connor sheri shaw

Oh Christ no, I'm writing about Discord again.

I'm currently in the midst of listening to CEO of Discord Jason Citron's statements to congress in late January, regarding child safety on their, and other, tech platforms.

Now, I've made my thoughts on Discord's management fairly explicit in the past, which was why the CEO's opening statements surprised me- I was half expecting AI-generated sounding slop ala Mark Zuckerberg's marketing-ass opener.

But, Jason talks like a human. A nervous one, including tripping over his words, and saying one thing when he clearly means something else:

We do, uh, have- 15% of our company is focused on trust and safety, which- this is one of our top issues- that's more people than we have working on marketing, promoting the company, so we take these issues very seriously.

- Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, to US Congress, January 31st 2024

Presumably he meant 15% of the company's staff, otherwise "15% of the company is focused on safety" sounds... not great! Equivocating company funding splits or available resources with human staff wouldn't hold up to scrutiny- congress isn't the time to be vague.

I get what Jason meant, though; assuming, of course, he was taking into account the recent layoffs.

January 11th, a couple weeks before Jason's Big Day, Discord announced they were sacking 17% of their staff- 170 people in "various departments", according to The Verge. 170 people is 17% of 1000, so that leaves 830 people left.

Thus, assuming these numbers are accurate, that'd put around 125 people in charge of trust and safety at Discord. Neat!

Now, I'll get back to the congressional hearing eventually, but in fact-checking those numbers I had the misfortune of reading the memo Jason Citron circulated to Discord staff regarding layoffs, as obtained by The Verge. I've heard what Jason sounds like under stress, so let's read what he puts out with time to cook up a statement.

The Almost Memo

Hi @everyone,
I want to follow up on what we just covered at our all-company meeting and share some context.
Today we are making the unfortunate and difficult decision to reduce the size of Discord's workforce by 17%. This means we're saying goodbye to 170 of our talented colleagues.

Love that it's "I" when you're offering a kindness, "we" when it's a difficult decision, and turns "our" to create an inferred them of 170 people by the end of the paragraph.

This is a decision we did not take lightly, but it is one that we have conviction in to better serve our users, our business and our mission over the long term.

Okay, so when 'taking' this decision, it was necessary to sack 17% of staff- in this they have conviction. They are so convicted right now, lemme tell ya, they oughta call Jason a conviction-man!

Where we are and how we got here
Our company has changed and grown significantly over the past few years. We should all be really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together to serve the millions of people who turn to Discord every day to spend time with their friends.

Who is 'we?' By saying 'we should all be proud', it implies you're including the reading employees, but 17% of those readers aren't included in that. And the same 'we' making decisions for 'our' company certainly doesn't include laborers whose careers are more disposable than leaderships', who get no say in 'their' company's layoffs.

'We' cannot be both the laborer and the employer without acknowledging the clear power-divide, yet this memo treats those two disparate groups as interchangeable. That, somehow, those laid off stop being 'we' the very moment the decision-makers at Discord click 'Terminate'.

At the same time, we have to face some hard truths. We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020. As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated.

The layers of deniability being deployed here are both blatant and cross-contaminating. More projects being taken on are not a "result" of increasing your workforce by 5-fold, there's no predetermination here.

Having more employees does not result in taking on more work, the latter are decisions informed by the former which conclude eventually to 'becoming less efficient' only as a result of bad ideas. Those are managerial decisions.

In this framing, Jason has assigned blame not to the impossible asks of his employees, but rather on having more employees at all. He's blaming the employees for being inefficient while framing this as some inevitable consequence of their hiring. Who made the decision to hire that many new people? Who told them to do work doomed to fail?

'We' includes you, Jason, no matter how carefully you cherry-pick that framing.

Today, we are increasingly clear on the need to sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.

Our agility-bringing focus must be sharpened, guys. We are much clearer on this than we used to be! How else will our organization become agile?! You may, reasonably, conclude the above paragraph to be meaningless fluff meant to soften the blow to fired employees.

However, the memo then describes that buzzword bubble as being what ultimately led to the layoffs?

This is what largely drove the decision to reduce the size of our workforce.

What is "this"?! 'Needing to improve' is buried so far in corporate metaphor that there's no actual policy proposed, yet Jason acts as though the logic speaks for itself. He's just deciding that to "improve" means layoffs.

