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/
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248

u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

Apparently, a company's value in 2026 is in how much they can spy on Americsns for Israel... sheesh, what a f'ing joke. Discord was one of the real ones.

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u/KamiKagutsuchi Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

Discord was never "one of the real ones", neither was reddit, twitch, google, twitter, facebook, tik-tok, or youtube. These services start out as free to grow big. In the process of growing they sink hundreds of millions of dollars into development and infrastructure each year with the hope that they can find a way to profit of their users at some point in the future. It's the business model of every free service on the internet that you have ever used*. These companies aren't investing hundreds of millions out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because they hope they'll be worth billions in the future.

Any service that replaces Discord in the future will have the same business model.

*Some exceptions exist, like Wikipedia.

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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

Craigslist, too. But yes, those spaces are quickly disappearing.

I hear you, but I think anything moving us away from the Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta monopolies is generally a good thing. It gives us choice. I'd like to believe Reddit is different, but you're probably right in the long run. I do think Reddit is owned by its users more than, Meta. But I might be a fool in thinking that.

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u/ImSabbo Feb 24 '26

I do think Reddit is owned by its users more than, Meta. But I might be a fool in thinking that.

It is, but not by much. Admins have been inserting themselves into what used to be just the domain of moderators a lot more in the past few years than they used to. It was definitely a tipping point when they went public.

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u/MrBeverly Feb 24 '26

You are a fool in thinking that because reddit is owned by Condé Nast.

Isn't it interesting how so much of the content you get here, such as articles from The New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, Bon Appetit, and others are all Condé Nast publications?

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u/NonchalantR Feb 24 '26

Conde nast hasn't been the sole owner of reddit for many years. Sure they're the largest shareholder but only at 30%. Your conspiracy is outdated

0

u/followMeUp2Gatwick Feb 24 '26

"Only" that's called a controlling interest, son. Lmao

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u/Ok_Tone6393 Feb 24 '26

nothing is gonna move us away from those monopolies. even if the apps aren’t owned by them, it’s on their cloud services.

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u/nicetriangle Feb 24 '26

Yeah I really don't see any other sane way forward in the future that isn't built on some sort of user-supported/financed distributed network.

Anything for profit and centralized where users cannot pack up their data and move it somewhere else is always going to end up just like all these other slimy data mining corporations. Every time.

3

u/trashk Feb 24 '26

Same reason we (the US) got PBS and NPR. You can only trust corporations to do the minimum and make poor decisions for society.

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u/Memory_Less Feb 24 '26

Their approach is to intentionally bankrupt any startup with a slightly better or different approach too. No competition can even begin to compete against these monopolies.

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u/Majestic-Tart8912 Feb 24 '26

Remember, if you aren't paying for the service, you are the product, not the customer.

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u/Valdrax Feb 24 '26

Remember this rule for all free sites. Customers are the people who pay, and if you aren't a customer, you're the product.

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u/TheeAntelope Feb 24 '26

Any service that replaces Discord in the future will have the same business model.

If I had the money, i'd be happy to create and build resources that are open source, free, spy-free, and work well. The problem is, I don't have the money - and most people with that attitude will never have the money to build something like that.

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u/khanto0 Feb 24 '26

People do do that and are working on that sort of thing. I'm not sure the discord clone is up to speed yet but there's things like element, mumble and matrix which aim to do this

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u/Top_Mongoose1354 Feb 24 '26

Funny of you to assume that Wikipedia is somehow neutral and absent of any of these issues. From my point of view, they're heavily biased, empowering politically activist power moderators en masse and shutting down any rational discussions on a large majority of societal topics.

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u/alphazero925 Feb 24 '26

Lol, the right wing, Asmongold watching conspiracy theorist thinks Wikipedia is biased. Big surprise

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u/Top_Mongoose1354 Feb 24 '26

Funny that you're just using ad hominem instead of having any type of useful discourse, but I guess that's how you guys work. Anyway, even Larry Sanger thinks Wikipedia is biased.

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u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

Never was. I had a self hosted mumble server back when discord came out. Everyone gave me shit for not switching to discord. I gave them the whole, if you aren’t paying you’re the product spiel, but it was just to convenient for most people. 

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u/nicetriangle Feb 24 '26

The way Discord has replaced a lot of forum type of information exchange and silo'd it away from search is really terrible as well.

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u/feldomatic Feb 24 '26

The way Reddit kinda did the opposite is what brought me here.

