Yes, I know this title is a bit of click-bait, but bear with me…
Recently Discord has been in the news, and for all the wrong reasons. Specifically, it has been tied to the Roblox pedophilia scandal, as creepers were luring children off of Roblox onto Discord servers, where they were getting these kids to send them nude pictures, videos, and in some cases, arranging to meet with them for sex.
Yuck.
Anyway, so a lot of us have been walking away from Discord as much as possible. I have removed all of the text-chat channels off of my old Discord server, and only keep a couple of audio-chat channels open so I can talk to my brother and a few friends. But I plan to phase those out as well, once I find a better solution.
Why? Because yuck. Seriously, I don’t want anything to do with Discord, if I can avoid it in the future.
To that end, for myself at least, I have started up a forum for discussing gaming – but mostly Tabletop Roleplaying Games. I’ve mentioned it before, actually: TabletopTribe.org
The problem then becomes, how do I provide an audio communication outlet for us to use, that is as low of a cost as possible? I’m still investigating options for this, but I don’t even know if my friends and family will want to move away from Discord. I hope they will, but that remains to be seen.
For myself, I’m effectively done with Discord. I know that they have become the defacto option for chat communication, but I’m still old-school, and have no problem with using forums. In fact, I almost prefer them over closed systems like Discord. Forums give you the ability to moderate as you wish, without corporate overlords coming down on your community (unless they are illegal ones like pedos… yuck!), and being smaller, give you the ability to deal with creepers that might show up on your own.
Seriously, I’d rather be copying the information of a pedarist on my own forum and sending it to the authorities, than counting on some corporation to take care of it. Obviously Discord and Roblox can’t be trusted to do that!
Anyway, in closing… fuck Discord. Seriously. Yuck.
