81–90 of 300 posts
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>The popularity of Discord always surprises me! It takes hard work and time to create an active community Free dedicated voice chat with rich text chat. It was meant to take on Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble etc. And it successfully did. >or IRC if you're savvy Totally different use case, not even comparable
Typing to people you don't really know on the internet? Seems the same use case
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 will inevitably lead to more government spying at the end of the day. No thanks.
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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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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 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 really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized.
Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization.
If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless.
Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions.
Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.
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You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. Also, connect with these important people outside of Discord. You have to assume these sites/services will ban you at any moment. Contingency planning isn’t just for projects at work!
> You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.
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.
The popularity of Discord always surprises me! It takes hard work and time to create an active community. Why put all that hard work and time into a corporate-controlled platform that can lock you out of it anytime they want? How do people feel ok taking such a big risk? Why not use an open protocol like Matrix (or IRC if you're savvy) to form your community?
It is not that it is difficult to use a client (though the authentication i snot obvious - but then I had to think hard about Discord authentication/servers/invitations as well) but everyone is used to have a web interface and mobile clients to start with.
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 don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale.
>I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.
You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.
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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 current situation is pretty goofy. We've hyper centralized speech into a tiny handful of outlets, with those outlets increasingly recklessly operating with exactly 0 accountability to anybody, in spite of the dramatic and undeniable consequences of their actions are having on both individuals and society at large. IMO the one and only reason this hasn't been dealt with is because we're going through a brief phase of dystopia. Governments seems more interested in trying to myopically exploit the centralization speech to their own benefit, instead of actually thinking of the longterm, to say nothing of making society a better place.