In short, a kid made a Discord account at age 12, lied about her age and said she was 18. The kid at age 13 clicked a scam link claiming to be Discord support and lost access to her account. Scammer asked for parents bank account details which is how the dad became aware. Dad tried to report the issue to Discord, but had to go through an AI support bot that kept closing the ticket. Dad spoke with someone named “Molly” that was possibly a human and explained that his daughter’s account had a lot of underage friends tied to the account that could be at risk. “Molly” said they’d have to open a ticket from within the app, which they no longer had access to because his daughter never set up 2FA.
Discord didn’t actually do anything about this until Ars stepped in. After regaining access to the account the daughter found 2 friends fell for the scam. Discord later banned the account for violating the TOS when lying about her age and stated they would only restore the account if they shared a photo of the kid along with a copy of her birth certificate or passport. The father gave in and complied so she didn’t lose access to her friends.
For the first few years, when it had no profit motive, no way to earn money, and was just willingly bleeding cash to gain market share, it was great! That is the first stage of enshittification and they are now on to stage 2: making the platform good for the real target audience, advertisers.
It’s so fucked up that companies with too much capital to burn can just bleed money for years in order to starve the competition out and establish a monopoly.
Tbf, their main competitor was Skype…
Few years? Nah man. Maybe the first few months but they were already laying the foundation 10 years ago by hosting the largest emote servers and running the Discord subreddit secretly themselves. They were always really shitty.
adding AI was that sign.