While difficult, I am confident this will put us in the best position to continue building a strong and profitable business that delivers amazing products for our users and supports our mission for years to come.

And now it's I again, as soon as you're done writing about decisions you were party to. As if to step away and say 'well, the people have spoken: we must fire the people'.

Jason picks and chooses when 'he' is 'we' as is convenient for, I can only assume, some semblance of an ego fragile.

What happens next
I’m sure all of you are anxious to know what this means for each of you.

Yeah yeah, since your fucking job is safe, Jason. Christ alive and dead.

• By 10:30 a.m. PT, everyone will receive an email. In your email, you will learn whether or not your employment has been impacted by this reduction-in-force.
• Leadership will hold a meeting with departing team members at 11:00 a.m. PT to discuss next steps
• For all remaining employees, we will come back together this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. PT to talk about what’s next

This memo can safely be from Jason's perspective now, regardless if he wrote or generated it, once the bad news is broken. As that shield of 'we' would instead become a sorry attempt at solidarity.

'In your email you' will learn, not our e-mails. Since the 'we' that makes decisions was always safe.

How we're taking care of our colleagues
It is incredibly important to me that we support departing team members through this difficult time and provide them with a sizable runway as they transition into future employment.

👏In these 😔 trying times, consider 🤔: how sizable is your runway? ✈️ Your team members will be departing soon 💺, so measure this before you reach your ⏰ future employment. 💯

To that end, we are offering them:

• Five months of salary (plus an additional week for every full year at Discord)
• Five months of benefit continuation
• Three months of outplacement services
• Equity vesting of awards scheduled to vest on Feb. 1, 2024
• Continued access to Modern Health through the end of 2024, and more

All of that and more can be yours for the taking, but more importantly the leaving.

Don't mistake my brattiness as ignorance of any compassion; these are nice things to offer your staff. Before kicking their asses out the door.

Though that's a bit like saying "I hope the car that ran me over has insurance!"

I’ll end by sharing deep appreciation and gratitude for those leaving us.

'LET ME START BY SAYING HOW GLAD I AM YOU'RE ALL LEAVING,'

Guy's using 'leaving us' in the same way one insists they didn't break up with you, you broke up with them. You're leaving us!

Discord is better because of your contributions and the passion you brought to delivering for our users, our company, and each other. Thank you for everything.

Wait... what?

"...and the passion you brought to delivering for our users, our company, and each other."

To delivering... what? Just to delivering? The idea of presenting a product, no matter what it is? I mean... you aren't wrong; the modern tech sector is all about conceptual delivery rather than actual product, but isn't that telling on yourselves?

Either Jason('s chatbot) forgot a word here, or he really does mean "passion" for, uh, 'delivering for each other' whatever that means. Like... in the giving-birth sense or what? These words could work, but not in this order!

Reads almost like an AI struggling to understand nuance and tone.

It’s incredibly difficult to say goodbye to respected peers, many of whom have become friends. I’m hopeful that working on and with our product has reinforced that these bonds can be sustained and even strengthened beyond the “walls” of any one place.

Tone shift! Now Jason's writing like he's pulled a coup on his army and sent his former squadmates to political prison: 'You may not like it, peer- friend, but our bonds can be... strengthened beyond the, ah, 'walls' of this place, ahahah...'

Take care of yourselves and let’s look out for each other through this particularly challenging time.
Jason

Taking care of 'yourselves' and looking out for 'each other' creates a separation, of others who were hurt, but Jason can't help inserting himself in the struggle one last time. Cheeky little 'let's'.

You are the challenging time, Jason. They are looking out for each other because of you and your ilk in leadership, making terrible decisions in the hopes Discord would have been bought out by Google or Meta by this point.

But it hasn't been. And now you associate yourself with every part of the hell you're in but it's creation. Wake up, asshole: you're one of the devils in charge.

