I don't know. I understand that argument, and I definitely sympathize with it. But on the other hand, we've tried the whole "super public communities" thing and I think it's been more bad than good. I'm ready to try smaller, more closed, better moderated communities. Maybe humans just work better at that scale. It's worth a shot, anyway.

You need consequences for being a moron to avoid having your community being overrun by morons. I don't think you can have that in public anonymous settings at least not for a long time.

It's quite the opposite of dark: Discord and whoever buys them gets to read the logs of every chat and every DM ever.

It's got to be a huge trove of behavioral and personal data that is immensely valuable to ad companies. People say all sorts of stuff in private DMs they'd never otherwise think to share with big tech.

I don't know, my favorite places during the golden age of phpBB were invitation-only forums with small membership and very little public content. I always felt like the open-to-the-whole-world era of Twitter and Reddit was the dark age, because the quality of discourse seems to go down dramatically when you're not talking to people who you have a long-term relationship with.

It also opens you up to large scale harassment and witch hunts.