This is absolutely happening. I'm not a developer in SV, I'm an IT leader out on customer land, and I can tell you a LOT of companies are looking to bring things back on prem for security and cost reasons. And before anyone laughs, yes, you ABSOLUTELY can save money going on prem, I've done it for company after company. It's one reason the PE firm that I've worked under for a decade kept moving me to new companies.
Let them laugh. Self hosting is much easier with OSS that solves most of the pain that made the cloud transition worth it, and commodity hardware has been cheap and capable for over a decade.
The software and ongoing costs make it a very different discussion. I can show how $100k capex saves 3 or 4x that same amount in opex. 2 years ago just before leaving a company I moved systems where we went from $1.8m/yr hosted to $400k/yr all in. Gave us better performance, faster problem resolution, and we had more flexibility because we didn't need to fit into other people's systems.
That sounds insanely expensive. AWS S3 only makes sense if your workload is also in AWS. Using AWS S3 while having your compute elsewhere is a recipe for an insane egress bill.
I have always used it as a model for my own leadership and it's worked out extraordinarily well almost always, and has been abused just once. I've had former employees who I've fired who would still work for me again, and I take great pride in treating peole with respect generates results like that. It works.
I'm not a fan of the change. I wanted Discord to remain it's little walled garden so I could continue to ignore it. It's a terrible experience in every way and I genuinely have zero idea why anyone uses it.
it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
I think you could probably just say "it became popular because it's free and everyone could use it to game with friends". Those of us that have fallen out of gaming or people that don't game might not literally have any idea why anyone uses it. So you could both be right. You are taking their zero to one by providing the answer.
I think there is a whole generation of people that have very fond memories of discord and everyone outside that window does not have that connection at all.
An addendum to that might be that other people have used other services before discord even existed that had better (?) feature sets but didn't win out and that can create confusion because neither group of people understands what the other group is talking about because there is no shared experience.
Its main draw isn't explicitly gaming, but where your social interactions more often align with that of a friend group / in a group chat dynamic where everyone's talking with everyone or hangs out together at similar times. Gaming is just how it started, because nearly all gaming groups have this sort of social dynamic. (Obviously Discord does support DMs)
The fact that it also scales up to handle hundreds or thousands of concurrent users made it work for pretty much everyone. Suddenly you had one place you could go where there were thousands of other people all interested in the same thing you were interested in, and could meet new people or new friend groups over that said shared interest.
It also absolutely needed:
- persistent, non-disappearing text chats that last forever*
- Free image uploads (and thus meme sharing)
- voice chat & screen sharing, proxied (so no DDOS attacks after a malicious person grabs your IP in a public voice chat)
- role-based access control, so you could have an announcements chat for your server where only admins can say things, you can appoint certain people as moderators, etc
- a mobile app with push notifications (to mimic the text message paradigm of being always available to chat with your friends)
- Discord building out the ability to connect custom bots so early
*: No word yet on if they'll ever start cleaning up old messages and attachments. There must be hundreds of petabytes of attachments stored in multi-AZ google cloud buckets that will never be accessed ever again.
The platforms before discord were very bad (and still are). Discord was such a god send back then simply for being reliable free voice chat for gamers.
I don't disagree with you that Discord is the best option for voice chat now, but there was a godsend before it and that was Skype. It didn't have the equivalent of Discord “servers” but it finally solved the voice chat problem that was previously plagued with technical issues, instability and incompatibility. Discord became the godsend when Skype decided to speedrun enshittification.
Gaming was the original use-case because historically every gaming clan had a teamspeak server, a forum, and an IM group chat, each of which was a pain to set up and administer. But it just so happens that this is also a pretty good set of features for basically any kind of small-ish online community, so it's taken off across a huge number of areas (my hot take is that feature wise it's actually better than Teams/Slack/etc, especially in terms of how the voice call UX works, and inertia and general reputation/theming are the main reasons it hasn't taken off for internal company communications).
- Subscribe to Nitro to use these emojis! (Every time you open the emoji picker)
- Did you know there are username styles now?
- Subscribe to Nitro to use animated avatars!
- Did you know there are per-server profiles now? (If you subscribe to Nitro!)
- Boost this server! (With Nitro)
- Here's a GIFs button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's a Stickers button that is forever part of the textbox buttons.
- Here's an Apps button that is forever part of the textbox buttons. Just kidding, now it forever sits next to the textbox!
