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Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

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Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#171

Post by anoonmoose »

bambax wrote: post #148
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".

This is incredibly short-sighted. Just because a company is "private" doesn't mean they can do anything (manufacturing illegal goods, selling things that are harmful, not hire a certain category of people, etc.) We could add to the list of illegal behaviors the fact of denying service without justification and recourse. Secondly, when those companies confiscate our accounts, they deprive us of what we had stored ther…

If the US wants "email as a utility" then they can build and fund it themselves. I wouldn't even complain about proposals for the US Government to buy Google- I am a demsoc, after all. But I do think that half-measures like forcing private organizations to operate under the same rules as private ones are a "worst of both worlds" proposition.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#172

Post by qzx_pierri »

falcolas wrote: post #145
qzx_pierri wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge your feeling that the internet is real life, and I respect your opinion, but I have to disagree. I'll repost part of a comment I made 5 months ago because I think it's very relevant: "Don't forget that everything you see online is a facade. 15+ years ago, I fell in love with the internet because it's somewhere I could go to be something that I'm not. I could be LOUD, or I could say things I would normal…

Many government functions (unemployment, DMV appointment scheduling, etc) can not be accessed from any place but the internet. It's one reason that Public Libraries are so important these days. That our government requires you to use the internet puts lie to the idea that you can live a complete life without the internet.

Yes, but those government services are funded using taxes, so yes, you ARE entitled to those services. You are not entitled to the use of any private service.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#173

Post by ranger_danger »

leephillips wrote: post #71
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.

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.

That's not entirely accurate.

For email see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437

For website see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#174

Post by ridgered4 »

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…

> A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.

Curious what the mechanism for identifying the VPS account was. Phone number? Some sort of client signature? I don't use discord.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#175

Post by vel0city »

horsawlarway wrote: post #140
qzx_pierri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

In your example of the highways though, Facebook and Discord aren't the highways. They're the private clubs you take the highways to. The highways are the telecom companies, the ones where you're incredibly limited on which ones will service your area, where you realistically don't have multiple choices.

Discord isn't the only group chat platform on the internet. WhatsApp isn't the only text message service out there. As long as you can get on the internet, the highway, you can drive to another club. You can use Matrix. You can use Mastodon. You can use tons of other services out there.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#176

Post by cinericius »

dannyw wrote: post #161
chrisked wrote: post #108

Write abuse@ and you stand a good chance they revert this quickly.

No chance whatsoever, they legitimately don't have a flow for unbanning people outside of knowing an employee.

This isn't true. I've been banned and then unbanned in this exact scenario - they re-enabled my account after 2 days. I had my messages flagged as spam for a further 6 weeks, but it was eventually resolved. My only contact with Discord was emailing support@.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#177

Post by falcolas »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #172
falcolas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many government functions (unemployment, DMV appointment scheduling, etc) can not be accessed from any place but the internet. It's one reason that Public Libraries are so important these days. That our government requires you to use the internet puts lie to the idea that you can live a complete life without the internet.

Yes, but those government services are funded using taxes, so yes, you ARE entitled to those services. You are not entitled to the use of any private service.

Effectively, the entire internet is privatized. To put another way, it is impossible to access those government websites without using a private service.

And since the government does not provide an email system, you still need to use a private service to access those public resources.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#178

Post by MisterSandman »

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.

It makes HN worse in your opinion. The fact that these posts get so much engagement shows that most people do enjoy these kinds of posts.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#179

Post by amerkhalid »

pjc50 wrote: post #117
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…

However, email is easily portable, you can download your messages, and even own your domain, so you can switch email providers without changing emails.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#180

Post by sriram_malhar »

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…

No, it isn't always about social media, or free speech, or 18-24 year olds.

An NGO I consult for runs its entire business on Google. All its documents are on Google docs, all digital assets on google drive, using google play store for their mobile app, using firebase on the backend ....

They work on children's education, and have lots of photos of children attending their workshops. My biggest fear is that Google AI will identify some photo as objectionable and shut the entire operation down in a hurry. Without recourse.

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