PART 3 OF A SERIES ON DISCORD. READ PART 1 HERE, AND PART 2 HERE.

remember this marketing campaign? i certainly do. it's always been part of my distain, my distaste, my discomfort around Discord.

it's late 2015. when i'm not hanging out with IRL friends doing perks, i was playing Video Games. i used two platforms to chat with my friends. one was Steam, where i had met a lot of my Gamer Friends, the other was Skype, which was very much secondary for me.

until i met my boyfriend, now fiancé, Austin. he didn't like Steam very much.

i didn't have a mobile at the time. so i would call with him every night on the Skype app on my playstation vita. i would fall asleep listening to him coming thru those crappy speakers. it was lovely.

eventually, Microsoft discontinued Skype support for the Sony product. i still didn't have a phone. so along comes one of my besties, Xander, sayin' "hey, you should get on Discord. i'm trying to get Steam and Skype friends together on there to make it easier to hang"

sounded nice to me! but keep in mind, this was 2015. this was early Discord era. meaning that when i downloaded the app, on first launching this was my loading screen prompt:

i groaned so hard i uninstalled it immediately and didn't reinstall for another couple months, when i was left going with the crowd to a new platform of choice

now, the above is a recreation. i can promise you this is what my loading screen said, and that screenshot is probably still floating around somewhere. but in researching, i couldn't find it.

instead i found a bunch of other nothing, dated-at-the-time memes:

later on, Discord started taking user submissions, and while they were still lame, at least it felt community-driven lame instead of corporate-driven lame.

i'm Scots-Irish and grew up in Diet Canada, so i won't litigate if it made sense for the Hanzo one to include the romanization, as opposed to the kanji. if they got it wrong, it'd make great cross-branding, considering!

the loading screen memes made me cringe, but like. whatever, right? it was pretty dumb of me to bounce off so fast, but i think i was out of uppers at the time.

bottom line: while i still had Skype i didn't see a reason to use Discord.

So then, what happened to Skype?

i will give you one guess.

skype tried to become The Social Media Platform of choice, including recording other people's conversations for clout, emoji purportedly designed by, uh, paul mccartney, public chatrooms etc etc

in fact, here's a list of discontinued Skype features from their website, which reads like an obituary of venture capital dollars

this isn't even close to all of them. anyways, as it turns out, people really didn't like their messaging and calling app being converted into a vehicle for monetizing conversation itself.

Sometimes when big companies develop products they just
have a bit of feature creep. They just managed to muck it up
all along. It was so terrible, that was the last time I used
Skype. I just got fed up of trying to use that application.
The whole thing got convoluted, the interface got worse,
and the performance got terrible. It just lost the ease of
use it used to have.

-Om Malik, Journalist & Venture Capitalist, as quoted in Wired

yeah i wonder how that happened, "partner emeritus" of silicon-valley's own True Ventures firm. i can't even afford a house and this guy is holding a stone-throwing contest in his glass mcmansion

anyways. in late 2019, you know, a couple months before the world had to go indoors, Microsoft announced that they'd be merging Skype for Business into their proprietary platform, Teams.

just in time for "business calls" and "casual calls" to become, sadly, merged in our minds

Zoom & Our Collective Corporate Nightmare

contrary to what funny internet man says in this funny internet video, Zoom very much did not "come out of nowhere"

Zoom was around since late 2011, as it turns out! and yes, during the pandemic it became synonymous with "conversation" for a while, if you wanted to see your friends or family without potentially infecting them, with a virus or malware.

credibility is key! Zoom had the edge, while Skype just has Edge.

lots of schools, including my public school growing up, secured their tech using IT grants for apple products specifically, which don't always play nice with skype- given that Microsoft acquired Skype in the early 2010s, that's hardly surprising

on top of this, zoom was already being used in college/higher education settings for years. it offered features like selective screen sharing and live local recordings, very useful for giving lectures!

then once the Funny Virus hit, the CEO played savior by giving away free licenses to schools

or more accurately, Zoom temporarily removed the 40-minute time limit from larger group calls for schools that reached out to the CEO, often personally, before re-adding it later

it amuses me that they throw out "as most students have returned to in-person instruction" (framing it around the students making this call, as opposed to it being a largely governmental choice) without even beginning to address their partial fault in that

now, consider: one of the biggest sticking points for getting people to switch off Discord to something new, is a lack of a simpler, better alternative. why would i learn to hack the g shell or script the newman (i am not a programmer), when i could just install a quick app, or even not have to install it at all?

skype, chance to respond?

well, it's okay, you go when you feel like it. such a Team(s) Player! speaking of-

Now what about Teamspeak?

