Seems like discord is asking people to verify their accounts with phone numbers nowadays. I guess I won't be using it anymore? :🤷
Why a phone number? Not everyone has a phone and most companies don't get my number.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I assume it's because it scales poorly. You can't readily source 500 phone numbers, while you could spool up a $5 per month VPS and host 500 email addresses.
They don't really want to match you so much as adding a stumbling block to someone making a bazillion accounts.
But I don't think they require a phone number for account creation right?
Yep, they let you create your account with just an email address, and once you've joined a few servers and started using discord they're like "oh btw give us your phone number too, you won't have access to anything until you do".
i read in some other post that's a per server setting the admins of that server can set. i'm not sure this is true, because i deleted discord a long time ago for being a boring waste of time
They think you might be a criminal, literally. Discord has a big problem with people conducting illegal activities on their service (buying, selling, and providing support for cheats, black hat hacker communities, harassment and stalking, etc. The list is pretty long)
Something about your account + connection makes you look very similar to people they know to have done these things. And discord decided that the risk of having these things on their platform is a greater threat to their business than the risk of people like you quitting the platform.
They do this so that if regulators, law enforcement, or one of their business partners comes to them with evidence that you're using discord to do bad shit, they can help track down the real person behind the account.
Maybe because I use librewolf with most browser fingerprinting and tracking disabled? I normally got like 3 to 5 captchas before I could login to discord.
Oh yeah, it's definitely that. For sure. Your behavior is more similar to the < 0.1% of users who do bad shit than the 99.9% who simply install the app and play games or chat with friends. You are a casualty of war, so to speak. Honestly, I don't blame discord, they have to secure their platform. I blame the shitheads who make this crap necessary by trying to hide their illegal activity using the same methods as the people like yourself who just want privacy
Yes, there was a significant controversy about this about a year ago.
What triggers it? I'm currently abroad, so I suppose that might be the reason. But not really willing to give my phone number to discord. Is there no known workaround?
It's kinda bothersome that so many online groups are using it (or facebook).
From what I understand, new signups aren’t allowed without a phone number now. As far as what makes them claim that and ask, as with other proprietary services, who knows? It could be a legitimate security reason, or it could be that they just made up some nonsense because they want to collect more data. Exactly like Facebook, yeah. I stopped using Facebook when they insisted I had to send them my driver’s license to sign in.
There’s no way to bypass phone verificiation, but many people use various services to get a temporary fake number and verify with that.