27 Feb 2022
libraries of our generation, discord.py.
I've personally used discord.py for the last 5 years as basically every Discord bot I have created was written in discord.py. I found it way easier to use than other competing libraries (including Rust crates like Serenity) as well as just more trustworthy as I had a history with its ease-of-use and feature completeness. I even used it to make a music bot after the C&D of many music bots by Google.
But when I saw that slash commands were being forced from a bot in a server I was in, I was disheartened. I was thinking about making a new Discord bot as a fun bot for me and my friends in our own server but seeing this completely killed it for me. I remember picking prefixes for my bots specifically for the ease of use on mobile screens (so you wouldn't need to go onto the symbols part of your on-screen keyboard to use it) and now that's kinda useless.
I read a gist by Rapptz (the guy who made discord.py) and I saw the situation was much worse than "Slash commands are forced guys". They're locking message creation behind a privileged intent (basically you have to request from Discord to be able to use message sending) and that it required a government-issued ID to actually be able to get verification to be allowed to use this.
I also found out that critical API changes were not being communicated with API developers but only with bot developers which is quite absurd as bot developers use the libraries that use the APIs! Bot devs usually don't implement APIs by themselves!
All of this stuff and more showed me that Discord has become more user-hostile and profit-driven as the years go on and it has really made me sad. Discord was my favourite communication platform since it came out in 2015 and still is to some extent but as I've seen it morph and change, well there's really no point in developing for it anymore.
Farewell Discord, ye served me well.
Rapptz's gist about the future of discord.py