# Discord 400 Hacker News commenters recommended Discord and 733 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (24 owners). **Verdict:** A free all-in-one community hub with strong voice chat, text, screensharing and moderation tools, though many distrust its ID/age verification, data practices and Nitro upsells. ## Why people recommend it - Free with excellent voice chat (5 comments): "The original thing that got gamers to switch to discord, it was their original and probably still is their primary target market, was a single login to a huge universe of voice chat rooms." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959505)) "Discord captured the market because it was completely free and had the audio mechanisms in place to make people with shitty mics and background noise tolerable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139174)) "they made an objectively superior product that was completely free to users, funded by investor money without any plans for immediate profitability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140398)) - Rich all-in-one feature set (5 comments): "Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044355)) "It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266156)) "Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961099)) - Builds close-knit communities (6 comments): "Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50283466)) "Discord is really where it is at these days. Discord servers with 50-100 people form the new social fabric of the internet where real community lies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46426831)) "There are plenty of groups in Discord where you can have conversations with people of different backgrounds and personalities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48642066)) - Good built-in moderation tools (2 comments): "the out-of-the-box automod and autospam prevention tools in Discord are generally good enough you probably don't need third party bots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711117)) "Discord gives the ability for users to moderate their social spaces without the overhead of having to run their own forum software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46238084)) ## What people warn about - Face scan and ID verification (5 comments): "Discord would like to imply that most users are in the automatically verified bucket and only like porn is flagged nsfw, but it's entirely in their control to tighten these screws" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47055574)) "We're being asked to either scan our faces or provide our government IDs, to access basic online interactivity we already have, on the likes of Discord and Playstation Network" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377415)) "The idea that Discord moderators (even worse than Reddit mods) could have access to verified identities from Palantir related databases sounds so atrocious." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139393)) - Privacy and data-selling distrust (5 comments): "If your largest investor is known for mining data for fascist regimes and you are in the business of verifying data authentication then it not guilt by association it is the smoking gun and best to avoid" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012715)) "Discord used to be better, but then they got popular, got incredibly picked up and now are probably being controlled by some very shady people." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973253)) "If they tell you they are not selling your data, its because they have a license agreement with another company which is selling your data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46958221)) - Nitro upsells and paid cosmetics (3 comments): "charging people $100/year per person for Nitro" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020470)) "Software starts getting features which users don't want or need, side effects of the company size and their Q4 roadmap to 'optimize' revenue|engagement|profits|growth" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46950927)) "their constant treadmill of paid cosmetics, for lack of a better term, that no one was asking for and at least monthly Nitro beg screen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47142880)) - Content locked away from web (3 comments): "I would rather leverage basic HTTP websites for consuming social media content than everything being that boring discord client" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46690827)) "I'd prefer having openly searchable forums and chat archives and to use IRC but I can't say the experience is that onerous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972106)) "It is simply inaccessible to anyone not using the platform. You need to create an account and join the community/"server" to see anything posted there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865724)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Telegram](https://hackerapproved.com/p/telegram.md): 229 recommend - [WeChat](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wechat.md): 14 recommend - [Telegram Desktop](https://hackerapproved.com/p/telegram-desktop.md): 13 recommend - [WhatsApp for Windows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whatsapp-for-windows.md): 10 recommend - [LINE messaging app](https://hackerapproved.com/p/line.md): 8 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://discord.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Discord", https://hackerapproved.com/p/discord/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).