I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at this meeting. It feels like a bunch of people who don't use the product agreed on some on-paper-the-best choice, but one that will ultimately kill the company. To me, one of the most fun features of Discord is that I can have my username of choice, and pay extra to be #0001. That's so cool! If I'm just going to be some globally unique set of numbers or whatever, well that's just Signal, and they can't sell my conversation history to some future repressive government. There just isn't any advantage.

To me, this is the "jumped the shark" moment. Discord has disappointed me for nearly a decade. I was one of the first users, and most of my social network I met through random Discord servers. I should be the biggest evangelist there is. But as part of their growth, they have fucked me over again and again and again. One time, I wanted to enable 2FA. They told my my phone number was ineligible for 2FA, because it was VoIP. It is not. But even if it was, I can't use Google Authenticator to have an extra login factor because of this? That's the dumbest product decision I've ever heard. I moderate several large servers; your reputation is destroyed if my account gets hacked. But because literally TWENTY YEARS ago my phone number was a Google Voice number, I can only use a password to log in? What the fuck does my Yubikey have to do with the Public Switched Telephone Network anyway? Crazy.

It was at that moment that I began praying for the death of Discord every single day.

(I also think they are greedy motherfuckers. I started paying for Discord as soon as you could do such a thing. They decided one day, that isn't enough money. I pay more for a fucking chat app than my IDE that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in income, and it's not enough? HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The greed is unbelievable. Luckily, I can still pay $50 a year to keep my username, but apparently that is going away? What are these people on? How did the people that funded this company sign off on this shit? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard! But I say that, and it's not. Wait until you hear the shit that they send to their biggest partners. It blows my mind. Weird fucking company.)

If I don't get my username when they do the great switch, I am gone. I hate this company, and most of my mental energy is dedicated to fantasizing about their untimely death. I gave this startup $50 every single year, because I believe in them, but they fuck me over again and again and again. "That's not enough jrockway, we've only gotten ONE BILLION dollar in funding, and we need your $30 real bad. Also, our phone number database is TWENTY YEARS out of date, so you can't use your Yubikey to sign in." Good riddance. I dream of the day the CEO is living out of a cardboard box and some 19-something tells them they didn't write good enough Ruby on the whiteboard to get a job as a junior engineer. Does that make me a piece of shit human being? Yes. That's how I really feel about your company. Sorry. I'll try to be a better person in the future.

For the Discord employees that are reading this and feel bad, go look up my account. Have I ever joined a server that needs "hey he's not a spammer" verification? Nope. Have I ever abused the system in even the slightest way? Nope. Have I received thousands of spam messages that the simplest AI ever could detect? Yup. And have I paid my bill every single year since your company was founded? Yes I have. And this is how you treat me? Crazy. Good fucking luck, guys. Good luck.