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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

#211

Post by marcosdumay »

rglullis wrote: post #49
Bilal_io wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.

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…

At the end of the day, the only way the OP's idea has any chance is if regulations mandate it.

The government is not supposed to be oppressive. And if it is, you are better out of mainstream communication channels anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#212

Post by chrisked »

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.

No true for me. I was banned and recovered my account within 2 days by emailing abuse@discordapp.com.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#213

Post by nonameiguess »

ncmncm wrote: post #197
vel0city wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The people you need to communicate with are not on Matrix or Mastodon. "Private" clubs and golf courses banning only Jewish and black people are not allowed anymore, for reasons.

Private clubs still exist, though, and they can still ban you even if all your friends are there. I'm also reasonably sure Discord can't ban you for being black or Jewish. They can, of course, ban you without giving a reason at all, but so can physical private clubs.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#214

Post by vel0city »

falcolas wrote: post #203
vel0city wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being banned on Discord does not prevent you from using the DMV's website.

Discord, no (at least for now - some government contractor adding self-help via Discord or Slack is not hard to imagine). Your gmail account? Yes, it would prevent you from using the DMV's website.

No, I don't use an @gmail.com address for important communications. If Google banned me I would still be able to communicate with the government on the internet.

It turns out there's more email providers than just gmail.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#215

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

Spam doesn't have to managed by an opinionated central banlist. For email the solution is aliases like anonaddy or SimpleLogin.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#216

Post by kemiller »

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…

For the record, I'm 46. I clearly remember what it was like before, during, and after the internet revolution and I've seen how things have changed. I actually partially agree with you that part of the solution may be to simply stop relying on these new media quite so much and rediscover more analog ways of relating to one another, and I actually see signs of a movement to do just that (among young people!) but that doesn't change that they are very useful and here to stay, and for better or worse a vital part of how we relate to people near and far.

Consider the postal service — imagine if you could permanently lose the right to send things in the mail at the whim of an unaccountable customer service rep in the USPS. No trial, no recourse. Unthinkable. I suspect you CAN be banned if, e.g. you commit mail fraud or send something hazardous, but only after you're convicted with due process. That's the part that's missing. You can argue that the USPS is a government-owned entity and thus different rules apply... but again, that's the point. The carrier of last resort, at least, should be run in a way that is accountable, whether technically government or not.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#217

Post by nonameiguess »

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…

I always wonder what I should take in terms of behavioral modification from these kinds of stories. They're certainly spectacular. So are stories of mass school shootings, of police murdering people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of children being kidnapped out of their own front yards by strangers and held in basements. None of those stories cause me to avoid school, avoid police, not let children into yards, though, because I'm aware of the actual prevalence of occurrence as a proportion of time spent living in places where these things sometimes happen and the risk level is sufficiently low, in spite of how spectacular the stories are.

Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it.

Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about.

Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#219

Post by rocket_surgeron »

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…

There is no solution, you just have to deal with it. There will always be noise in the signal.

If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm".

C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it.

What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved.

Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is.

"Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does.

You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do.

We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem.

So you're gonna just have to deal with it.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#220

Post by rglullis »

marcosdumay wrote: post #211
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…

At the end of the day, the only way the OP's idea has any chance is if regulations mandate it. The government is not supposed to be oppressive. And if it is, you are better out of mainstream communication channels anyway.

> The government is not supposed to be oppressive.

All "Big" Governments are oppressive, as all "Big" anything is. The only difference is in how they exert their power, and what type of people are at the top of each pyramid.

Even "totally democratic" powers of the west will quickly attempt to crush anything that takes that power away from them and show potential to liberate people.

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