Discord is a terrible forum replacement


Quite a lot of times when I'm trying to find tech support for a problem, the websites will point to a Discord channel. Now as someone who is trying to be mindful of their online privacy, and who don't like big corporations, I think we that build internet communities should know better.

Why it sucks

When you host your community on Discord, you are essentially locking out all helpful information out of reach of anybody that doesn't make an account.

There are many reasons to not make an account with Discord, for one they have had many scandals, such as its inability to protect minors, by not shutting down problematic servers which were clearly in violation of the platform's rules, even after reports. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to this, which says a lot.

Another one is their inability to protect their user's data; this has been seen in the data breach that exposed over 70,000 IDs to hackers, which could have been prevented had they deleted them as they said.

They have also (as many companies) gone through enshittification, the platform has been constantly getting worse, now adding the useless "orbs" feature, which pays people an orb currency for watching idiotic advertisements or completing quests such as installing a sponsored game.

I could go on and on about the problems of the platform, but I think you get the point. There are plenty of reasons to not use it, and locking users out of your community because you decide to use a platform that does not respect you as a user, is just a very bad idea if we want to keep the internet free and awesome for everyone.

I want to clarify: I'm not condemning everyone for using it, my main criticism is for communites that provide indispensable information that can not be attained anywhere else but their Discord server. If you do use Discord because you have friends there, I totally understand, and I'm not telling you to stop doing so, however I think there are viable alternatives which I will expand on later in this article.

example.c

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    int num = 67;
    printf("num: %d\n", num);
    return 0;
}
            
meh.asm

section .data
    msg db 'meeeehhhh', 0

section .text
    global _start
_start:
    mov eax, 4
    mov ebx, 1
    mov ecx, msg
    mov edx, 13
    int 0x80
              
chicletch.asm

.global _start

_start:
    movl $4, %eax
    movl $1, %ebx
    movl $msg, %ecx
    movl $13, %edx
    int $0x80

    movl $1, %eax
    xorl %ebx, %ebx
    int $0x80

.data
msg: .asciz "CHICLETCHSS"
    
example.cpp

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    int num = 42;
    std::cout << "num: " << num << std::endl;
    return 0;
}
    
script.js

function soma(a, b) {
    return a + b;
}

console.log(soma(10, 20));
    
example.py

def soma(a, b):
    return a + b

resultado = soma(10, 20)
print(f"Resultado: {resultado}")
    
Last updated: 28/05/2026 - Typo fixes