That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.

The barrier to entry is so low in fact that I worry about the day when terrorist groups begin to deploy them in major cities.

We already have auto-tracking drones. They can lock onto a person and follow them around. The intended use is to allow live streamers and YouTubers to be able to stream/record video by simply sending the drone out. But if it can automatically track and follow a person, it can likely be reprogrammed to automatically home in on a person. And at that point, it’s just a matter of strapping some C4 to it. It would be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon. Program it to ignore anyone with your military uniform (or find some other anti-tracking feature, like an IR reflector that the drone can see,) and you could surgically strike an entire neighborhood with a swarm of them.

My only guess is that it might help people who auto-hide NSFW by default.

It’s always ethical to steal from billionaires. The artists, actors, musicians, etc get paid by the production companies. When you pirate a TV show, that cast and crew has already been paid. You’re not stealing from the poor struggling stagehand; You’re stealing from the billion dollar corporation that paid them pennies and ensures they’re still struggling.

Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?

It gets even worse: During the investigation, it was discovered that at least one person had copied videos and photos onto an external hard drive and taken them. The investigation never discovered who it was, or how many people had made copies; They just knew that files had been copied to at least one external storage drive.

The implication being that all of the teenage girls had their laptops open in their bedrooms, and at least one random employee had copies of their photos and videos.

Yeah, the Overton window has been pushed so far right that neutral sources with no added opinion are now considered center-left.