Guess I'm Done with Discord • Hacker News Board

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#41

Post by throwaway2048 » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #18

Tor breaks a lot of shit for me, and I dont even bother with captchas becuase it usually just flags me as a bot. So I dont think this is particularly surprising or out of the ordinary. But yeah, discord used to be held in high standards by me and plenty of other gamers, but they have made it clear that they cannot handle tough situations, and dont really care about their userbase. Someone should start a privacy focus…

Google captcha is particularly egregious because it will flag you as "never allow in, ever" but not give any indication of this, and still will happily have you solving captchas (that is, working for Google, for free) for 30+ minutes, until you catch on that they aren't ever going to let you past.

Captcha v3 is even worse in this regard, because it silently flags you while appearing to let you in...

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#42

Post by wowaname » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #7

> I refuse to provide phone verification as I believe it is Discord's fault for flagging my account... > I will be communicating with a couple communities with which I'm involved to explain that I am unable to use Discord Does this person not have a phone? 'Unable' seems like a stretch. If this person said, "I don't want to provide my phone number to Discord, so I'm going to stop using it" I'd understand. Their openi…

Just a note: I do not ask to have my blog entries submitted to this site, precisely because the comments I receive here are very assumptuous and negative. I have had prior interactions with Discord which influenced the tone of my E-mail. My blog post is simply presented as-is and I really do not care what others have to say about it, but I have no control over what is submitted here. I just want people to keep this in mind should future posts of mine be submitted, before someone points out "hey, you got onto Hacker News again" and I have to be subjected to a bunch of people not getting the full picture (and even some people complaining how pink my site is... grow up).

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#43

Post by Spivak » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #27

jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but also the tone of both emails was quite antagonistic The customer is always right. > They may have had slightly better luck if they'd been friendlier and not attempted to school the Discord staff on how their app should behave. Or not. Besides, it should not matter, either they did something bad or they did not, the tone of the message may upset the recipient but when you ban someone just like that you can expec…

> The customer is always right. This meme needs to go away. The customer is not always right, and it's deeply unhealthy for businesses to adopt this attitude. Even very customer centric businesses do not adopt this mantra.

I mean the statement has never been about infallibility or anything it just means “the customer’s feelings are always valid” but was coined before such language was common.

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#44

Post by wowaname » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

rpgraham84 wrote: post #20

Writes weird posts about how some pedophilia is okay, uses tor with tails compulsively? 10 bucks says this dude goes to prison for child porn within the next 10 years.

You do this with every privacy-conscious, freethinking person who comments on this site?

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#45

Post by leftyted » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #7

> I refuse to provide phone verification as I believe it is Discord's fault for flagging my account... > I will be communicating with a couple communities with which I'm involved to explain that I am unable to use Discord Does this person not have a phone? 'Unable' seems like a stretch. If this person said, "I don't want to provide my phone number to Discord, so I'm going to stop using it" I'd understand. Their openi…

> Does this person not have a phone? 'Unable' seems like a stretch. If this person said, "I don't want to provide my phone number to Discord, so I'm going to stop using it" I'd understand.

If I say "I am unable to do X" that might mean "My conscience compels me to refuse to do X" or "I literally cannot do X". Both interpretations are valid.

> Their opening email also strikes a pretty aggressive tone -- calling Discord anal, insulting, "spit in my face" then goes on to make a number of demands of the company? I'm not super surprised the customer service rep on the other side didn't go out of their way to help.

I suppose I agree with you that the email is rude. Then again, I don't mind giving out my phone number and email even though companies are using these things to track me, build a profile, and spam me. I'd rather that they didn't; I think it's corrosive behavior. But it doesn't affect me much and so I put up with it. Point is, the writer of these emails could be seen as heroic because he or she has principles and is refusing to back down (despite the rudeness).

Like I said, I have similar principles but I'm not too fussed about them. This worries me sometimes. This level of invasion of privacy isn't the hill I'm willing to die on but I hope there is a hill I'd die on. If not, I'm an unprincipled person.

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#46

Post by wowaname » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

pfisch wrote: post #16

1)You're not a paying user 2)You use proxies/tor which probably makes your concerns the concerns of 0.01% of the user-base. Why should a company whose primary motive is to be profitable go so far out of their way for you, a non-paying client whose concerns represent basically none of the legitimate user-base?

The post is entitled "Guess I'm done with Discord", not "I'm entitled to my Discord account and everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot." As I said in another comment, my post was purely informative and not even in a format that would be digestible by people who do not know me.

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#47

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

pfisch wrote: post #16

1)You're not a paying user 2)You use proxies/tor which probably makes your concerns the concerns of 0.01% of the user-base. Why should a company whose primary motive is to be profitable go so far out of their way for you, a non-paying client whose concerns represent basically none of the legitimate user-base?

> you, a non-paying client whose concerns represent basically none of the legitimate user-base?

You seem to be implying that they are not a legitimate user. What makes them any less legitimate than everybody else?

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#48

Post by wowaname » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

Prohias wrote: post #31

If the only deal breaker is your phone number, this is going to be an issue for you moving into the future with many service providers. Consider leasing a number through Twilio, it will save you from frustration.

I'm probably going to leave phone companies entirely, when I'm no longer on my family's plan, and set up a VoIP number because it'd give me hands-on experience with how VoIP works and it seems more cost-effective for my use case. I'll remember Twilio if I need it for any verification purposes, but it's definitely a sad state of affairs that phone numbers are seen as a mandatory identification step in this day and age. I understand that it's an easy choice for some companies to make, but it doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#49

Post by lidHanteyk » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #40

lidHanteyk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord's been an abusive member of the community for a long time. They distort nomenclature, mislead about their intentions, and aren't able to show that they protect personal information. As a light and funny example, Discord doesn't comply with the OpenSSL license.

> Discord doesn't comply with the OpenSSL license. In what way? Have you reached out to Discord to make them aware? They seem fairly committed to open source from everything I've read.

The OpenSSL license for Discord's bundled versions of OpenSSL [0] has two conditions which are being violated. When they advertise the features of their client, or offer binaries of their client for download, they do not include the verbatim text, "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit. (http://www.openssl.org/)"

They know that they are violating this license; they don't care. They are free to clean up their act at any time.

[0] https://www.openssl.org/source/license-openssl-ssleay.txt

Re: Guess I'm Done with Discord

#50

Post by smitty1e » Sat, Aug 24, 2019, 10:14 PM UTC

elmerfud wrote: post #2

This is a typical response from service companies in the Internet age. They don't care about truth, or what actually happened, the algorithm says you're bad then you're bad. There's no human to appeal to, no human oversight of if their algorithm is right or wrong. They use another algorithm to check it, which tells them that you must be a bad actor. I've had my own issues with Lyft that are similar. Banned from using…

> but there's way to much consumer abuse for these Internet age services.

a) Government programs are programs, written in the language English. So let's be careful what services we launch with the stroke of the Presidential pen. They could be a cure worse than the disease.

b) Whither capitalism? A remedy to consider in parallel with government regulation would be some actual competition. How do we get the functionality we want without quite so much Orwellian peril?