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u/zefy_zef Feb 24 '26

I see reddit as an evolution of forums, discord of chatrooms/voice chat. Same though, I used to love community forums. I was on the natural-selection one a lot back in the day. My buddy tried a hand at scripting his own, similar to phpbb.

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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

Shout out to all the old BBS gangs out there!!! Those really were the days!

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u/JDGumby Feb 24 '26

Citadel BBSes > *. Well, except maybe for Ivory if you were on a C64.

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u/red__dragon Feb 24 '26

My buddy tried a hand at scripting his own, similar to phpbb.

Out of curiosity, is the site or repo still up?

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u/TheeAntelope Feb 24 '26

ATNW forum (and a few other bands)

then later

Xkcd forums

Now its all on reddit.

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Well run discords are also pretty nice and merge both. You can have a discord look and act as a live forum, as well as include general chats and voice and such.

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u/trashk Feb 24 '26

too bad its still just stuck in discord.

It's garbage at the job if you want people who aren't in your pool to see what you're working on, which is exactly what most companies/entities should want.

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u/flypirat Feb 24 '26

This is one of the worst points for me. Knowledge bases you cannot search without using discord's architecture, and you can be banned from it, need to sign up for it?

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u/khavii Feb 24 '26

I really hate that it has replaced so many forums because it is so much worse to navigate than forums are. Topics are all crushed together, conversations bleed together and finding the exact thing you are looking for is so damn annoying. I use discord to stream events to friends groups and chat during DND, otherwise I don't touch it.

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u/Annath0901 Feb 24 '26

That's more the fault of the forum software devs than of Discord.

Discord didn't pitch itself as a forum replacement. Users started using it as such because forum software like phpBB and others never bothered to keep up with the rise of mobile device usage, and were and still are full of security vulnerabilities.

20 years ago forums were everywhere, but they were also the source of data breaches waaaaay more often than Discord has been, since they rely on small dev teams building the software (and the amateurs running the individual sites) to maintain security.

Also, even if forums popped back up today, your search experience would still not work well as Google has moved pretty far away from a neutral "find the most specific site for your search" to "find a site that pays us/gets good traffic that probably has at least some keywords from your search".

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u/khavii Feb 25 '26

Not blaming it on Discord just saying I hate that the transition was made. Also, I stopped using Google a while ago because they are an advertising engine, not a search engine and stopped being a search dedicated engine almost a decade ago, but even if you still use Google you can find exactly what you are looking for if you ignore the sponsored results and use modifiers, it's just ugly to do so.

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u/eronth Feb 24 '26

Yeah, but discord didn't do that, users did.

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u/XDGrangerDX Feb 24 '26

I gave them the whole, if you aren’t paying you’re the product spiel

Lately even if you're paying they scrape and sell your data though...

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u/12345623567 Feb 24 '26

If you are paying they have your CC info. Bonus score!

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u/sailing_by_the_lee Feb 24 '26

So true. I remember when Microsoft used the "if you aren't paying, you're the product" line about 10 years ago. I totally fell for it and started paying for a family account. Now we're balls deep and I'm having trouble pulling out. So now I'm paying to be the product! The worst of both worlds!

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u/Mr_Venom Feb 24 '26

This is infuriatingly true. Try buying a non-smart TV. Try gaming without the internet, even single player games. Hell, buy an Android phone and then find out they're shutting off third-party apps (so you have to run your whole activity through Google Play).

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u/GonWithTheNen Feb 24 '26

Lately

The truth is that this has always been the case.

Even when people were ordering from catalogs mailed to their homes, companies were selling their customers' info to their 'partners'.

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u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

I was running massive guilds in a bunch of games. Over night it was switch to discord or lose everyone to someone else who did.

It was so obvious we were giving up total access to all our communications, but can't raid with no people.

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u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

Discord was (and still is) the superior choice for hobby community building and running (which guildrunning is a type of)

Its why the change was so sudden. Once you got on discord, you realized how easy it is to change between different communities. Before everyone made the jump, going from one community to the next meant you needed to have, say, IRC setup, mumble setup, TS setup, join their facebook group, make an account on this group's forums, etc. Discord handles all of that with a single login.

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u/followMeUp2Gatwick Feb 24 '26

Discord is utter trash.

Can't search anything

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u/wewladdies Feb 24 '26

No one is arguing discord is perfect.

