i'm seeing a decent number of people saying that Discord's addition of masked links is Fine, Actually, and it's a normal feature of markdown that's been around forever, and (most importantly) you should always make sure the link you're clicking actually goes where you want it to.
and yes! you should! that is a thing that most of us Grizzled Internet Veterans probably already do (perhaps, unfortunately, after being bitten by a malicious link or two). but the thing is, there are a lot of people that... don't do that, for a variety of reasons. maybe they're new to the internet, maybe they misread/misunderstand the confirmation dialog, maybe they're even a Grizzled Internet Veteran that's had a temporary lapse in judgement and blindly clicked through that dialog because they've already clicked through a couple dozen legitimate ones today.
the point is, Discord--a company that is infamous for making very poor and user-hostile decisions--is making it easier for scammers to do their thing, at a time when scammers are already running rampant on their service. this is why enabling masked links--and doing the absolute bare minimum to sanitize them--is such a colossally bad idea.
like you don't even need to avoid itch dot io's malware reporting now to pull the "wanna playtest my game" scam or even set up a page at all! you can just mask a link to whatever virus you're sending people, it's so much easier
