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As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

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Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#111

Post by ryanlol »

xupybd wrote: post #57
tdb7893 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that large portions of the alt-right ideology goes outside of politics into racism, misogyny, and harassment and it makes sense to keep a community with those traits under close surveillance. My view on the alt right is that there is a line between reasonable political views and spreading prejudice against certain demographics and the alt right really walks that line (I haven't been on this discord but…

The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible. The actual alt-right political movement is just a very small group. I don't think many outside of that small group actually hold the racist and misogynistic views that are expressed on these forums. It's often just backlash at the rapid change in culture. People want to break the new rules of disco…

>The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

After watching and participating in this for years, I don't think this is true anymore.

The people who found it funny to piss off people by pretending to be Nazis ended up attracting actual Nazis and were eventually replaced by them.

It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half the country actually agrees with you.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#112

Post by scrollaway »

amk_ wrote: post #93

IMO its origins in the gaming community, and all the moderation features that grew out of it, make Discord a much better fit for open source communities than Slack. For example: - Individuals can block and report other users - There are tiered mod levels - Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad actors Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord t…

Absolutely agreed.

I run three Discord servers:

- A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats.

- A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/), general channels, voice channels etc.

- A large (20k users) one for our company's (gaming-centric) userbase.

Discord is a fantastic tool that adapts to all three situations very well, scales really well from 4 people to 100k people. Its DM/friendslist system scales a lot less well, but is still very usable with 100+ DM channels. I have even created a personal (private) Discord server where I'm keeping a journal of what I work on, inspired by a HN post the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15823599).

Discord is scalable messaging UX done right. I'm a huge believer in what they do. (Yeah, if only it were open source etc, I get it; different problem, different story)

I much prefer it over Gitter for open source chat (Gitter's only real advantage is how well it integrates with Github). And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough.

I just wish Discord would get phonecall support, but that part is probably not going to happen. It's doable with a bot though. PhoneCord (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6hlesz/anyone_e...) used to do it, they were shut down because of the obvious abuse implications but I'd really like to hook up Twilio with Discord in a bot for my company, internally, so we can do phone conferencing from it.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#113

Post by scrollaway »

AFNobody wrote: post #100
jhgg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound right. Can you email me the email you signed up with? jh@discordapp.com We definitely don't have any rules that hard auto disable accounts.

If I have to say something on HN to get a response, the answer is No since I contacted Discord bout it when it originally happened. You can go find that email if you supposedly 'care' and reply to it. Ah, you've changed it to say its an invalid email when I tried using the same service again. ;) Also the original account is gone now so yay I guess? Someone went back and deleted instead of disabling them. https://i.im…

Hold on, I get using disposable email addresses (I use them all the time), but I'm not sure why you are concerned about Discord knowing your email address when it's going to literally know everything you type into it (in other words, messaging history).

It's a bit like being concerned about gmail requiring your real name to sign up. I mean, yeah, but, what?

FWIW I signed up years ago and never received a single email from them outside of the initial signup one and any I requested.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#114

Post by brendyn »

It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing:

Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens before switching to a freedom respecting software.

Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#115

Post by atc »

brendyn wrote: post #114

It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing: Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for…

Discord won many people over simply because it was such well written software, and that continues today.

Its proprietary nature has always concerned me too, as well as what they're doing with the data (i.e. assume they're reading & listening to everything).

What they mustn't do is forget how quickly they grew and the underlying concept that enabled it: people will flock to different messaging platforms quite easily (Teamspeak to Discord is a great example) which means Discord can lose just as quickly as it won.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#117

Post by diggan »

scrollaway wrote: post #112
amk_ wrote: post #93

IMO its origins in the gaming community, and all the moderation features that grew out of it, make Discord a much better fit for open source communities than Slack. For example: - Individuals can block and report other users - There are tiered mod levels - Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad actors Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord t…

Absolutely agreed. I run three Discord servers: - A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats. - A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ ), general channels,…

> And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough

Would love to hear more about the reasoning behind this. IRC might not be as flashy as Slack, but for my daily work and communication, it works fine (I use IRCCloud) even though I would love for IRCCloud to offer a bouncer so I can use my own client.

AFAIK, the only way Gitter "integrates" with Github is sending repository updates to the channel, something which Github has a webhook for doing with IRC as well.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#118

Post by keypusher »

gravypod wrote: post #62
dwrtz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with push-to-talk?

It's obsolete and only needed because their software is broken. Skype, Google Hangouts, teamspeak, ventrillo, mumble, and tox all support my microphone and voice activation correctly.

Definitely not. If you have been in a channel with 25+ people for a raid or large event (exactly the type of gaming community Discord caters to) then you should know push-to-talk is absolutely required and you will often be kicked if you don't use it.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#119

Post by philtar »

brendyn wrote: post #114

It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing: Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability, or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized service. Thus Discord can be used for…

Your opinion should be rejected outright for offering no alternatives.

Re: As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

#120

Post by scrollaway »

diggan wrote: post #117
scrollaway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. I run three Discord servers: - A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats. - A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ ), general channels,…

> And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough Would love to hear more about the reasoning behind this. IRC might not be as flashy as Slack, but for my daily work and communication, it works fine (I use IRCCloud) even though I would love for IRCCloud to offer a bouncer so I can use my own client. AFAIK, the only way Gitter "integrates" with…

Re Gitter: It integrates with the repository (eg. pasting commit hashes, bug numbers etc creates a link). It also has github signin. These things are really nice.

Re IRC: I absolutely hate Slack, but IRC holds no candle to Discord. Scrollback, search, highlight management, moderation tools, usable permission system, voice support, video support, low barrier of entry, online permanence, excellent file upload/image support, account-based identities, role customization and role-based permissions, support for profiles, drop-in group chat, markdown support with syntax highlight, multiline messages... am I done yet?

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