Quasi KYC on PeakD

Hi fellow Hivers,

I wanted to rant a little bit about the unexpected but sort of frustrating update I saw while trying to figure out what’s going on with PeakD.

While on vacation one of the things I’ve been trying to do is check my phone every evening or so since I had some posts scheduled and I check to make sure I’m up to date with the comments on my posts so I don’t miss any and can visit a few of the people that I enjoy their content. I was a little dismayed to see that PeakD was down but that’s not a big deal except the post that I had scheduled for this being didn’t get posted which was a little annoying. This makes 2 posts that I had scheduled now out there in the ether, and will likely randomly post one day 3 years from now at 330 in the morning lol. So I was trying to figure out what I’m going to write about this evening since I’ve got a lot of pictures and other things from the trip but I figured I would hop over to the PeakD discord to see what’s going on and join the misery of folks in there that our favorite front end was down.

What I was greeted with though was something that got me highly annoyed! I have to add a phone number to my discord account in order to post anything in the PeakD discord? What the hell is that nonsense about?!

To me this is basically a KYC type thing, as our phone numbers are most often connected to our identities. It’s not a big deal to some but for me, I think KYC is such a load of shit and especially for a simple discord server. I will not be doing it out of principle but I also just lost a bit of interest in the PeakD platform right now and that makes me sad. I don’t know what caused this crap to occur but it’s a real detriment to the experience of not only me but likely many other people who want nothing to do with giving a platform their phone number. Email address is fine and one thing but a phone number is a whole lot more than needs to be included in my opinion. If there was some type of huge scam going on with people trying to steal info via the PeakD discord that’s one thing, and likely some drama I probably would have heard of by now but it’s most likely not that lol. I’m hoping it’s not government or regulatory pains in the asses that came knocking but I don’t think that would be the case.

At any rate though, this is quite the sad day for me as I really enjoyed the PeakD project and team behind it but this gives me less enjoyment out of it, knowing that I can’t even go into their discord channel to see what’s going on and offer some commentary to others that are in there in case Asgarth or Jarvie aren’t around and someone has a question I can answer or help drive to.

I’ll have to poke around the PeakD account page and check out their latest updates to see when the heck this change was made for their discord server. The night has turned into something a little more annoying than it started out as. It’s really not a big deal in the grand scheme of life that’s for sure but it’s one of those small things that when it occurs you are thinking WTF that’s annoying lol. I still like the team behind PeakD and their software is amazing, this just took it down a notch or two for me sadly. It’s still high up there on the notches but came down a few in light of these recent events.

Well let’s hope this post and my next few posts go according to plan so I don’t have to freestyle write on my phone instead of my laptop lol. I also don’t know what the post I wrote was even about so that’s also annoying, as the posts I write are always ones that I want to post otherwise I don’t finish and schedule them. I’ll have to go back and see if I can somehow recover the post. If I had the discord channel to comment in I’d be able to ask the question LOL. I guess I’ll have to send Asgarth a PM to get the information :D