First of all, thank you for the reply. Yes, my ticket was fairly … to the point and I did not make an effort to be polite, but Discord's support team does perform a good job in terms of timely and complete responses. As I said, starting the account deactivation/deletion process over E-mail was not a hassle (compare that to Twitter, eh…) and I have even been able to start a transfer of my own guild over to a trusted member, so the guild does not die with my absence. But with the current route Discord is taking, I cannot wish it as a company the best of luck. I'll respond to some of your points.

>anti-spam

My impression would be that an aged account with a good reputation would be held to much less scrutiny than a new account, regardless of my method of accessing the service.

>regardless of whether […] there is 2fa enabled on the account

Clue me in on this one because I do not understand how a bot surfing for accounts would be able to guess this code in a configured number of attempts. Many login forms have a number of tries before the account is temporarily locked and the user is notified of a potential breach. This is no substitute for a good password, but it's one additional safeguard, and it's one that doesn't depend on a nonfree CAPTCHA service. I'm trying to de-Google lately and I've been pretty successful; one of the few services I use anymore is GDrive and that's only because I have unlimited storage and GPG at my disposal. Discord isn't owned by Google, so my decision to abandon Google's services shouldn't have weighed in on my decision for third-party services.

>it's also our responsibility […] (even if they don't employ the best security practices[…].)

I understand, but there's a line one has to draw for things like this. I'm not a fan of password requirements but employing a minimum password length (if Discord doesn't already do so) would be a good start. As a public service provider, I understand the issue with compromised accounts, and how they can be used for spam and harassment, but I still believe there are smarter ways to go about this than punishing people for using the wrong IP address to log in.

>hostile toward FOSS

>we have tried to give back to open source software

That doesn't really mean much when Discord openly detests third-party FOSS clients and will not make its server available at least in a similar capacity to GitHub's self-hosted solution (I don't think GitHub is appreciative of FOSS either, and they prefer to capitalise from the walled garden they've created rather than truly express the libre ethic, but hosting servers has been a long-requested feature especially from established communities who don't wish to rely on Discord's infra).

>and privacy

>we've stated that we don't sell your data

I'm a cryptoanarchist. If an organisation has my IP address, they have my IP address. If they have my phone number, they have my phone number. Discord may have my intentions at heart, its servers may be kept updated and secure from most threats, but Discord is a high-profile platform now, and we're all no stranger to hackers leaking database information from a zero-day or some other oversight. I cannot trust words and policies, I can only fully trust audited code and myself. So, no, in this light Discord does not appreciate the concern for privacy if it does not make exceptions for verifying accounts by other, more private means.

I wish I could give an answer on how to moderate a platform without negatively impacting people, but to reuse your words, there isn't an answer that satisfies everyone, and there will always be shortcomings for any solution, whether it's a setup cost or a long-term conditioning of users to create better passwords. In fact, I talked about passwords specifically in another blog post [1] so I can only hope they are eventually phased out for something less prone to user error. Despite what we're stuck with, I do genuinely believe Discord could tune their spam and login mechanisms such that false positives are kept to a minimum.

[1] https://wowana.me/blog/are-passwords-the-right-solution.xht