i love my barebones messaging apps! finally, an app just for chatting! assuming, you know, you're a Pro Gamer™

i love being audio-bombed by strangers joining my call! i love spending money on servers to talk to my friends! i love there being 5 different versions of this goddamn app and nobody can agree on which one to use!

look, once teamspeak is up and running it looks... fine? i guess? if you're someone who just needs a chat service while Gaming, and doesn't mind scripting. i hated it every time i used it growing up, and it by no means fits my use case today.

i can't hack the github to get the dachshund out of the jar or whatever just to talk to my family. ease of use is a massive driver in moving to a new platform, and TeamSpeak saw the writing on the wall of venture-capital-backed feature creep and went:

"not us, we're here for The Gamers!".
a famously popular and understanding group of people to pander to.

as it turns out, of all the terrible branding decisions Discord made, removing the meme loading screen text was probably the best one. gamers are easy to pander to, but oh so very difficult to get away from.

Please take us seriously.

is this... legal? like, they aren't citing ANY sources here. can you really just claim your competitor "sells your data to third parties" with literally no proof? also, the check marks still being greyed out in comparisons is hilariously blatant

what do all these chat platforms have in common? Skype, Zoom, TeamSpeak, and indeed Discord? is it feature creep? well no, teamspeak seems pretty content where its at, E-sports Aesthetic as it all is.

their common thread is that they all crave legitimacy.

Discord, TeamSpeak, and TeamSkype all want, above all else, to be taken seriously by the general public. because the fewer people who see your app as for 'somebody else', the more potential users customers

wait, what about Zoom? are they actually staying in their lane?

of course not, they're funded by venture capital after all. they literally can't stop making new features or this incredibly successful, ubiquitous, famous company will go bankrupt

it's time to "ditch" Venture Capital and VC Firms; in the side-of-the-road sense.

i don't WANT to stream for 15 minutes to at least one viewer. i don't WANT to unlock the Coruscant's Pride Wrap

why is my messaging application pushing Star Wars assault rifle textures for a video game i don't even have installed? well, it's all thanks to a little thing called

Venture Capital

discord, like most modern "free" online platforms which promise no ads, is funded largely through venture capital investments from people or firms seeking increased returns

i wouldn't say there's anything by default morally dubious about taking money from people to fund your startup aside from the usual capitalism stuff; the problem here specifically, is the incentives created by your platform's core funding being pinned to ROI.

i cannot stress this enough: a platform's exponential growth will inevitably, eventually, fail. by definition.

there are only so many humans on the planet. only a small fraction of them will be in a position to use your platform (people with internet access at all). out of them, only a smaller portion still even needs a messaging app

therefor, once the market of Gamers in need of upgrading from Skype is tapped, to give investors their promised increased returns, discord needs New Features™!! monetizable ones!!

so, here's something worth noting about the VC world: because so much of it is rich techbros, born-wealthy manchildren, and other oxymorons gambling on the next Big Thing with stupid amounts of casino chips; a company being absurd is NOT a deterrent

your coffee startup suddenly pivoting to the metaverse or whatever is not going to be enough to shake investors, especially if they've already convinced themselves 'the metaverse' is going to itself be the next Big Thing

i just made up the above scenario as a joke. like jonny frakes.

but uh-oh! i googled "coffee startup metaverse" like a FOOL:

that last one is about a roblox map made to get kids excited about environmental activism.

when i was in middle school, for a class once our teacher literally just had us all play FreeRice for an entire period. i didn't see any articles about Mr. Nolan bringing rice to the metaverse.

(which, at the time, would have been second life. anyways.)

So, when does Discord stop needing funding?

you'd assume all of this investment is to help discord continue to operate for years to come, i mean $15 billion in projected value¹ could keep the lights on for YEARS on such a low-rent platform, right?

they've already done the prerequisites for this kind of sustainability; you have to pay for nitro to upload big-ass files, bandwidth saving measures to kick people from empty calls and consolidate identical chatrooms, etc. i have no issues with this; websites are not free.

but, again, Venture Capitalists care about growth. not sustainability. being unsustainable is the "breaking things" part of "moving fast", in the eyes of a shareholder

let's look at another example, everyone's most tolerated membership platform, Patreon:

as pointed out by excellent documentarian Dan Olson in an equally excellent thread on some weird blogging site called twitter, Patreon is not an expensive platform to maintain, relatively speaking. at least, it didn't used to be.

a text and image based platform for people to ask for money from fans, and allow a standardized, reputable place for both parties to be okay giving out otherwise very personal information. shipping addresses for IRL merch, mailing addresses for newsletters, whatever kinds of fun things creators do over there. i wouldn't know!

