I found Discord to be too toxic and problematic for my liking (including full of scammers and rug-pull projects), so I left and don't use it. The same goes for Reddit. Plus, they both use AWS for storage (which they apparently don't bother to encrypt). I'm not going to support centralised Big Tech companies (even indirectly) if I can help it, so I bailed. You can keep your Moons; I value my privacy more. I can't say that choosing to stay away from them has had a negative impact on my life.
In one of the Discord communities I was in (Arweavers), the mods were the scammers. That was the whole point. The administrator was in on it, too. When I complained that one of them (John Smith-Biden, as he was known then), who I mistakenly thought was trying to help me set up the mining software, stopped responding to my messages, the administrator thought I was going to reveal that they were running a scam and blocked me. When I contacted him to enquire why I was blocked simply for asking for help, he became very aggressive and confrontational. The conversation went downhill quickly and I remember genuinely and sincerely wishing him that his "project" suffer many setbacks and fail miserably.
For those who don't know, Arweave makes the false claim that it is better than Filecoin (FIL) for two reasons, one of which is that, while Filecoin allows you to specify for how long you want to store a file, Arweave will store it for two hundred (200) years. That strikes me as a bloody stupid waste of resources, particularly since the files will be immutable while stored (and it has/had no graceful way to handle modifications/diffs). Who on Earth would want to store a file for that long? Certainly not I! The other thing that put me off (even before I was blocked), was that in order to (supposedly) mine Arweave, I'd have to sacrifice 100 TB of HD space and download all the files already stored on the blockchain before I'd be able to mine anything. Now, even if I did have 100 TB of spare HD space (never mind the bandwidth to download that much data), there's no way in Hell I'd be prepared to store other people's crap on it just to get some crypto. That makes no financial sense to me. What a load of bullshit!
Smith-Biden (and the server owner) basically pitched it like this:
If you sent them all your Filecoin (FIL) and installed their mining software (which attempted to reserve 100 TB of your HD for "distributed storage" of their files), they'd send you back the equivalent in their crypto and allow you to mine it.
That looks like a scam to me, but sadly, people fell for it. At least one positive is that I didn't have any Filecoin (not that I would have sent them any). The other is that the "miner" was really difficult to install, requiring a number of convoluted steps that were easy to get wrong, so lots of people gave up on it before the process completed. (Even with my technical know-how, I couldn't complete setup and configuration, which is just as well, in retrospect.) It was also buggy, so often didn't do what the developers/scammers wanted it to do. (In fact, I was first invited into the community by one of the developers, since I have development experience). However, it became clear that the developers were a bunch of amateurs, with not even the vaguest idea of how to use project management tools, issue trackers and/or a distributed version control system. They didn't even have a whitepaper document, which is a definite red flag.
It was a pretty sophisticated and convincing scam; I'll give them that, but the scammers tried to be too clever for their own success. I'll stick with Filecoin and VeraCrypt, should I ever want to store my files on a blockchain.
Thumbnail image: Arweave logo from Crypto Logos