(A third of your horizontal screen estate is now textbox buttons)
- Here's a dedicated Gift button so you can buy Nitro for your friends too! In the textbox buttons.
- We have polls! Not in the textbox buttons though. It's in the same submenu as opening the file picker! Oh, did we mention you need an extra click to open the file picker now? (Why would we put it in the textbox buttons when we only put things there that upsell Nitro?)
- Did you know our new noise suppression is sponsored by Krisp? (Plasters Krisp logo everywhere)
- Have you played this game in Roblox yet?
- Verify your phone number to keep using Discord.
- Verify your ID to keep using Discord.
- Did you know which of your friends are playing games right now? (You can't turn this off)
- Earn Orbs by joining your friend in this sponsored game!
- Subscribe to Nitro for increased stream resolution!
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 3 months of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Nitro subscribers get 1 month of Xbox Game Pass free?
- Did you know Xbox Game Pass subscribers get 3 months of Discord Nitro free??
- Did you know you can get a longer message length limit with Nitro?
I say this as someone who's used Discord basically daily since 2016. They are so much more bloated than they were, it's insane. And a lot of these are things nobody wants, not just stuff I personally didn't ask for.
Don’t forget the holiday “we’ve changed all of your notification sounds for the third year in a row as a forced opt in instead of an opt out, and we’ve done this across all your clients with settings that don’t follow you”.
Fuck the Halloween sound pack. I didn’t want it.
Bonus points that Discord intentionally knows they abuse and gaslight users with the popups and notifications; one point they hovered a “DIDNT ASK” over the X button to dismiss some of their stunts.
Here's an easy example. Every discord client now ships with Krisp, and many clients squelch settings were automatically changed from standard to Krisp when this feature launched.
That change was many many years ago. I personally find Krisp super efficient (no adverse CPU usage or anything) and highly useful. It's better than Apple's 'noise isolation' at not picking up e.g. sharp / fast / heavy breathing.
> it's a super low-friction text, voice & screenshare program with support for your whole WoW guild (or whatever communities) and you have "genuinely zero idea" why people use it?
Yes. The UI is so bad I wouldn't call it "zero friction". But it's just my opinion.
Discord is a mediocre chat medium - I don't mind using it, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
But people use it to store all information about some games - effectively replacing a wiki. And it is AWFUL for that. Everything about Discord makes it bad for that
What do you find so bad about Discord's search functionality?
Because I see this complaint a lot, but I've personally never had any real problems with it, and it seems to cover pretty much all of the bases I'd want in a search for this kind of platform.
Because it's not semantic search, it's text search. You don't search Discord like you search Google, which is a problem when it is used as a wiki replacement.
It's not even text search. I can know the exact text I'm looking for and get messages that use completely different words just because Discord tries to group related words together when indexing. It's like some lobotomized collated word search, since it doesn't support symbols or quotes either.
Discord's text search is a simple intersection-of-all-words search, with some filters slapped on top. And it's not even the word you typed, it's all words that seem maybe semantically equivalent or similar. When I know the exact word I want to search for (e.g. "loves"), it sucks to always get results for every other related word (e.g. "love", "loved", "loving"). Maybe it'd be a useful feature if it had a toggle, but it doesn't. Some other words that have problems with this are time/times, caring/care, wanting/want/wants, and fucking allowance/allow/allows. Seriously?? Allowance is treated the same as allow??
Can't search for or with symbols. Lots of search engines have this issue. Just ignores them. Want to search for instances of ":3"? You're actually searching for instances of "3". Not much else to say on this other than it's annoying.
I assumed some ulterior motive. Did they pick the cheap option?
Why would they have left their userbase in the same lackluster search situation for so many years… maybe genuinely massive backlog and improved search won’t improve their numbers like $otherPriority?
Discord is very hard to understand for me. But the young people love it for some reason. Had to use it for some projects or hackatons, and it's still a mystery why it's so popular. No one found older links that were deeper in the chats, had to constantly tag people to see anything, random chats pushed the important information away. It was overall terrible for everyone yet everyone still loves it.
And weirdly, I then understood that there's no real global platform for a quick chat that everyone knows and CAN actively use. In universities we use Teams, but beyond that people are never active there...
But I also don't understand Twitter or Mastodon. It feels like there's so much better ways to both post stuff and reach people.
Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)
Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.
A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.
The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.
If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.
Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.
> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product
Sooooooo what is your solution?