(my Patreon account got suspended at some point and i'm not sure why, but in order to get it back they wanted my social security number, so like, no?)

especially not now. Patreon's insistence on consolidating creators' works onto its own servers, despite mediator being separate from the media being a good thing for nearly everyone involved, now means that it costs even more than ever to run the platform, and therefor they must take on more venture capital, and generate more monetizable features, and so on, and so on

until this once extremely profitable and theoretically massively scalable platform is now laying off employees to cut costs

after all, how else will they continue to invent new problems to solve, right jack?

In response to the changing environment, Patreon needs to change the way
we operate. Here’s what that means for us:

• First, we’re going to continue increasing our investments in our product,
engineering, and design teams, so that we can deliver the updates to our
product that our creators and patrons need.

• We’ll also maintain our commitment to outstanding service and support
for creators.

• We will restructure our marketing efforts under a smaller, consolidated
team in the near-term, focused on updating our brand, developing creator
resources, and launching new products.

• We will restructure our Creator Partnerships efforts to take a more scaled
approach with a smaller, consolidated team in the US.

• We will reduce the size of our operations, recruiting, and other internal
support functions to align with the new scale and priorities of the rest of
the company.

     -Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, 2022

that second bullet point means nothing and is total fluff, but exists to muffle how absurd the idea that they need to scale back in order to "launch new products" is

Patreon doesn't need "new products"! Patreon users don't want new products! they want to continue doing their work in peace while taking contributions, and you guys will keep getting a cut! this is all pointless! absolutely without substance!

bringing it back to Discord: why does my messaging app try to sell me guns?

It's not about sending a message, it's about the money.

dunno about you, but i'm not a fan of typing words, in my word typing program, and having the program overlay the part of the screen where words go with suggestions i instead replace those words with paid symbology.

venture capitalists don't care what the product they're investing in does; they care about how many people are using it, and of those people, how much revenue can be extracted?

so let's think like a VC firm for a second. ew.

Can you sell the user data?

this is a very profitable business, but Discord has, for the time being, been very very insistent they do not sell user data. in researching, i have seen absolutely no credible proof that Discord is lying and doing it anyways. so, at least for the time being, let's be nice and assume they're telling the truth here. after all, data brokering is profitable, but so are a lot of other things

Okay, so then Discord Nitro, how do we make that more profitable?

first of all, get as many people to buy it as possible. so, create a slew of new features to potentially incentivize people who are on the fence, and then offer the original model at a cut rate to catch the poors. what's "great" about this is inflation will cover the difference, given enough time

wait, what was that about youtube bots disappearing? eh, i'm sure its fine.

How dead set are you on that 'no ads' thing?

discord likes to brag about how they don't have ads, which to be fair is a massive plus. ads are terrible.

however... do they not have ads? like, does discord really not have advertisements?

like... is a popup about getting a fortnite skin, or asking me to play halo- are these not ads? are you not advertising a product in exchange for main-stage legitimacy, or is this just called a "collab" or some other euphemism of a sort?

like, a requirement of earning these skins or whatever is that you stream to at least one viewer; you're making your users do the advertising to each other, and, you know, hoping they'll buy nitro for a higher quality stream while they're at it

besides, doesn't this actively work against Discord's rebrand away from being "Gamer Chat"?

then again, that was probably just because selling games was a bad idea. remember that? so, they needed to branch out further, rather than remonetize the already exhausted gamer market they had

now remind me, how dead set is Discord on not selling user data, again?

So what about the usernames thing?

if you're on co-host, i can almost promise you've heard about this, but just in case: discord is changing from having usernames end in a poorly-named 'discriminator' (a series of 4 numbers, especial to the appended handle), to having a core identifying username necessitate uniqueness, with rate-limited change, and an independent nickname tag separately

think of the way old shitty blogs like Twitter do it, your @ isn't the same as your Name, but your @ also cannot be the same as anyone else's @

As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular,
more problems have emerged. The technical and product debt we
incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed
to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people.
The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too
complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.

