Discord wants to change the bot system by April of 2022 so that message content becomes a "privileged intent," requiring a bot’s creator to provide a government ID in order for the bot to be able to see the content, and that content specifically cannot be used for command parsing. Using message content is how most, if not all Discord bots do anything. Discord is practically forcing bots to move over to slash commands, but that won't quite work for most bots. Many bots will need to be almost entirely rewritten to accommodate that, and many others still won’t work.

The reason they think this is necessary is to prevent data harvesting from users, but the problem with this is that the bots that do that actually front as users, not bots that would have to go through a verification process.

My example is a homegrown bot named FICSIT-Fred. This bot reads messages and responds to those which match certain common problems that people have with modding a game called Satisfactory. Without the message content, it simply cannot function.

Essentially, Discord is killing off many bots with this move. Many will never be able to make these drastic changes, and will no longer work. 

For a longer explanation and exposition, read this by the author of discord.py, one of the libraries that holds together many bots written in the Python programming language. 

“A lot of current bots in the ecosystem are faced with a choice of either getting rewritten to comply with changes I believe to be unnecessary, or to die. Discord seems to believe that this change is for the better …[and] that most bots will fully migrate over within the timeline given. I do not believe that this will be the case.” - Rapptz (discord.py)

By signing this petition you agree with the position that these changes will do so much more harm than good (death of hundreds if not thousands of bots vs. trying and failing to prevent data harvest) and that this proposition be stopped in its tracks.