There’s been a lot of noise surrounding Discord as of late, understandably so, mostly because it wants to implement age verification and presumably sell your information for evil deeds.
Truth be told though, as someone who’s been around long enough, it’s difficult not to cheer on it’s eventual demise because while I don’t hate Discord, or any messaging app for that matter, I am frustrated with how a bunch of stupid fucking assholes basically consolidated half the internet onto it.
Now, I’m not here to tell you what to think, but I would like you to reconsider “just one app” or “the everything app” as an entire concept. Because you can say there are no good Discord alternatives and you would probably be correct, but I would also argue there shouldn’t even be the next Discord at all.
Part 1: Outsourcing Responsibility
Let’s start by mentioning the news. Now, when I was growing up, there was an assignment in school where we were taught to look up multiple news sources and compare and contrast them.
This was to teach us, essentially, that you are smarter than your TV. It was a lesson in basic media literacy. And this was reasonable to expect of children, much less the average person.
Flash forward to now, where it's often argued that it's hard to find a reputable news source. But from the perspective of me, a 34 year old virgin, I would probably argue to just look up multiple news sources, that's what I was taught, that's the solution.
But in the year of 2026, that's not what the "average person" wants to hear anymore. What they want is a single, unbiased news source, "just one app" that they can trust blindly. So, if you’re ever looking for an explanation for “the death of media literacy”, there you fucking have it.
I can recommend you watch this video essay on the film “Idiocracy”, while the film is not perfect, the video does a pretty decent job of explaining concepts such as outsourced intelligence and “the subject who is supposed to know”.
Part 2: There’s no way in the fuck you’re ever leaving Steam
When it comes to the concept of “just one app”, I think no example better exemplifies this than Steam. Because if you think people are crashing out hard over Twitter and Discord, boy howdy, you haven’t seen nothing yet.
See, I’m old enough to remember when Steam was just called the Games folder. Because the problem with Steam is simple, all of your games are stuck on this one client and you can’t get them off their client. So, when that platform inevitably falls down the shitter, which it will, you can’t fucking leave.
You are just FUCKED. You will have to start all over as a PC gamer.
Valve, of course, doesn’t have to do this. The mere existence of GOG shows us that DRM-free distribution is possible, and not only is it possible, it’s good. But Valve doesn’t want to do it because super-gluing you to their stupid client is how they’ve maintained their monopoly.
Otherwise, people would just freely buy from whomever gives them the best deal, as opposed to now, where people would gladly pay more for the convenience of having it on Steam.
See, Gabe Newell has always reacted extremely poorly whenever his monopoly is threatened, and now with Xbox apparently becoming compatible with all PC gaming, he’s just doing this shit again with the Steam Machine. Because not only does he want you tied to his client, now he wants to tied to his own goddamned operating system.
Valve is an insidious company because they keep siphoning for more and more control in a way that you can never leave their grasp. But because I guess they throw up sales every once in a while, people just fucking ignore it.