Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

news.ycombinator.com

291–300 of 300 posts

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#291
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to miss that Discord is excluding people who are not abusing their platform.

This original post is someone using their phone number for two accounts. Having multiple accounts is against their rules, so it's abuse of their platform. Another user talking about being banned from Discord was supposedly involved with a server trading child pornography and then continuing to get banned by creating additional accounts which is once again against Discord's terms. I'm not seeing a lot of examples of p…

A private organization should be able to do what they like, provided they have not acquired enough market power to be acting in the role of a public utility. As a public utility, they should be obliged to follow procedures that offer due process.

Does that mean they cannot "exclude those who they feel abuse their platform"? That is a tendentious, disingenuous question.

Does that mean they should be obliged to have a legitimate justification for such action, and offer an avenue to challenge it? Yes.

Does it mean the list of justifications should be subject to public review? Yes.

Does it mean that permanent bans for trivial, correctable reasons should not meet the standards of such public review? Yes.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#293
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This original post is someone using their phone number for two accounts. Having multiple accounts is against their rules, so it's abuse of their platform. Another user talking about being banned from Discord was supposedly involved with a server trading child pornography and then continuing to get banned by creating additional accounts which is once again against Discord's terms. I'm not seeing a lot of examples of p…

A private organization should be able to do what they like, provided they have not acquired enough market power to be acting in the role of a public utility. As a public utility, they should be obliged to follow procedures that offer due process. Does that mean they cannot "exclude those who they feel abuse their platform"? That is a tendentious, disingenuous question. Does that mean they should be obliged to have a…

The company which delivers water to my house is a utility. I have no choice but to use them.

The company which delivers electricity to my house is a utility. I have no choice but to use them.

McDonald's isn't a utility. There's lots of other places I can go to get food.

Discord isn't a utility. There are tons of other chat platforms available on the internet.

Gmail isn't a utility. There are lots of other email hosts available.

Are you seriously suggesting Discord is the only place to communicate on the internet to the point it's a utility like water and power?

Are Odd Fellows a utility?

Is Hacker News a utility?

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Neither one of those are counterexamples. One guy decided to give up solving his deliverability problems (problems I don’t have after self-hosting my email for 20 years). Nobody banned him. The second example is cloudflare banning a site. I don’t (and wouldn’t) use cloudflare, and even in that case, nobody banned anybody from his own website—just from cloudfare.

Regarding email, it's still possible for practically every other mailserver on the Internet to block messages from you, effectively banning you. That's what happened to OP I believe.

On the second one you might want to look further into that case... people have been frantically going after every possible company that does any business with them trying to get them off the internet, whether that's hosting providers, DDoS protection services, IP allocation providers, upstream ISPs, nameservers, domain registrars, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#295
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but Facebook is the biggest public square in the world.

Sure, as long as you acknowledge you're not using any legal definition of the word "public". You're not really even using any dictionary definition of the word "public".

Deal :)

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a helpful nor constructive answer

Though you're not wrong, what would a constructive answer be in this case? Discord is ignoring OP and they alone can restore service. I don't see what constructive answer you can expect in these threads other than "I work at and I DM'd the CEO for you"; I've seen FAANG companies and Stripe respond that way here on HN, but never Discord. The best alternative I can think of is "that sucks, rotate phone numbers and try…

this a common trend with technocrates defending technology that can basically be ripped out from under you at any moment. hopefully OP will get some help but there are many in a similar situation in many other similar apps.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#297
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck trying to convince an resource-strapped nonprofit to implement contingency plan for this. No government regulation means existence of these will for all practical purposes depend on Google's whim. I don't see any other viable option, you do? can you elaborate?

> I don't see any other viable option, you do? can you elaborate? lol you're a consultant?

Why lol? I do have some nonprofit experience not as consultant but as voluntary admin and I did consider google dependence a problem. But there was no other easy option, that's why I'm asking.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#298

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…

> Feels very 1984. I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.

Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen to me I had to report it as soon as possible, first opportunity. Wrote down the date I recollected that. Clearly the opportunity went stale, there's exceptions and this was it. Sacred? Memories? Consistency? Why would anything conform to that? Sue whom where how? Forget it.

Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time.

Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time!

Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame!

No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=imag...

Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels very 1984. I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.

Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen…

I might add subtitles for this later.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#300

This happened to me - they absolutely will not unblock your # unless you know somebody who works there beyond the support queues. I was told by a friend who did a stint at Discord that standard flow is churn new accounts, and that's acceptable because their users are already used to name churn.

Wait, are you implying they’re doing it to cook the books for inflating the total # of accounts on the platform? Somebody call Elon.

This is not at all what I meant, my implication is that they don't care about the poor user experience. I'm sure they don't count the banned accounts.
Post reply on HN