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As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

polygon.com

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

#121

Post by AFNobody »

scrollaway wrote: post #113
AFNobody wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Lol. :)

A) Its the principle of the thing.

B) I can get around the disposable email block with a disposable email quite easily. Its more the fact they got rid of the original account that pissed me off.

C) I change online screen names somewhat frequently to cut off the occasional mentally unstable person who tries to work around a service's block feature.

D) Discord makes a ton of privacy claims that are dishonest in the sense that they are actively trying to block anonymity which would allow those claims to be true.

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

#122

Post by scrollaway »

AFNobody wrote: post #121
scrollaway wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's a bit like being concerned about gmail requiring your real name to sign up. I mean, yeah, but, what? Lol. :) A) Its the principle of the thing. B) I can get around the disposable email block with a disposable email quite easily. Its more the fact they got rid of the original account that pissed me off. C) I change online screen names somewhat frequently to cut off the occasional mentally unstable person who tr…

It's easy to confuse blocking anonymity with blocking spam, given that spammers want anonymity (and are a far larger group than privacy-minded folk, given that one single spammer can lead to thousands of "identities").

But Discord isn't blocking "anonymity", they're blocking disposable email addresses (low-hanging fruit spam). They don't ask for your name and, whatever email you give it, doesn't have to be tied to your name.

It's a bit like blocking Tor. Websites don't block Tor because they hate privacy, they block Tor because it's a spammer's tool of choice.

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

#123

Post by pluma »

ancarda wrote: post #104
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…

>- Individuals can block and report other users As far as I know, Slack won’t implement that because it’s a team chat app and if team members need to block people, there’s larger problems: https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481

In other words, Slack merely tolerates public Slack chats, it doesn't want to encourage them.

As we speak, I have five slack communities open in my messenger. All but one of them are open to the public.

I'd wager there are more public Slack communities than there are private (i.e. "team chat") ones. But much like Twitter, Slack has a fundamentally different vision for their platform than their users apparently have.

To me this was first made clear when Reactiflux (a massive community around React, Flux and related web technologies and topics) had to switch from Slack to Discord because they had hit a hard limit of members and Slack said they wouldn't increase it because their software and infra wasn't build to handle these scenarios.

Nevertheless open source projects and community builders keep flocking to Slack and Slack doesn't seem to have any intention to clear up this misalignment. They're benefiting from the free advertisement small public communities create but don't want to spend any extra energy providing their services to them as they grow.

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

#124

Post by bunkerbewohner »

Vishnevskiy wrote: post #64
gravypod wrote: post #58

One thing discord fails at accomplishing is voice activation in their web browser client. If anyone from the company is reading I will gladly write you a python/scipy program that will do the correct real-time DSP for voice activation if you implement it into your platform. It's a window, an fft, a filter around a primary frequency range, an integration, and an N second timer since the last time the audio crosses the…

Is this only in our web client or also in our desktop client?

We use the desktop client and our group often has problems with words being dropped not only at the end but also in the middle of someone talking if they're using voice activation. :-/

It's usually specific users whose words get dropped, maybe their activation threshold is just low enough. But still, seems to me like this should not happen, especially in the middle of sentences, since the beginning of the sentence is recorded just fine.

(Windows 10 Pro)

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

#125

Post by pluma »

koolba wrote: post #47
NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of legal liability nor brand identification you want. https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-c... Also the bad people never stay confined to their private hate club. See the linked article here about "raids" on other channels or literally the entire history of Internet social media.

I bet they use Gmail too.

I wager some of them even have Facebook accounts. Clearly Corporate America is in on this.

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

#126

Post by Tehnix »

gsich wrote: post #50
z3t4 wrote: post #39

> "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak" Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source Skype alternatives !?

There is. Matrix, Mumble, IRC, jitsi ...

Didn't know IRC supported Audio nowadays...

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

#127

Post by ploggingdev »

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…

> its origins in the gaming community

Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)

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

#128

Post by maaark »

ploggingdev wrote: post #127
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…

> its origins in the gaming community Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days. [0…

I think mainly by offering for free a better/easier voice calling system than Skype/Ventrillo/Teamspeak.

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

#129

Post by kikimaru »

ploggingdev wrote: post #127
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…

> its origins in the gaming community Anyone know how they gained traction in the gaming community? Their wikipedia entry [0] says they had a game development studio which developed games that were not successful, then they start developing Discord and successfully launch on reddit. How did they promote on reddit given reddit's aversion to self promotion? Maybe ads? Would love to learn more about their early days. [0…

[anecdotal] In our little fighting game community, our tech-savvy guys got tired of trying to add features to the IRC channel, so when they heard of Discord they just convinced everyone to switch to that. It's easier for Facebook-followers to follow a link to Discord than ask them to download an IRC client -> open #server -> open #channel

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

#130

Post by herbst »

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…

I mod a community around anonymity and have to explain exactly this at least once a month. There is no reasonable way we could trust such a software for anything related to privacy, anonymity or free speech.
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