You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.
IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.
IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).
I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.
OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
> OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.
As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...
Nope, but I know people who have well and I know the level of quiet cowardly compliance that industry participates in. I want to enable an independent and private internet and US network providers are not in a position to help with that.
What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.
The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.
You _can_, but if you're running a FOSS project you probably already have a significant shortage of spare time. Most FOSS devs are not that idealistic: they want something that works and works reliably and not to be building their own platform just to be able to work on the project they actually want to work on.
What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?
You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.
I'll echo the general impression. Even just using Matrix for direct messaging it's not something I am going to be able to pull any of my friends onto unless they already put the privacy and openness advantages very highly. It's just a pain to use, a pain to debug, and flaky enough you often have to debug it. It certainly seems like there's a lot of effort going into it but it seems to have resulted in a lot of churn but not much polish at any level.
it sounds like you had an awful experience with a specific client and/or server combo (or perhaps multiple ones). can you share which ones? as you say, there's a lot of effort going into it, so it's important to know if impression is based on outdated knowledge or whether you or others have had a bad time with the current generation.
Element (and Element X) and the main server. I still use it daily (to message the one other person I know who uses it) but nothing makes me think it's viable as a discord replacement. (I haven't had too many problems super recently but then I haven't tried to log in on a new device for a while)
Matrix has been my almost exclusive chat solution for the last several years to talk to all friends coworkers and familt and it is a major upgrade to IRC in most ways, while also giving me end to end encryption when I want it, and the ability to self host and federate and bridge to other networks. Self hosted at two companies as well and works fine. Those are the features that matter most to me, and Discord does not do any of them.
Whatever issues you are experiencing will not get better if you are unable to describe them in words more detailed than "sucks."
I'll take a crack at this one. I've been using matrix and element for over a decade as my main messenger, and it's great, but it also does suck. I even use it for my business chat. It's pretty much the most popular federated encrypted client right now, and it seems to have taken over XMPP's lead. So here's a nice list/rant about why matrix/element sucks.
1. I spent 15 minutes last month helping my business partner sign onto ElementX on his second phone. He's signed on his PC and his primary phone, but the second phone was very difficult. Basically type username and password, but now you have to verify with emoji. How do you do that? Well, sometimes it pops up on your other clients that a new client needs verification. Sometimes the popup never shows, and there's no way to find it. But we found it eventually. Verify via emoji. Great! Let's do it. Oops, it timed out before he could finish. Apparently it has a super short timer that even I struggle with it. Eventually we gave up and used the recovery key, which worked, but you know many people are going to lose that key since it's not a password they can just memorize. Most other messengers, it's just username, password, and then click the email confirmation link. Boom, easy.
2. Audio/Video calling/conferencing. There are apparently 3(?) different technologies in Element alone, depending on which version of Element (desktop, web, mobile). The "old" one is jitsi. The new p2p one appears to be only available to clients that aren't Element? Or you can only create conference rooms in those other clients (commet?), but you can join them from any client. But then those new rooms are sometimes not join-able from Element clients. They just don't appear in the room list at all. Even clicking a link to the room says it's the wrong "room version", but it's a freshly-created room. So I delete the room and make another new one. But now it's a Jitsi room and it doesn't work in this other Element client (all first-party actual Element clients, and all broken in slightly different ways!). So... it's working now, but only after lots of trial and error and lots of cussing from my business partner. And I have to somehow justify that this is better than using Slack/Discord/whatever corporate thing.
3. The official client is fragmented. On mobile, there is Element (classic) and ElementX. You're _supposed_ to use ElementX, since it's the new one, but ElementX does not have all the features of Element (classic), so you might need the Element (classic) client for those things. But Element (classic) is not getting updated, so you're left in the cold as far as updates and the new features (meaning you might not even be able to cross-verify your clients, or join video calls, spaces, etc.)
4. The official matrix server (synapse) is pretty slow. I hosted a couple small communities (~100 people or so?), and synapse somehow kept getting overloaded and crashing. Maybe it needed more than 4GiB, but that seems kind of silly. There are decent 3rd-party clients (continuwuity is my current favorite), but there's no migration path from one server to another without wiping your entire database and starting fresh. So.... my main homeserver is kind of stuck on synapse.
