There are ways to put a stop to Discord's "Sponsored Quests"—for the most part anyway
Traditionally, Discoord has been an ad-free experience, and the social app is the better for it. Unlike Facebook or X (formerly Twitter), you can use Discord to communicate with friends and follow members of your fandom or online community without an influx of pop-ups or user-unfriendly data-scraping policies.
Alas, as you may have read, that's changing: Discord is now rolling out "Sponsored Quests," a new experience developers can opt into that will subtly advertise their games to Discord users. They may not operate quite like traditional internet advertising, but they are ads. Luckily, there is a way to disable them—for now.
As Discord highlights in its announcement, Sponsored Quests are opportunities for PC gamers to earn rewards by live streaming gameplay to friends, or via in-app activities. Developers can set up Quests Discord users can take advantage of. For example, Epic Games and Lucasfilm Games rolled out Quests for the May the 4th Star Wars holiday last year: Fortnite players could earn both an in-game Fortnite Wrap and a Coruscant Pride Wrap by streaming their gameplay to a friend, or by accessing an app within a Fortnite Discord server.
While that might sound harmless enough—don't do the Quest if you don't want the in-game perk—the larger issue with Quests is that Discord is planning to use them as advertisements for games, and to use traditional internet ad tactics to deliver them to gamers. The company will deliver Quest pop-ups to users based on their age and location, as well as their gameplay habits. So when you see a Quest pop-up appear in the bottom-left corner of your Discord window, know the app decided to deliver you this particular Quest based on these data points.
Discord doesn't make it super clear, but there is a way to disable these in-game rewards advertisements, as well as the tracking that goes along with them. To start, open Discord, then head to Settings > Privacy & Safety. Here, disable the toggle next to In-game rewards (aka Quests).
That said, you may still see Quests ads even after opting-out of them. In particular, you may encounter these pop-ups in your Gift Inventory, or whenever a friend is currently engaging with one of them. Luckily, at this time, the Quest experience in general is pretty non-invasive. Let's hope it stays that way—there are already vanishingly few good places to hang out on the internet.
