Comment by prussia
16 days ago
Discord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...
Discord is focused on large groups. E2EE doesn't work in this case. Group management overhead traffic is too high and too unreliable, and a bad actor could just join the group under a pseudonym to log messages. Discord isn't E2EE for the same reason Hacker News isn't.
For large public servers it would be pointless. But for DMs and small private servers, it would be meaningful. Most people in DMs and small private servers would not appreciate their messages being publicly accessible like HN comments are.