When one thinks of websites that have done nothing but harm to the internet there are a few obvious candidates that come to mind, like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and Tiktok, or perhaps even Instagram, Twitch or Tinder are all good candidates for the worst thing to happen to the internet, but I rarely see anyone talk about the website I believe to have had the worst impact on the internet: Discord.
The problems of the previously mentioned websites are numerous and already known to many. They all share in the fact that they helped centralise the internet, they all steal user data and use it to make their algorithms more addicting and more lucrative for advertisers, they are all mediums for mass 'brainrot' to spread, they all selectively police certain opinions, political or otherwise, they are all privacy and security nightmares, etc, etc, etc. Discord shares in almost all of these flaws, but I believe that there are some other flaws unique to Discord that truly set it apart as a true plague, most of which boil down to its closed off nature.
The fundamental problem with Discord is that in order to access different servers you need an invite. This in itself isn't a major problem, but when you consider that many people have started in the last few years to use Discord as a replacement for forums (something Discord itself has very much leant into in some of its more recent updates), this becomes a major issue, as it becomes extremely difficult to find the content you're looking for. For 90% of modern internet users, the only time they ever interact with a forum is when they are searching for support for an issue they're having, and the only place they can find it is on one of these forums. This phenomenon is so common that it has been immortalised by countless unfunny memes.
This phenomenon is so common because hobby forums have often been bastions of information for any topic, and hobbyists often have better knowledge about how to fix issues than actual manufacturers. All this means that since most forums are public and appear on search engines, only one person ever needs to ask for help and get a good answer and then all of a sudden the entire world can see their issue and learn from the answer he received. All of this completely falls apart when you have discord hosting all of the 'forums'. All of a sudden, people can't easily find a thread about how to troubleshoot their problems, and even worse, it becomes harder for like minded hobbyists to actually find a place to discuss their hobby, even if they know that the Discord server exists.
Have you ever tried to get into a Discord server that you know exists but you don't already know the members? I have, and it's a complete waste of time - And on the off-chance you are someone looking to troubleshoot, and you do find out about a hobby Discord server, and you do somehow find an invite, good luck actually finding out if anyone asked your question before, finding old conversations in Discord is a nightmare, the channel might have been deleted, one of the people in the conversation might've deleted their account, etc, etc - And worse again, if you do ask a question you'd best pray to every God you've heard of that someone that can help you is currently active, because if the server is even slightly active your question will be buried within the hour, never to be found again. Forums never had any of these issues.
This isn't just a problem for tech support, in fact tech support is probably one of the worse examples I could've used, but it gets the point across. In my own experience, there have been many different projects I've been interested in that use Discord as their primary means of keeping users informed, these Discord servers are almost always cesspits of archetypal 'Discord Mods' (honestly this archetype could be the subject of a whole other essay) that end up being nothing but than a stain on an otherwise OK project. But even saying that Discord sucks for project hubs wouldn't be going far enough. Discord servers are terrible for hosting any sort of community (it's actual goal), public or private. I have been in several online 'communities' hosted on Discord and I know exactly how things go.
This deluge is inevitable on a platform where the only actual admin is a 3rd party company with no actual interest in it's communities, Reddit also has this problem but Reddit itself solves this problem by just being super authoritarian and not really existing for this community building in the first place. Classic forums were always ran by one guy, and that one guy, for better or worse, ran things as a God-King, the forum God has a vested interest in protecting his community, and even if he accidentally gives power to a schizo, he can easily revert their decisions, and people can get on with their lives, a near impossibility with the godless dystoptia of the centralised Internet.
In conclusion, Discord has ruined 1) every search engine ever made, 2) the reputation of every project it hosts, 3) every friend group ever hosted on it, and more things that have also been ruined by every modern social media platform, like old school forums, the sanity of the world, the innocence of the young, etc, etc, etc. I pray for it's demise slightly more often than I do for most other things in this world of ours.