You don’t need to engage with the gamification thing. Closed protocol sure I guess, and also I’m sorry I don’t know what “grey partterns” are and am gunna assume that you’re not referring to the colour palette.

But it’s a solid product that largely just works. I’m still worried, obviously, that certain voluntary things will become less voluntary and things will get much more frustrating as they search to go public.

Discord is technologically lightyears ahead of their competition. Its by far the smoothest large scale chat application out there. The only "dark pattern" is them pushing Nitro and you know what users should buy nitro not free to run a service at that scale.