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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

#51

Post by anoonmoose »

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.

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".

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#52

Post by onion2k »

huhtenberg wrote: post #13

HN needs a separate section for this sort of "media shaming" posts. I understand why they are being made, but it's getting a bit tiring to see these on the front page so frequently.

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

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#53

Post by Sebb767 »

_V_ wrote: post #34

I have also tried to contact support and it was painful. At first you get an automated response from some bot which is unhelpfull. After some more diggin and poking around you get to a human but they just told me that they don't know details about flagging and cannot do anything in regards to these processes. So basically useless. I really don't understand why it got so popular edit: typo

> I really don't understand why it got so popular

Because enough people never contact support for it to not be a major problem, I assume.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#54

Post by steanne »

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…

you may be able to participate in servers that have bridges, like to irc or matrix. that's a minority, though.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#55

Post by devmor »

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…

>If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets.

This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve.

If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "like" and verifying it against her public key.

Edit: The person I'm replying to has edited their post at least 3 separate times in the past couple minutes, adding multiple new lines to say different things, so if this disagreement to it ends up making no sense, you know why.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#56

Post by [deleted] »

devmor wrote: post #55
JonathanBeuys wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets. This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve. If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "lik…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#57

Post by enriquto »

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…

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop?

As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#58

Post by viraptor »

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…

You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. They're not. I want both regulation of massive internet services and for mastodon and others to become more common choices.

> based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible.

Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. If you're found to be doing something illegal, it's on you to figure out how to deal with that. It may involve not using that software.

But we don't live in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Government regulation is useful for many things. The answer to corps running wild does not have to be starting an isolated system from scratch.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#59

Post by PaulKeeble »

When they were doing the massive bans in November/December/January it looked like it was to try and boost their new user stats for the rumoured upcoming public sale. But more and more it just looks like they have an errant security algorithm that bans legitimate customers with no recourse. I suspect much of Discord's new user signups are people who have had accounts banned and then have to make a new account, there probably isn't much real growth happening now and there is growing disquiet about their terrible customer support.

Re: Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

#60

Post by temp_account_32 »

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".

They pretty much are de facto public services. The town square is now digital, and the laws have failed to adapt. Just because some big corporation owns it doesn't make it different in practice. Do you really want to defend a future where you can be banned from doing anything because some random $BIGCORP's algorithm decides so on a whim?
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