Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#111

Post by anoonmoose » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

teeray wrote: post #100

anoonmoose wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".

We don’t have the same standard in place for physical private companies. If Walmart started issuing lifetime bans to people because they didn’t fill out the customer survey on the receipt, they would be well within their rights by the same argument. It would also probably not be tolerated by society, because it impacts food security for those people where Walmart is the only grocery store around.

I am fine with Walmart issuing those bans, as is within their rights, because the correct mechanism to respond to that would be for it to be "not tolerated by society", aka, the market will respond.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#112

Post by senko » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

We really need a platform that would run open source for you as a service.

In many cases there are reasonable OSS alternatives (here, Discord itself!) but not everyone wants to be a part-time sysadmin.

Free/Libre Open-Source Software as a Service, anyone?

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#113

Post by mavhc » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #99

mavhc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing to people you don't really know on the internet? Seems the same use case

Instantaneous creation of a server with an RBAC GUI, multiple text and voice chat rooms, voice chat, screen share, app share(game streaming), and for clients, a GUI that allows people to view the status of other servers while participating in one. Again, it's made for voice/screen/streaming share, not primarily text.

Weirdly, every server I'm on is primarily text.

I'm in multiple text chat rooms on multiple servers in irc though.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#114

Post by rhn_mk1 » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #50

vachina wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not your server, not your data. Host your own mission critical services, and don’t commit too much to (especially free) third party services.

You cannot self-host identity. You cannot self-host a social graph. If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend. People go on social media for the social graph. You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via c…

Sure you can self-host identity. Why would it be tied to a domain name? It is tied to a public key already, in e-ID systems, S/MIME, or GPG, Tor, blockchain, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#115

Post by nosianu » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

blueflow wrote: post #87

onion2k wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is to promote these posts more , not less. Give services an incentive not to be stupid.

At some point it just makes HN worse. People shouldn't use discord at all if its that bad.

And to achieve that - you need to inform as many people as possible, no?

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#116

Post by wang_li » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

anoonmoose wrote: post #51

moss2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera). If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.

That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".

Your argument was lost a hundred years ago or more. There are many regulations on businesses. On their speech, on their pricing, on the products, on hiring practices. The list is quite large.

AT&T can't restrict who can use their network to make phone calls based on the political views or the content of the call. Why should Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Especially when special liability exemptions were made without which they likely wouldn't even be in business.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#117

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #30

I don't get it. We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts? I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this…

Unfortunately as we've seen from email, if there's no system for silencing posters you get drowned in spam. The history evolved as follows, and this is how I'd expect it to go for any "decentralized" comms system:

- various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular

- deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist

- people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability

- after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#118

Post by leephillips » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #107

leephillips wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly right. People choose to give these companies power over them; they choose to submit to tyranny. Nobody can ban me from email, or from my own website.

They can, it just takes extra steps and so probably won’t happen as nobody is likely to run a coordinated campaign to do it.

How would it work? I mean, I can imagine framing me for a felony and getting me banned from internet access as part of my sentence, but are there less extreme procedures?

EDIT: Maybe breaking into my email server and sending out spam to poison my IP. That’s conceivable, and would partially ban me from sending out email.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#119

Post by rglullis » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #101

rglullis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is arguing about us stop relying on over centralized corporations and to start using the tools (that already exist!) based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible. Your response is "mah regulation". On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we…

No I'm likely older than you and definitely older than the median on this site and have always basically believed regulation is a more effective solution than blaming users for their problems.

Saying that people are complacent and expecting the audience of a site called Hacker News to be mindful of their self-sovereignty is far from "blaming users for their problems".

The fact that an older individual shares one idea with the younger generation does not exclude the possibility of it being a generational divide.

Kudos, though, for also sharing the younger trait of treating every argument as something about their own identities.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#120

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

moss2 wrote: post #44

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #30

I don't get it. We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts? I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this…

Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera). If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.

[deleted]