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Posted: Sun, 01 May 2022 20:16
Last edited: Sun, 01 May 2022 20:16
Tags: self-improvement software
There are probably a hundred of these articles that all talk about the same things. Discord is spyware. I can go through all the spooky stuff that Discord does but it is quicker for me just to link to this good article. In short, you do not want to be reliant on Discord for any communication. But there is more to this chatting software than just spyware? Hear me out.
I was the one of my friends that pushed for the move to Discord from Skype. Back in those days it was just superior to any other things we had used. Yes we could have used TeamSpeak or Mumble but none of use was very interested in those at the time. After days of complains we finally moved over and everyone was happy. It was new, fresh and fun.
I worked to make Discord a place for me and my friends, and even some more serious circles. At one time me and some friends tried to make a public server to unite like minded people. However that was only for a short while before it started to get out of hand. The place made me some good friends I still have today thou so it was all worth it. Discord is not a bad application for these kinds of things. If you only look at the functionality of the program it is one of the best and easy to use social programs ever made I would argue. That is also why it is so dangerous.
If we fast forward to today, six years later, I have 12 servers in my list, and about 7 active DMs with friends or smaller groups. I have most of them muted because I do not like notifications as distractions. And to be completely honest. I am not really interested in most of the chats I have in my list. I have my regular circle of people that I talk to but I do not enjoy talking in larger chats with people I don't know. I only want to chat with my friends. And if I where to get to know new people, I would like to add them to that list as well.
Now if we go into my reasoning why Discord is dangerous. We all know that scrolling social media for the latest update is bad for you. The same thing applies to Discord I believe. In my recent post, Dopamine reset progress, I discover that I apparantly have a Discord "addiction". It is not really an addiction because I am not dependent on it, but I use Discord as a method of escaping boredom and other things. Much like how people scroll the same feed over and over on social media.
The way I discovered this "addiction" was by uninstalling Discord from my iPad and phone. Meaning I can only view Discord if I start up my workstation computer. I am no longer connected unless I am at the workstation. And the results where that I was a lot more present in the moment in what I was doing. I could much easier focus and would not get distracted at all anymore. When I went on walks or to the gym there was no feeling that I was missing out on messages, or any urge to post about things because I did something boring.
I think most people are more dependent on Discord than they are aware of. Try to be without it for a day or two and feel the difference. When I read the book Limitless by Jim Kwik, he said in one chapter something in the lines of: "We used to say BRB when we left the computer. Nowadays we never leave. We are always connected because we carry the chat with us." And that comment hits hard for me. I want to say BRB more like the good old days when you would call your friend on the phone and ask if he wanted to play a game. Then we both logged in to Maple Story and we where chatting in-game. (Yes there are actually still in-game chats that you can use to casually talk.)
Now if I where to summarize all this. As I mentioned first, Discord is spyware as mentioned in the first link. Second, Discord is designed to be flexible and easy to use in a way that it want you to use it for everything. This way they can collect more data about you and your friends. And lastly we have the "addiction" aspect. Because you may have a lot of chats and lots of people typing all the time, you could read chats in forever. It is designed for you to never disconnect from it.
So what do I want instead? In the future I want to leave Discord all together if possible. Or at least shrink it down to a minimum. It is not only addictive in the form of wanting your attention at all times with notifications and such, but it is also spyware as mentioned. My ideal would be to have a self hosted XMPP chat where me and my friends just texted each other. 99% of all comunication that I have over Discord is just text. And during the very rare occations when we want to speak in voice we could start up Mumble and talk. For screensharing, which is even more rare than just talking, you could use something like Jitsi. I have not used it myself but it seem to do the trick. Or if you wanted, you could set up a rtmp relay over nginx that people could connect to in the web browser.
Discord is difficult to leave because it is so useful. But in the end it is just another data mining platform in my view. Self hosted solutions are not very easy to implement or to get people to use. They are to difficult most of the time. Or too spread out over different programs. Maybe there will be, or already is a solution for this but we will see. I am closing this post for now. Thank you for reading!