Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 300 posts

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#131

Post by evanwolf »

cloudwalk9 wrote: post #66
quikoa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's worth to consider taking them to a small claims court. I don't know what the odds of winning are but it's quite the hassle for a company.

I've considered it. But they have a right to refuse service for any reason. Only damages I could claim is 10 dollars from my last month of Nitro. Not sure what they're doing counts as disability discrimination either. Probably don't have a case.

They lose if they don't show up in small claims court to defend themselves. It's a few hundred bucks in the US for them to hire a lawyer to show.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#133

Post by abduhl »

somenameforme wrote: post #90
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".

Private vs public all comes down to the interests of society, it's not religious dogma. Prior to the 60s it was perfectly legal to refuse to serve somebody because of their race or religion. The courts decided this was not in the public interest, and so that changed. Some time before that it was private companies used to also be able to fire anybody seeking to unionize. Then that changed. There is even precedent wher…

Small point: the courts didn’t decide this in the 1960s, the legislature did with the Civil Rights Act. The courts enforced it. The courts don’t (shouldn’t) determine what is in the public’s interest, the legislature (aka the people) does.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#134

Post by sanitycheck »

kouteiheika wrote: post #95
ropeladder wrote: post #15

I triggered some Discord flag where now they require me to give them my phone number to log in via the web. I won't give it to them. Luckily I have a still-logged-in instance on my home computer, do I can still use that for the time being. Super frustration though.

Same here. Still logged in through Firefox, but can't login through Chrome anymore. Exact same computer, exact same IP address. I contacted support and they refused to help me, quote: > I just checked with my team, and upon review of your account, it appears that our detection system has triggered successfully and we will not be removing the phone verification requirement on your account. You'll be required to regist…

They probably just don't have a way to invalidate tokens. When it expires you'll be locked out on Firefox too - better tie up any loose ends.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#135

Post by MichaelCollins »

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".

The entire premise of limited liability corporations is a creation of government; these are artificial entities, not people, they have privileges not rights. Every single right you might think a corporation has is a privilege, not a right, and can be taken away. They don't even have the right to exist at all.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#136

Post by giraffe_lady »

rglullis wrote: post #119
giraffe_lady wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Something I also share with the younger generation is the understanding that the cowardice of their elders is what got us all in this situation to start with. "Self-sovereignty" and individualism are failed ideologies: we will solve this for all of us or for none of us.

A large contingent of ""hackers"" throws up their hands and say "fine none of us then as long as I can insulate myself from the worse effects of it" and yes that is a shameful abdication of the responsibilities we have towards each other. Sorry if you find your own identity in there but you don't have to be so complacent about it yourself either.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#137

Post by readsadhours »

cloudwalk9 wrote: post #28

Discord Trust and Safety in particular is downright useless. I feel I should share my story. It's a personal hell I've been stuck in for a while. I'm disabled from severe depression resistant to first line treatments, bedridden a lot of the time, and I rely on the platform for most of my social interaction and resources for my hobbies, as far as I can pursue them of course. Discord is invaluable and is basically a mo…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#138

Post by blueflow »

nosianu wrote: post #115
blueflow wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Be consequential and quit if discord is that bad. Its the companies job to produce a good service, not yours to beg them for it!

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#139

Post by aseipp »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #126
unethical_ban wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I respect your view and can see your point. May I counter that Discord effectively proprietarised the open standard that is IRC and then put all the bells and whistles such as shared screen streaming, voice chat etc on top? Similar to how WhatsApp proprietarised XMPP. Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels. That's how I see it. You are welco…

Discord was originally designed for gaming voice chat. It marketed itself this way, it was positioned this way in its public perception, and most of the early feature development reflected this. The move towards "online communities" only came later once they realized they had a broader product: they realized they had an alternative to Slack, while originally they thought they were an alternative to Ventrillo and Mumble. But make no mistake, the gaming angle was why Discord became popular; it made it vastly easier to host and create (and eventually, find) dedicated servers for specific topics, and the voice chat quality was mostly ahead of everything else (except Mumble, but again "not hosting your own Mumble" was a selling point.)

The fact it had text channels with (very, very limited) markup was less a ripoff of IRC and more "The basic thing everyone expects from a comms client, to have basic text channels where you can type words." It's literally the most fundamental thing a "communicator" can do is to have a text box that other users can look at. Otherwise you wouldn't even be able to organize people to get in voice channels! Sorry to say but nobody except nerds know what "IRC" is, but almost everyone understands online chat. This is not new. The fact IRC diehards think Discord "proprietized" IRC is a good example of not knowing or understanding your enemy at all and just romanticizing about what you think is important. Discord was not popular because of text chat. It was popular because of voice chat, and it did voice chat very well.

Every discussion of Discord has to have IRC contrarians who reminded you "it had text chat first", all while the fact of the matter is text chat isn't what made Discord popular to begin with!

> Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.

That isn't because IRC is some magical happy software that makes everybody using it sit in a circle and sing campfire songs. It's because what you are describing is the natural end-point of all online communication forums like Discord, IRC, AIM, or even Twitter or whatever: "community." What you are witnessing is a community of humans congregating, not some magical special sauce that IRC gave us in 1980 or whatever.

Community has existed in human society for a long time, in fact. Seeing it replicated in different mediums with similar features and form is not surprising at all. Your wording might imply IRC gave us this or something, or that the "communities" in Discord are rather ersatz in some way -- but I argue that's a simple confusion of cause and effect.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#140

Post by horsawlarway »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #70
kemiller wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are but that’s precisely the problem. More and more of our vital communication channels are owned by single private entities. IOW public discourse is being replaced by “public” discourse. The promise of blockchain solutions is that they can return us to the status quo ante of the internet where there were open protocols that operated in a decentralized way. Whether it can fulfill that promise, I don’t know. But…

The internet is not real life. It seems a lot of people who hold your opinion are in the 18-24 age range. Those people who grew up thinking the internet is the only way to communicate or “make things happen”. But I assure you these private companies do NOT have to let you use their services, and common excuses such as “Online communication is like a public square!” is not rooted in the desire for free speech, but is…

I'm 33. I think you're wrong.

I suspect you're older - imagine the US without a public highway system. Imagine every highway is private. Imagine what arbitrary bans from those highways would do to impact how you live. Talk to me about how well we should communicate face to face in that situation?

Idea not that appealing? That's what you're advocating for today.

A complete loss of a highway system that has no public replacement. By the way - those "18-24 age range" are all being forced to help pay for those "private highways" with their tax dollars anyways, in the form of govt subsidies to private cable companies.

Should we discount the ability to still communicate face to face? Nope. Damn well shouldn't.

Does that make this ok? Nope, Damn well doesn't.

Post reply on HN