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PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

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Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. As terrible as AWS and Microsoft are as companies, at least they have an established reputation in B2B software. It’s an apples to apple-flavored candy comparison.

> AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. AWS originated in providing servers for a book business that grew from there, Microsoft originated from writing a interpreter, but both of them excel in other areas today as well. It's not impossible to start with something (chat for gamin…

> It's not impossible to start with something (chat for gaming), gain expertise (chat for large groups) and then apply it elsewhere (chat in the workplace).

I understand what you meant, but it's not quite applicable in this case. Chat for gaming (and approach) is not an adjacent market of workplace/enterprise chat.

Just imagine Slack or Microsoft Teams going for gaming chat; you can quite imagine that repurposing of product not happening.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#43
post #23

If what you say is true, take them to arbitration. They usually have to pay the arbitrator’s fees and you can typically do it over email/video call.

Is that a Discord specific arbitration that's available, or something else?

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#44
post #2

Does Discord charge or have some type of contractual agreement with you? It does seem odd -- they must have some checking on addresses and personal information and what you posted just happens to match that regex.

Does there exist a Discord business plan / any way to even get such a contractual agreement in place? We use Discord as a support channel for our developer tool and I've never heard of an option to get enterprise support...but if such a thing does exist and Discord offers it, I'd probably take it given OPs story

For dev support, why choose Discord over Gitter, or even IRC? Slack and Teams also allow free guest access for this scenario too.

That said, group-chat-based support seems like the wrong solution in the first place - simply because Discord is a silo and they don’t make it easy to get your own data back out of it (this page is an infuriating read: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R... ). Also, the fact that Discord themselves are using ZenDesk for their own support (instead of, y’know… using Discord) is another reason to not use Discord like this.

Orgs using Discord today are giving me the same vibes as those SaaS that thought they could do everything with only Redis and NodeJS (with no RDBMS in sight) - yes, it works and might even work very well in some cases, right up until it doesn’t and there’s no plan B.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. As terrible as AWS and Microsoft are as companies, at least they have an established reputation in B2B software. It’s an apples to apple-flavored candy comparison.

> AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. AWS originated in providing servers for a book business that grew from there, Microsoft originated from writing a interpreter, but both of them excel in other areas today as well. It's not impossible to start with something (chat for gamin…

AWS and Microsoft were both much larger companies with many years of successful operations by the time they launched cloud services. Discord is both younger as a company and still recently raising new funding founds. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t rely on them but they’re definitely less proven.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#46
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that this did not look like a business. It looked like a gaming server.

It is related to gaming, but we handle large amounts of money to keep our servers running, as well as providing revenue to Discord in the form of "boosts". It should be relevant to people running startups here.

Define: “large amounts of money” - there’s a difference between funding a $500/mo clan/guild VPS set-up vs a $20,000/mo SaaS start-up AWS invoice.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#47
I agree it’s not a TOS violation, but I do think it could potentially be a shitty move to post the ASN from which a specific user is connecting to your service, if they’ve not said it’s okay for you to do so.

If you’re from a small town with a local ISP, associating that town with your first name could be enough to specifically identify you, with the help of yellow-pages directory sites. Even just knowing someone’s state or country is a data point that can be used to narrow down their identity. For the privacy minded, this could be very unfortunate.

I’m not sure why you would be publicly posting the ASN from which a user is connecting anyway? Could you explain the context a bit more here?

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#48

Discord won't let you use a VOIP number so I can't even get on it

It's bizarre how inconsistent they are with this. I signed up with a shady anonymous email, only use it through a VPN and have given them no phone number, but they're still happy to let me use this account. I'm half convinced these companies inconsistently apply these sort of policies to sow doubt and get the users gaslighting each other about what the actual policies and rules are.

"Servers" can set only phone verified users to be able to join. Depending on your usage of Discord you may have never joined a server that has thet turned on.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. AWS originated in providing servers for a book business that grew from there, Microsoft originated from writing a interpreter, but both of them excel in other areas today as well. It's not impossible to start with something (chat for gamin…

> It's not impossible to start with something (chat for gaming), gain expertise (chat for large groups) and then apply it elsewhere (chat in the workplace). I understand what you meant, but it's not quite applicable in this case. Chat for gaming (and approach) is not an adjacent market of workplace/enterprise chat. Just imagine Slack or Microsoft Teams going for gaming chat; you can quite imagine that repurposing of…

> Just imagine Slack or Microsoft Teams going for gaming chat; you can quite imagine that repurposing of product not happening.

If that ended up being more popular, they definitely would. But I don't think that'd happen either.

Re: PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

#50

I'm super risk averse so I would never build a business around a single point of failure like that - but I know that there is money to be made taking this risk (at least VC money, presumably real money). Look at everybody building off OpenAI, look at AWS, Shopify, etc. I'll never base my business around a platform, but I'll miss out on many opportunities, even if it's a big risk. All that to say the warning won't sto…

The Apple App Store is a similar single point of failure and both Uber and Instagram would not have become what they are today if they had not built their businesses on the back of the concept that Apple will not arbitrarily ban them. When they launched, their web apps didn't exist (and you couldn't access gps or photos from web apps anyway, so their services were impossible except for via the App Store).

Then again, so did Tumblr.

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