I'm sorry for being blunt in this message, I apologize in advance, this is just something very personal to me.

This seems like a desperate attempt to force developers and users to use the slash commands & intents system after a most likely underwhelming launch. I understand wanting to prioritize use of your cool new feature, but you should not be deprecating a core feature like commands through message prefixes until it is barely used anymore, and even without looking at the metrics I can guarantee that slash commands are not used more than traditional message commands. I know many people, but I know zero people that actively use slash commands. Like most other discord features, they're a carbon copy of slack slash commands, which are already really weird and confusing to use even on slack. I find slash commands to unnecessarily take up screen space and feel claustrophobic and clunky to use, not to mention being a nightmare to implement as a developer. If you showed some metrics in the blog post proving that most of the userbase is already using slash commands then I would be fine with this, but taking an educated guess, I'm going to say that's not the case. Another issue I have with this is convincing our bot users to actually use slash commands when the time comes. Here's what I predict will happen: Huge bots that handle things like moderation (mee6, dyno, etc) will get access to the message content intent, and they will probably keep their message-based command systems. Bots that don't handle moderation or have a unique need for reading messages other than for command purposes will lose access. Obviously word about this happening will not spread everywhere, and most of the userbase will be unaware, so, here's what will happen as a result of that. As developers, it's a universal rule that we have to treat all users like idiots, because most users will not read your instruction manual, they will not read your tweets, they will not read your website, if it doesn't work, they will remove the bot from their discord because "mee6 works, the other bot doesn't work, therefore it's gone", instead of trying to use slash commands. And then there's going to be a significant portion of users who will still remove your bot even if they figure out that it's slash-command only because they don't want to be forced to use slash commands, I know I wouldn't. We will probably see a drop in users and servers, and endless tweets and questions "why does bot not respond????" Down the road if the intent/slash command system is improved and people actually start using it more than normal commands I could totally see this being a step in the right direction, but right now it just feels like a weirdly forced move. I understand wanting to improve user security and not letting bots read any and all messages, but that could totally be fixed just by adding a role permission for letting bots read message content (We have READ_MESSAGES, but that denies them access to the entire channel, including sending messages). If this announcement was made after the community was shown improvements to the system and there was a general consensus among developers that it was time for it to happen, great, that's perfect. But that's not the case. Announcing vaguely that "there will be improvements" along with "by the way you have to use this system" does not sound like the best way to go. What if the "improvements" are subpar? What if people still don't use the system? I just feel like this was a very weird stage in the lifecycle of intents to announce a major update of this capacity and it feels like a giant "fuck you" to non-moderation bots.

Thank you for reading, and again I'm very sorry if this sounds out of place or rude, it's not what I'm going for, I'm just a bit pissed right now.