5. Bridges. Yes, you can bridge anything to anything, but have you actually tried it? Interface is super clunky. You have to run a separate bridge service, make sure it swaps keys with the matrix server via a yaml configuration dance, then talk to the bridge's bot in a dedicated matrix channel with special commands that may or may not get your bridge working. I've used signal, discord, telegram, and irc bridges, and they're all a mess in one way or another. My most recent attempt was with the signal bridge. I made the mistake of enabling end-to-end encryption. One day, the bridge server restarted and lost all its encryption keys. Cool, now all the bridged rooms are dead. So naturally, I delete the bridge service and re-configure it from scratch. Now it doesn't work because its bridge bot username was already taken by the previous instance with the lost encryption keys. And I can't just delete that bridge bot user because _matrix does not allow deleting users ever!_. So now I have broken signal bridge rooms and broken signal bot users that I can't ever delete, even with the admin panel. So naturally I open up a postgresql client and delete them manually. Oops, now my matrix database is broken in ways I cannot even begin to comprehend. Because deleting users is not allowed. So now I just can't have a signal bridge. _maybe_ there's a way to make it work, but I've been programming and sys-admin'ing for over 20 years, and it's just beyond me. I'm going to have to (again!) wipe out my homeserver and start over, losing all my messages and contacts (again!). XMPP had very nice transport services, and Psi+ had a very nice UI for configuring and organizing them.
6. Multi-identity support is lacking in all the official and most community clients. If I have a work account and a personal account, I need to start two separate Element clients. Each one is a hefty electron app, and they all have the same systray icon, so I need to trial+error every time to open the right one to message someone. So far, there's only one client I tried that had proper multi-account, and I think it was commet. It was ok, but I hated that it was a flutter desktop app where every click felt super unresponsive. So I went back to Element. Most XMPP clients have multi-identity built-in. I'm not going to use my work identity for personal chat, just like I'm not going to use my hackernews account to message co-workers.
7. No message auto-deletion. Many people like to claim that Element is more secure than Signal. It is not. If you live in an oppressive country where things you say can easily result in prison or torture, you need more than E2E encryption. You need messages to be gone. You can't trust that your device or your friend's device won't get confiscated and forced to reveal your password. Even the United States has forced device unlocking at the borders. Signal (and Confide, and even Telegram) have automatically deleting messages, so even with the keys, there's nothing to see. Matrix stores messages forever. Aside from some complicated server-side setting, there's no way to automatically delete them. You have to right-click and manually delete EVERY message if you want future privacy. Nobody's going to do that. And I tried enabling the synapse settings for auto-deleting messages, but they didn't work. It seems that feature isn't really tested, or it's documented poorly.
8. The spam/CSAM problem when running a public community. The admin tools are a bit lacking, so without some considerable expertise, it's often not worth even having a community matrix server. So folks just make a discord instead, which has actual moderation tools builtin. Yes, I know there are external moderation tools you can install, but why should that be required?
9. The protocol is too complex to make full-featured 3rd-party clients. This isn't IRC where you can make a basic client in 3 lines of perl. You'll notice that the 3rd-party clients are all lacking in some features of Element, the official client. Even the official ElementX client lacks features of Element Classic. Most folks are stuck on the official electron-based Element client, which has a fairly clunky UX (try explaining to your grandma how to cross-verify clients).
This list is just off the top of my head. I could probably write a whole book on the problems with the matrix ecosystem. But again, matrix is the best we have. IRCv3 hasn't really caught on, and the need for an IRC bouncer to receive offline messages isn't commonly excepted in 2026. XMPP was/is ok, but it hasn't been commonly used since Google Hangouts pulled the bait+switch on us 10+. I keep thinking I should really just go back to XMPP, or start using delta.chat since "everyone" has an email address.
I often can't even get fairly technical folks (who write code by hand, etc) to use Element, even if I do all the server setup and just hand them the keys. It's too hard for most folk. It's too hard for me, and I've been maintaining my own matrix servers for 7+ years. I maintain 3 matrix servers right now. One synapse, and two continuwuity. NixOS makes it pretty easy to maintain servers, actually, as long as they're not open to the public.
And if anyone asks me "what should we use instead?", I'd probably say XMPP or IRC. And we know neither of those is perfect, either, and nothing open source and federated is as easy to onboard like Discord, Signal, or Slack.
But even though Element/Matrix sucks, it still works well enough for me to use it as my main communication. At least until I finish my own multi-protocol messenger. Which I started about 6 years ago and haven't had time to work on.
