Top level thought: the reason so many people are aware of the horribleness of Discord is that developers hate writing text intended for human consumption.
Okay, this is kind of a long chain, so strap in and follow along.
Why are people upset about Discord? They’re upset because Discord is complying with regulatory requirements to perform age verification on its users. Age verification is problematic on many axes, and the regulations are themselves problematic in many ways. People are upset, predictably enough, for lots of different reasons, depending on which problems hit areas they personally are concerned with.
Now, why are so many people upset? Because there are lots and lots of people using Discord, and they’re distributed across many, many groups. Discord doesn’t just involve some influential but small group of people, like “English speaking pedophiles who work in government.” It crosses lots and lots of groups. It’s chat rooms, and these chat rooms are being used by all kinds of folks.
Here’s a fun Mad-Lib for you: “If you have questions or need support for <product>, <imperative verb for information transfer> <information repository>.” Here’s something to consider: if you see this on a website or a product brochure and the information repository is some kind of social media, then what it means is that they couldn’t be bothered to produce documentation good enough to tell you how to use the product. Going to some project’s Slack or Discord and asking, “Hey, how am I supposed to use ThingumBob 2.3 to control my Whatzit Carbon Fiber?” may get you an answer, but don’t count on it. That’s information that really ought to be in the ThingumBob manual, but that manual is probably just a QR code that encodes…a URL for the Discord.
So that’s why I, a retired guy who gets tired just thinking about talking to people, have Discord installed on my computer. And no, I never use it. But, I’m not special: I bet there are a lot of people who have Discord on their computers and phones, specifically because one time, they had a question about how to use some opaque bit of software. And now, because there are zillions of people nominally engaged with Discord, it’s actually news worth covering when Discord adopts a problematic policy.