Taiwan flag emojis could end in punishment for mere digital dissidence. And consider Tencent‘s coming blows against wider liberties via gaming and internet regulation.
For evidence, see WeChat app censorship extending China‘s Great Firewall into everyday life for over 1 billion Chinese citizens. Quitting WeChat means exclusion from society, showing the immense coercion citizens face. Now Tencent penetrates Western lives while paying lip service to our rules as it indoctrinates and monitors more users worldwide into its ecosystem.
Harming The Vulnerable
Discord‘s gamer chat focus means young user safety should be an immense priority. Yet power-hungry expansion plans have repeatedly failed users.
Over the years, the platform has enabled doxxing, swatting attacks, revenge porn leaks, self-harm content and rampant harassment. Victims report their abuse claims falling on deaf ears as Discord makes its calculus – lose one user or risk platform profitability and scale? Scale easily wins.
This coldly transactional thinking overlooks long-term wounds inflicted especially on vulnerable youth. Across online gaming and culture, marginalized groups like women, people of color and LGBTQIA persons already battle daily hate. Protecting them matters more than Discord‘s next billion.
Personally seeing multiple friends leave gaming spaces after relentlessly sexist, racist attacks, Discord‘s ability to casually harbor sociopathic harms disgusts me doubly as a woman of color.
No surprise alt-right groups celebrated when picking Discord as their organizing hub before the violent 2021 Capitol insurrection too. Discord only belatedly banned them once mainstream backlash hit, showing where its priorities lie. And without fundamental reform, such patterns enabling extremism will only worsen.
Surveillance Capitalism For State Interests
Western platforms like Facebook and Google pioneered the dubious data mining of users for profit only. Now China transforms this surveillance capitalism model explicitly for state interests.
By investing worldwide in apps like Discord, Tencent seeks to hoover up data on foreign populations – for aggregation into psychologically-rich profiles on mass sentiment, relationships, beliefs, and influencers. These insights become incredibly potent for Chinese intelligence agencies to target propaganda, mold discourse, manipulate elections and castrate opponents.
It‘s cultural-informational warfare perfected for modern networks. And Discord‘s canal into 350 million young Western minds offers China a goldmine of meta data to craft behavioral nudges advancing Communist Party aims.
As a gamer disgusted by controlling institutions, this Tencent tie-up looks dreadful. Dissidents and marginalized communities already vulnerable in the physical world now get big tech systems exploiting them through virtual spaces as well.
And once surveillance infrastructure embeds itself so deeply into communication norms, good luck reversing its threats. Chinese-style algorithms may already crunch through Discord data to train even more potent versions inhibiting free expression worldwide.
Protections Must Match The Hazard
Discord now flaunts over 150 million active monthly users globally with projections of up to 500 million users soon. This explosion should alarm, not celebrate.
Unchecked, its network effects and lock-in effects actively help concentratate society‘s best and worst instincts onto one rogue platform. And handing China‘s state engines access to mold youth cultures worldwide poses civilizational threats.
We face a maelstrom of harms – whether extremism, misogyny or censorship – riding the tsunami of Discord‘s growth. Yet patchwork policies still treat the app with kid gloves just because it focuses on ‘friendly‘ gamers. This complacency courts disaster.
Contrast this with Europe‘s moves to heavily fine and regulate platforms like Instagram or TikTok for child safety breaches. Or Canada‘s fresh proposals to govern social media transparency and accountability including audits. Western nations need a radically firmer grip to control rogue actors in tech.
As citizens, we too must ward against select blindness because an app‘s tools feel useful initially. The fairest platforms also tend to win the fiercest user loyalty. But co-dependent relationships with destructive technologies will only lead societies – like proverbial frogs in slowly heating pots – towards darkened futures.
Technology built for control relegates all to pawns. Games and virtual worlds offer hope of transcending the bounds of flesh. Tencent and Discord now threaten that liberatory promise for millions by trading digital freedom for surveillance power.
With collective action and policy change, we can still create technology built upon wisdom and justice. But the hour runs short and platforms run amok. We all must awaken to reclaim what it means to live, play and question freely across physical and virtual realms before time expires.
The Endgame
Discord staying this course means it likely degenerates into: another division machine, accelerating extremism and hatred through networks. An all-seeing ear for Chinese authorities tracking dissidents. An exploitation hub harming society‘s vulnerable. And an indoctrination tool manipulating youth culture against human rights.
We all lose except amoral executives and soulless state capitalists running these systems behind the scenes for whom profits trump human damage. This dystopia is not inevitable. We paid Discord‘s bills; we can cut its cords and build something better aligned. But waking to tech‘s downsides is the needed first step.
I pray fervently that this company some of us once loved shows willingness to change. When enough gamers and citizens collectively demand reform, even giants must bend to people powered tides. But such optimism diminishes daily as revelations on Discord‘s harms keep surfacing. I urge all now to seriously consider: are its conveniences still worth the darkening costs to society and selves?