Disclosure: I wrote some of the code on Confide's backend back in 2021. I do not currently work at that company and am not promoting or un-promoting the app in any way.
Slack and hangouts were both functionally worse than discord for a long time. I haven't used them in quite a while, but even if they have now caught up, network effect is already in play.
Also is slack free? I remember some debacle about their free tier being pretty poor.
my comment was not a claim that discord is completely unique in its offering. it was directed at the "genuinely zero idea why anyone uses it" part of the comment
As someone who hit the PC gaming world in around 2008 online, we started with TeamSpeak and Ventrilo which were hosted platforms that allowed you to voice chat with your friends. They had cost money and weren't that great on audio quality (from that time).
Then we went to separate game specific voice chat platforms which were inconsistent, but meant you struggled to find a way to chat with mates outside of something like Skype at the time.
Discord was one of the first platforms that was firstly free and allowed you one place to chat with friends and communities about games AND had very good quality audio.
People use it for all sorts of things, however I use it fairly minimally and only to be able to voice chat with friends either when gaming together or playing separate games. I don't get understand some peoples problems with it, it works better than anything else out there for what I use it for.
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
Discord is my favorite communication platform on the internet. It combines everything useful that was offered by older platforms like IRC, Skype and TeamSpeak, and provides that with a modern UI.
For me, it also helps that all of my favorite communities are on it.
could you be specific? It has pockmarks for sure. tacky upsells, cringy gamification, horrible resource consumption (mine runs at like 800mb of ram or more). Oh yeah inconvenient updates.
but still probably the best signal/noise community experience out there. and great customizations.
My initial comment was tongue in cheek (but transparent enough I think, given the context). So, let's be clear. I questioned whether it's still true that it's people who are doing all the HR work at Microsoft without LLM assistance.
Things change fast nowadays. Microsoft has access to the latest models. Using AI to screen employees is controversial enough to keep it hush-hush. There's no principled reasons that they can't extract useful training data even with the presence of biases.
I'm a writer, a technical writer, and a highly technical person in the executive space. Communication has always been one of my strong points, and the blathering on that AI does drives me to distraction. It's impossible to really tailor the output of LLMs very much. I value information dense, direct writing when it comes to technical things and they're always embellishing and going off on side quests and it's obnoxious.
Ok, but in this context it's EXACTLY what the user wants for a TV. Everything can go to an HDMI switch, including external tuners, and you'll have a soundbar because TV speakers are GARBAGE today.
I would argue it's easy to understand how they all have this opinion: Because humans understand this about ourselves. It's in the data we create and provided to the LLMs.
Absolutely. I actually went to trial many years ago because a DA wouldn't back down, he thought I'd bend. I didn't. We literally had video footage of the culprit, it clearly wasn't me and clearly WAS someone else. The DA waited until the day before we were to pick a jury to drop the charges, just a few days before trial. After, the DA even said to me, "I'm a dangerous man to make an enemy of." I think I was 20, so obviously I was cocky and snapped back "So am I," and stormed off. I not live a thousand miles away from that crappy little town.
When I was 19 and told the DA I'd be fighting my case and proving my innocence, I watched a vein pop out of his head. He got the better of me though, his dad was the mayor and the judge was in his pocket and they facilitated an absolutely mockery of a trial despite zero evidence, and my public defender was in on the racket and refused to allow me an appeal, and the jail refused to give me new counsel.
This same DA has a reputation for assaulting prostitutes and just got sworn in as the parish judge. I guess playing fair would have hurt his career because my understanding is to be a judge out there you have to demonstrate crookedness.
I was arrested as a minor because someone who was giving me a ride was found with 0.156 grams of cannabis residue in his booksack which was not accessible to me at any point. The other two defendants had parents and accepted pretrial. I was homeless with no parental support or money for pretrial and had to fight it. The driver went on stand and said it was his and that I never had access to it. Half a dozen cops testified wildly different stories.
But, my right to a jury trial was illegally taken from me and the judge simply said, "I think you're lying," without a shred of proof and gave me the maximum allowed 6 month jailtime and maximum fines for a misdemeanor charge given to me as a minor with no prior record. I immediately told my attorney I wanted to appeal due to a mistrial and her failure to make a valid motion to quash, and she looked at me, pointed at the judge, and furiously scolded me, saying, "Absolutely not. That is my boss and he will make my life hell if I allow you to appeal."