     -Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO of Discord, May 3rd 2023

as it turns out, many considered this a feature, not a bug.

discord is purportedly a messaging app. i don't want people searching for my @ to talk to me on the platform i use to hang out with my partners, and call my sister to talk about k-pop. i do not want to be easily discoverable there.

this is like saying the problem with phone numbers is they're unique and hard to attribute to the owner, unless said owner writes it down for you. why is this a bad thing?

i'm a niche internet personality, enough to the point of having been recognized a handful of times in real life. i don't want people to easily reverse engineer my personal online messenger handle from my name alone.

the old system incentivized sending fans a link to a server, not a handle. if you wanted to talk to someone one on one, then you could write down your handle like you would a phone number; the more interpersonal the medium, the harder it should be to find it without permission

you know what this new system does do, though?

incentivize people to name-squat, thus increasing your userbase on paper. i'm sure that'll be great news to the VCs next shareholder's meeting

even if a creator online has decided to not use Discord, which they have every right to do, if in the future they are left without a choice as it becomes many users only social media by necessity, if that creator didn't become an "early adopter", their handle will most likely have been taken. by an innocent coincidence, or an active scammer, who knows?

and either way, the idea of discord serving as defacto social media isn't anything new; so if there's a massive shift happening in the """socmede""" world, then who is Discord not to shore themselves up to potentially be the next overbloated, dead platform destroyed by its own needless growth?

Discord is a black hole. It's destroying itself & taking us with it.

a platform can only be so dense. you can only feature creep for so long before you are no longer recognizable for your key functionality.

denser and denser, more and more pointless additions which cost money to develop, cost money to maintain, and thus require further investment. and those investors want their returns to increase every fiscal year, not stagnate. it doesn't matter if the platform has successfully found its audience, if it serves its purpose and will continue to make passive returns for the foreseeable future

what's better than money, to a venture capitalist, than more money?

the closer we get to the centre of this absence of light, the more time stretches and warps. you start to wonder, "has Discord always been like this?", you have trouble even reaching out to people because the app keeps crashing, under the weight of a fifth reinvention of the wheel that is emoji 🎡

the justification for layoffs, for pay cuts and benefit reduction and pivots to so-called "AI", is to facilitate this pointlessness, this growth unwanted and unwarranted. to create new ways to show VCs how you're making their money back for them in a cycle of masqueraded investment debt

Yesterday we made an active shift in the talent needs of our marketing
department to better serve our growing business and future ambitions.
As part of this, some difficult personnel decisions had to be made to
meet these goals.

     -Discord Rep to GamesIndustry.biz in 2019

you could just let us send messages. but where's the money in that?

PART 2: Preemptive-Passive Writing & Discord's Username Update

---

1. Further clarification on the absurdity of valuation versus true capital.

when i read about how much debt elon musk has taken on or massive fines for corporations undermining democracy, something just fundamentally refuses to take hold in my silly little brain

$13 billion? $787 million?

today i spent $4 on pasta and a 2 litre of RC cola

money just... ceases to have a foothold in reality beyond a certain point. smart british youtube man did a very lovely demonstration of the differences between the M and B in the illion

these numbers are just hit points of monsters battling in the world of invented purpose

fines, as shown above, only really matter to people who are near to, or already struggling to pay for X or Y. there are legitimate expensive things to consider in these regards, schooling for your kids, healthcare

(you know those things america decided to charge you for )

but there's also, like, the $34 fine i get for being $2 in the hole in my bank. guess i got some bad rolls on my starting wealth

unrelated: look at these emerald dice! this is not a metaphor

so doing 1 million hit points of damage to elon musk is a good, solid hit, maybe he's even bloodied! now roll a dexterity saving throw for being dogpiled by weird internet fascists

when you have enough money to stop thinking of it as anything other than a statistic to increase, a number to raise, minmaxing to get the best build with the MOST money; you can do anything you want, any damage you take shrugged off because of your deep HP pool

this is why, perhaps, maybe for balancing the capitalist hellscape game that is America*, we should consider some debuffs for monostatting so hard

*(but since this metaphor is mostly about 5th edition it'll probably continue to be just as unbalanced lol)