more info: https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
The number of people that consider Discord part of their threat model or an actual privacy risk is incredibly tiny compared to the number of users that get inconvenience by mass bot raids & people bypassing IP bans.
I help manage a medium-sized Discord guild and we were randomly targeted by a bot raid whereby ~100 bots joined in the span of 1 minute and proceeding to spam various channels and the DMs of our users. Enabling Discord's requirement for a verified phone number stopped the raid in its tracks and allowed us to clean up without further issue.
In the same way, Discord's automatic content scanning is designed to protect the large percentage of minors on the platform & proactively deal with potentially exploitative material + guilds (per https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-transparency-report-apri...)
Removing these features & restrictions in order to appease your extreme edge-case privacy views does not help the average Discord user in the slightest.
It seems that you believe that you benefit from Discord's gatekeeping. I'm glad it seems to be working out for you. If it wasn't, however, how would you know?
You don't agree with Discord's practices and lack of privacy, something which, by the way, I agree with you, and as such, decide not to use it. They are not discriminating against you, you're the one deciding not to use their service. To me, it sounds the same as if you don't like McDonalds because it's unhealthy, then accuse them of discriminating against you because they won't serve you some lean chicken salad.
My first account I was able to get was via a number I rented on dtmf.io. The account was suspended (across all "servers" in Discord) in a few minutes when I linked a few of my IRL friends in a Discord chat to that Discord article on my own website. I've not been able to sign up again since, despite having blown something like 40EUR on numbers from different countries/providers trying to get a new one.
Even when it works, it's at least 10 minutes of solving CAPTCHAs to log in, each and every time, and sometimes the Google CAPTCHA hits some other exit node rate limit and just tells you to fuck off entirely, making login impossible even with a working account.