The other parish public defender, which they'd pulled from my case due to his desire to actually help me, was so upset that he went to the judge's quarters, screamed at him and then came to my cell to apologize profusely about me getting illegally railroaded. He was never able to fix my case.
His brother... was the DA. Now he is running to replace him as DA since his brother got sworn in as a judge. I'm going to reach out to him and try to get it removed from the system now.
Also, when I got arrested, the DA's dad, the town mayor, personally visited the home of the folks who were letting me stay in their garage so I could finish high school and tried to convince them to put me out on the street so that I would fail my classes and end back up in jail. The fucking mayor.
So many levels of fucked up to that case. Not to mention that the officer who arrested me is a known meth producer, distributor and user. I have personally witnessed her bring a smurf to the pharmacy to buy sudafed IN HER POLICE UNIT so that she could go cook meth while on duty.
And while in court for my own case for 0.156 grams of a material that was never found on my person or within reach of me, I watched a man who was friends with the judge get sentenced to a grand total of 20 days of community service after being found with two ounces of pot in his pockets and a bottle of whiskey while illegally hunting on someone else's land out of season without permits, operating a firearm while basically blackout drunk. It is literally who you know.
This took place 13-15 years ago. Anonymous FBI tips were swallowed up, ACLU was uninterested, couldn't get a journalist to bite. Some of the people involved have already died without ever facing justice.
Write a book. The only thing they hate more than accountability is a tarnished legacy. Disbarment is temporary, the public dancing on their grave lasts as long as the scandal and plot location are known.
Because the DA has a win/loss ratio to maintain. If it drops too low, how is he ever going to run for governor? It's all about power using it to protect their career.
As people have said, they hate losing a case and will try to tempt you into a plea deal that seems like less hassle than anything else and "make this go away." But I'm stubborn, always have been. I made a fool of him in court by his reckoning because I challenged his authority and won.
Seriously. And what kind of moron did the D.A. he think was that he would take a criminal conviction on his record by pleading guilty, when he had video evidence of his innocence!! Just to avoid embarrassing the D.A., a stranger to him?
I'd like to see a three way verdict: guilty/not guilty/innocent.
An innocent verdict would mean the defendant had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did not do the act and would put the state on the hook for all costs. A jury that hung between not guilty and innocent would be considered to be not guilty, no retrial. Reality works better when misdeeds carry costs for those who commit them.
"Your honor, I was innocent of that prior crime and it shouldn't be used to enhance the sentencing of this current case, nor to influence the jury's perception."
"I'm sorry, it says you weren't found guilty; it doesn't say you were innocent."
Now extrapolate this to your friends or potential employers.
"Sure, LorenPechtel wasn't proven guilty of murdering 500 orphans as accused, but he never fully proved his innocence with a detailed and corroborated minute-by-minute log of his activities for the past 5 years. So maybe he did it!"
It's innocent until proven guilty. Not guilty until proven innocent. A third category would be abused to high heaven, and the courts already engage in far too much abuse.
Except for plea bargains, where it is often "innocent until bullied into accepting a plea deal as the better option - even when you didn't do it". No need to prove anything there.
I am currently in the court system defending my innocence regarding a recent incident which I can't currently discuss, and the officer who charged me was literally bragging about how most of the charges would get "pled down"; he was openly and deliberately frontloading me with bogus extra charges hoping some would stick if I did a plea deal for the rest. He told me that if I talked back to him, he'd give me an assaulting an officer charge just because he could get away with it. The corruption is baked into the system from top to bottom.
Or if the jury acquits, they are asked whether it was reasonable for the state to prosecute the case for each of the charges. If ≥50% say no on any charge, criminal charges are automatically brought against the prosecuting attorney and judge for malicious prosecution. Conviction carries mandatory disbarment plus prison time.
They used to have this in Scorland - Guilty, Not Guilty and Not Proven, with the last two legally having the same affect (ie being aquitted) but I believe Not Proven was abolished at the start of this year.
I believe the problem was that in practice it became He Totally Did It But The Evidence Sucks So He Gets To Walk Free, and was increasingly interpreted as such. In the public's eye, everything besides a Not Guilty meant you did it.
There are sort of other options like an Alford plea where, my understanding is, the prosecution knows you didn’t do it, you plead guilty anyway and they tell you to just fuck off.
so then if you're not guilty, so not actually innocent, you're like... kinda guilty, right? you could still end up on the no-fly list, or the sex offenders list, or what have you.
They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.
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