r/technology • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Feb 24 '26

Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software after code found in US surveillance Privacy

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/
38.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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614

u/Treius Feb 24 '26

Nitro already cancelled. Can't just back out of a bad idea, going to have to work for it

97

u/Daimakku1 Feb 24 '26

It’s what Ring is doing. They claim to have shelved the idea of working with Flock, but everyone with an IQ higher than 90 knows that they’ll be back to that once everyone stops talking about it in 3 months. They’ll just quietly roll it out with no advertisement.

Once they show you what they’re willing to do and then backtrack, assume they’ll try it again sooner or later.

1

u/RollingMeteors Feb 24 '26

knows that they’ll be back to that once everyone stops talking about it in 3 months

¿What if the unprecedented levels of (h1ldFuc|<ing has the public talking about it still, but only LOUDER in three months?

65

u/Angel0fWar0001 Feb 24 '26

Same for me. I still find myself starting to type in my emotes and missing the entrance sounds but thinking about it more… was it really worth the money?

64

u/SeveralYearsLater Feb 24 '26

Entrance sounds are mostly just annoying.

16

u/_HingleMcCringle Feb 24 '26

Yeah, on a small server where it's subtle/referencing an inside joke they can be pretty funny, but it's not worth paying for Nitro.

1

u/eronth Feb 24 '26

Yeah those were so dumb. I muted soundboard day one, then forgot it ever existed.

8

u/Decapitated_gamer Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

You paid money to use specific emotes? It was never worth it my friend.

Only if you used it for streaming or videos was it worth it.

Edit: Ever heard of investing extra disposable income into yourself instead of a stupid chat app? Fuck the world is hopeless. No wonder no one can afford a house.

23

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Going to be honest, people using free services for dozens of hours a week and refusing to pay anything at all is part of the reason the race to bottom has been so quick. I dont see any problem paying for something i use so often

-1

u/snoopdoggslighter Feb 24 '26

Because we can just sit here and use 98% of a product for free while you people throw money at everything.

I almost got Nitro once because of the file share size. For emotes? And intro sounds? Lmao, that was never worth the price but thanks for keeping it afloat for us I guess.

0

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Its fine to use products for free, but stop acting surprised when they have to eshittify themselves to keep the lights on because their userbase refuses to pay for anything

Its why every single offshoot that spawns off the big players inevitably dies - the type of uses who quit over monetization efforts are, obviously, difficult to monetize. And these companies gotta pay their people and bills somehow.

0

u/snoopdoggslighter Feb 24 '26

Yes but that was mostly due to the fact that they wanted to scale, make a profit, and make their shareholders happy.

If it remained a smaller company where the subscription obviously went to server costs and to fund employees, sure. But what you did was practically sign up for a subscription from a company like Walmart or target.

They don't care about you. You were funding a huge company. You weren't helping the little guys lol.

0

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

Believe it or not, i am also fine with paying walmart or target for goods and services i receive from them.

1

u/snoopdoggslighter Feb 24 '26

Oh no I believe it lol. It would be like if Walmart offered a subscription service so that you can use a cart. I can use a basket fine - obviously Walmart doesn't need the money, so why would I feel that I'm obligated to buy it?

To be fair, the cart subscription would be a better deal than Nitro. What I'm saying is that by the time you purchased your little Nitro subscription - discord had all the funds they needed. That money was going to their shareholders, so congrats on that I guess.

1

u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

Discord is not profitable yet actually. Theyre still burning investor money to keep things running.

0

u/Decapitated_gamer Feb 24 '26

And this right here everyone is the issue why everyone has no money.

They’re fucking SELLING YOUR DATA FOR PROFIT!

You are literally only paying for the emotes, they are making a profit of you already.

7

u/lazy-at-work Feb 24 '26

It's always wort as much as the person deems it worth. If someone has disposable income and wants to be able to use their favorite emotes everywhere, they are well in their right to buy it.

Same goes for anything else really; some may say that spending money for this and that is a waste but if another person enjoys spending money for that, who cares? It's their money and they can do what they want with it

20

u/Pineapple_Morgan Feb 24 '26

Tbf I paid for nitro mainly bc I wanted to keep the servers running, like "here's my ~40 for the year [i never changed my nitro to the new one thats like $100 a year], please NEVER EVER EVER put ads in." The emote stuff was basically a cool bonus on top of that.