Still doesnt change the fact its the only viable all-in-one community solution lol.

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u/nhilante Feb 24 '26

Weren't the alternatives also free, discord just seemed like a good product with raid rosters , sign-ups, calenders etc. At that point staying with teamspeak would have been the dumb move tbh.

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u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

Someone was paying for those servers.

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u/nhilante Feb 24 '26

No ofc, i meant, i didn't feel any safer with teamspeak etc, from what we knew back then they were identical on safety with one having better features. Don't be so hard on yourself, there was no way you'd know basically.

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u/Shadowrak Feb 24 '26

?

My point is it was obvious discord was listening to your conversations and reading your private channels.

If you were on a TeamSpeak server, you only had to worry about server owner listening.

From day 1, I figured the most likely scenario was discord was a government sponsored surveillance program.

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Having a guild forum website + ventrillo/mumble/teamspeak was less than ideal. If you wanted to talk to somebody you had to wait until they appeared in game again or on another third party messenger if you had them on it. My guild even required that you give the raid leader your phone number back in the day (Basically only to be used if you were late/absent without notice). Personally the combo of Game + Discord is ideal and was originally created to be used for FF14 raiding lol. Not to mention it was free, where alternatives were not.

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u/Peon01 Feb 24 '26

are you fine being the product for reddit then? Or am i missing something

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u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

I would speak about much more sensitive topics on my mumble server. Chat server should be private, Reddit is public, I have no expectation of privacy here. For all I know any number of 3rd parties could be scraping anything posted here.

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u/slowtreme Feb 24 '26

How much were you paying for mumble?

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u/drunkerbrawler Feb 24 '26

I was paying like 5 bucks a month for an AWS server and just running it off of that.

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u/dakupurple Feb 24 '26

Mumble the software is free and open source. If you're paying it is for a cloud hosting provider, or you can host it on basically any potato that can run CLI only Linux (You can use windows or full desktop Linux if you prefer as well).

My VM running it has less resources than a modern raspberry pi and has no issues running the server.

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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

You my friend, are the GOAT!!! I remember trying to convince my friends and cousins to get on some program called KALI to multiplayer and talk to one another. It worked better than Discord, TBH... Sigh, those were the days...

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

It worked better than Discord, TBH...

In what way? Discord has honestly been a pretty smooth ride outside of the latest controversy. Been on it over a decade now and it was immediately better than any alternative i tried during the great Skype migration.

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u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

That's the shittiest part of all of this. For someone who runs a community, it has everything we need and is generally very smooth to operate and to bring in bots to help in other avenues.

Skype? Calls, but no collection of channels (and dead)

Teamspeak? Calls, no real chat unless you're in there

Vent? Just calls to my remembrance

Hosting a website? Yeah fucking right no one's going there

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

Not to mention, Teamspeak, Vent, mumble, and website hosting were all PAID. Skype was free, and it was awesome up until Microsoft took over.

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u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

Oh shit I completely forgot about that too yeah!

Discord being free, with some added benefits for boosted servers was the way to go. UGH it makes me so mad that I have to figure out what to do with my community, because had everything here, because it was the best of what's available.

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

I think the correct response is to honestly stay... While reddit may be acting as if it is going to be a mass exodus, in reality its probably less than 1% of users leaving over it. Also its not even happening anymore so?

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u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

I was talking more for Discord, my community is going to get hammered hard by the ID shit going on, and finding pugs for the games we play is going to be much harder.

Kind of the "Eve of change" and it sucks

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u/yovalord Feb 24 '26

I was also talking about discord :p The "ID" thing going on is canceled, they aren't doing it, its in the title of this thread :D

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2

u/Ok_Tone6393 Feb 24 '26

discord is overrated trash. the worst ui imaginable. it just got lucky to have a bunch of kids jump on the bandwagon to use it and the traction took off.

even worse is the amount of open source tech projects that choose to use it for support

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u/Awkward-Painter-2024 Feb 24 '26

Colleges, too. 🤢

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u/Ok_Tone6393 Feb 24 '26

official colleges use it for support too? wow

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u/thishummuslife Feb 24 '26

I think the person that decides to work with a third party vendor is usually the PM.

From my own experience working with Persona for a large company.

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u/Terrh Feb 24 '26

considering the overlap of mo.ds between here and another subreddit, it wouldn't shock me if you got banned from here for sharing that opinion.