Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scaled | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to believe Discord's intent is to make the client great when the recent updates have been to shove Best Buy ads into it. Even to the point of surfacing ads as friend dm notifications! In fairness, I'm jaded since I lost my account due to a sudden ultimatum to share my phone number -- extortion for my PII. So it is impossible for me to believe Discord operates in good faith.

View on HN

In fairness these are probably distinct teams at discord. A team of engineers focused on performance probably _genuinely_ cares about that.

But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.

This is a fair point, but it's basically being proud of making the monstrous privacy-destroying ad machine go 10% faster. With how they pressure people to doxx themselves to them (phone number verification) or be completely locked out of their accounts, there is enough predatory tactics in that company that no one should feel proud of working there.

Yeah look Discord is more than one person. A lot of us really care about making the most performant client and that's why we did this.

I don't work at Discord, but I know of very few companies that don't have "malicious" tactics in one sense or another. Ultimately they are trying to improve their own bottom line and that _rarely_ aligns with what's best for people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com