I totally agree. At the same time, nobody should be using Discord anyway, for a variety of reasons. They're one of the least trustworthy online platforms I can think of, and have unfortunately encouraged online ecosystems where you have to "Join our Discord" in order to maybe be heard. I would be delighted if age verification encourage more people to abandon Discord. In a better world, companies like that wouldn't be allowed to become zombie corporations but instead be forced to go out of business.
They'll shut down servers and close your account with no reason provided outside of demanding you add a phone number. It's happened to me a few times, and I was squeaky clean on there even when compared to the way I talk on HN. Didn't matter whether I provided a phone number. I'm not the only one it's happened to. Anyone with friends on Discord should make sure to write down their contact information in case Discord one day decides that they or their community doesn't exist anymore. But do they delete your data? No, of course they don't... they keep it all to themselves!
THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.
Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.
I have a few years old account. One day they just blocked be out and rudely demanded a phone number.
At the time I had TOTP based 2FA since forever.
Fine, I got myself a burner number (not sharing a real number with creeps and bullies), account tot unblocked. I kept using it.
A week later I deleted a phone number form my account (marked as optional after all), and the account got immediately, immediately blocked, after I saved the changes.
Not to mention it is a total silo that is not indexed by search engines and protected by archive.org - one day when Discords VC money finally runs out, it could all vanish in an instant, destroying communities and a lot of culture.