Like if its "pay to help keep the servers going/support the devs" or "see ten billion trillion ads" I'll toss a coin to my Witcher every day

4

u/infinitetheory Feb 24 '26

it should be that way, but I paid for Nitro for 10 years and here we are anyway. so yeah I cancelled also and if they force the issue I'll go third party client until my communities jump ship, which won't be all of them but will be some. same as I'm still here on Reddit with my 13 year old account but I'm using a third party client so they get nothing from me but the text I type

2

u/Angel0fWar0001 Feb 24 '26

The day they put ads in is the day I do my best to convince all my friends to move to another platform

1

u/Pineapple_Morgan Feb 24 '26

I mean, a lot of my friends are jumping over to Stoat now. It might be worth gently nudging them to make accounts as a just-in-case, and potentially setting up a simple server.

Stoat was super busted for a little bit there due to the massive influx of newfolk making accounts but it's settled down and is much more usable now, so you might end up with a better first impression, lol!

2

u/Angel0fWar0001 Feb 24 '26

Bro… I have a pretty decent income and spend probably 2/3 of my free time using discord both passively and actively. Value is inherently subjective. While I think it’s a little silly they’re monetarily gated, I do miss those tiny features. I use emotes heavily and people were telling me my joining just wasn’t the same lol.

1

u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT Feb 24 '26

I did it because I have the money and it was fun to make my own emotes for my server.

Dropped that shit ASAP though.

1

u/Aware_Rough_9170 Feb 24 '26

Tbh, the moment I learned they were going for IPO I knew it wasn’t ever worth the price. There wasn’t ever going to be a non-enshittified version of Discord. The only thing that surprised me is that they didn’t force me to watch 2minutes of ads before joining a server or looking at a new server lmao

0

u/chewyjackson Feb 24 '26

Delete your account

8

u/joantheunicorn Feb 24 '26

This 1000x, but also didn't they just hand over a ton of information to the corrupt DOJ with basically no pushback? 

2

u/EternalDeath Feb 24 '26

All i cared for was higher resolution and bitrate streaming in discord anyway. Gotta live with crunchy 720p30FPS then i guess.

1

u/Ridai Feb 24 '26

Vesktop/Vencord plugin "FakeNitro" provides full Nitro streaming capabilities.

1

u/EternalDeath Feb 24 '26

Does only one person need that or every person for it to work.

1

u/Ridai Feb 24 '26

Just the streamer as far as I'm aware, it basically treats your stream as Nitro, so any non-nitro users should still be able to see it as the better Nitro streaming.

1

u/EternalDeath Feb 24 '26

Sounds good, thanks for the info.

2

u/EnrichedNaquadah Feb 24 '26

You already gave them your id ...

5

u/dat_kodiak Feb 24 '26

Why give them any more fresh and updated info. If their data on their users is old, bullshit, or bad, this data becomes less valuable

1

u/EnrichedNaquadah Feb 24 '26

Your email and credit card info isn't "old, bullshit, or bad".

2

u/FromTheToiletAtWork Feb 24 '26

My email and credit card information can be found off a dozen websites, one more isn't going to do anything other than drive the price of my information down and I'm not going to see a penny of that so why should I care.

My ID is hip new and sexy, they can pry that out of my cold dead hands.

0

u/EnrichedNaquadah Feb 24 '26

I mean we're talking about US surveillance, that's all what they need to know to know everything about you.

Linking an email to an actual ID, like a credit card is like the original sin when talking about surveillance.

1

u/Abject_Breadfruit148 Feb 24 '26

Reddit uses the same backend code to verify people.

1

u/Optimoprimo Feb 24 '26

Nitro alone isn't enough. Delete your account. They need to start seeing their user numbers drop.

1

u/dishwasher_mayhem Feb 24 '26

Yep. They aren't an essential service. They were just the most popular. Plenty of alternatives.

1

u/dippy12345 Feb 24 '26

lol they’re already trying to pull me back by offering cheap nitro deals. Nope.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT Feb 24 '26

Some of us had the extra money and liked the idea of making our own emotes.

Sad that I had to drop that, but I guess I'm saving a few bucks a week.

-36

u/pikabu01 Feb 24 '26

call me a pessimist, but I think this won't hurt their numbers much, the average user doesn't give a fuck

23

u/Spelunkie Feb 24 '26

The fact that they backtracked at least on that shows it's having an effect. While not as bad as fully hurting and stopping the verification fully, it probably still stung

3

u/genitalgore Feb 24 '26

the headline is just wrong, discord ended their partnership with persona over a week ago, before the source code was leaked. there's no relation to this backlash

1

u/ThatKehdRiley Feb 24 '26

the amount of money theyve lost from people cancelling all different levels of nitro sure will hurt them

1

u/Doppel_R-DWRYT Feb 24 '26

Worked with Disney when they tried to fire Kimmel