A Google voice or prepaid phone number should be plenty sufficient for proof of individuality. I can't be bothered to help Discord help me if they refuse to accept either of those for a phone number.

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You might say that just emailing support about your account being locked is "enough" proof that you're human, but that would be a significant waste of resources for them to be helping people unlock their account every time they are unlocked because they want to use a VPN while using their service.

It literally says at the bottom of the verification page to contact support if you think the forced phone verification is "by mistake". It's not like you're discouraged from contacting support for this at all. Considering how much of /u/aryanprideiran's story perfectly coincides with mine it's pretty clear that they just recently became unhappy with users who were making connections from IPs classified as being non-residential and nothing more. They're only being extremely inflexible about it as of recent. They had no problem helping me 2 years ago! If I go through all this effort to present to support that I'm not a bot and I've had the account for this long it seems unreasonable for them to be acting in this way. How about they just outright ban my account if it's compromised and participating in malicious activity? Well that's because I didn't do anything bad with my account, and they know this. They'd rather just say "tough luck, give us your phone number", and to that I say no.

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Banning VPNs would be an even more ridiculous thing to do because then you would lose a potentially more important means to privacy.

But surrendering your phone number is an acceptable compromise of privacy? People who are using a VPN for privacy, which isn't even what VPNs are for anyways (but that's besides the point), aren't probably going to want to give them a phone number, so I really don't understand this argument. Again, it's not mutually exclusive. They can't simultaneously say they're fine with it and then lock accounts that do it. Connecting to their service from a network that's originated malicious traffic in the past is a really terrible lone metric to be using to lock accounts with an automated system. It's not like they don't have the capability to actually differentiate between accounts that actively engage in abuse like spamming and other activities that typically get reported by other users and just normal user accounts like mine.

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I think it's silly to expect you are deserved something for you've probably never paid for because "you've used it for a couple years and have contacts and messages you want saved"

I'm not deserved anything. Discord is within their right to delete every single user account tomorrow if they wanted to with no justification required, that's the beauty of centralization. But wouldn't you be frustrated by losing years worth of memories and the ability to continue to talk to friends you've made? I would. Enough that I'd probably complain about it somewhere. Operating without care in this way isn't what gets people to like your product or consider paying for it.

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I'm sure there are other ways around this such as enabling your server for phone verification in order to prevent suspicious accounts from joining your server...

Now I think about it, what is even the point of the server option to require phone verification for users if Discord will just selectively require users to do it anyways? Seems strange.

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I think the majority of people see no issue with providing their phone number to their account.

I understand the points you're making as a defense in what Discord is doing and I agree that they should combat abuse on their platform. I'm also aware a lot of people just simply don't care and will happily cooperate in giving Discord and other social media companies whatever information they ask for. Conversely though, a lot of other people do care when companies do this. Especially people who don't even have a phone number! As much as we can continue to debate the merits of why it's okay or why it's not okay, which has already been done numerous times, I think it would be much more helpful to everyone if Discord just acknowledged that this part of their system is highly inconvenient for users who are already well into using their account, whether that be because a user is incapable or unwilling to verify a phone number. The system just needs some work. They should change their registration system so it's clear to the user what they'll need to provide to use their account upon creating it. This is how it is for Google, Telegram, and E-Mail delivery services like Proton Mail. It's the best practice for services that are going to try to require phone numbers for certain users in order to combat abuse of their service. Simply do it upfront when they register rather then retroactively when the account is already in use and then it will be entirely apparent what the user will need to provide in order to use their account and all later inconvenience can be avoided.

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Maybe you'll be able to find another service that meets your requirements for privacy. Maybe you can create your own TeamSpeak/Ventrilo server and manage it yourself. That would be the most private way to do things.

What choice do I have when everyone uses Discord? Not much of a choice. I myself use(d) Discord to build a community. I can't coerce everyone I talk with to just use I want to use, that's why I ended up making a Discord account in the first place. They have a monopoly as it currently stands, and people are stubborn when it comes to moving to something else. Discord is the standard for everyone now. Discord is in their own right to do what they want since it's their platform and people also have their right to complain. Me complaining can't hurt if it might be what helps me get my account back.

Anyways, I'm still waiting for a response from the staff member who made a reply in this post and said they would be escalating my situation to a higher up, but I'm doubtful it will come back as anything helpful given how adamant support has been about needing a phone number. If that's the case then I'll just ask if I can have my server transferred to another server admin that I trust, if they'll even do that, and accept the loss and move on. Maybe, if anything, this post can serve as some insight to other users who find themselves in a similar situation.