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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

#151

Post by taohansen »

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…

try bringing up this argument with any of the reddit communities for meditation, Linux, or communities you'd expect to make ethically informed choices about the software they use and support. you will not be well-received.

for whatever reason, people have these shield-walls up against criticism of the software they use every day. it points to a double-think that allows people to engage in ethical practices (meditation) while blissfully continuing to neglect the activity of living ethics (which is the only true meditation). if one doesn't inform the other, you're doing it wrong.

it's deeply troubling.

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

#152

Post by scrollaway »

AFNobody wrote: post #147
scrollaway wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> It's easy to confuse blocking anonymity with blocking spam > 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. And yet, I somehow can do it without either of these measures. So can Reddit and Matrix and a bunch of other services. We must some sort of amazing super genius. /s This falls under "beliefs you have", not facts.

I find it really sad you would think people are more concerned with pissing off privacy-conscious citizens than with blocking spammers. What a world you live in :/

It's not a belief, it's an area I'm interested in, and I've talked to a lot of people about it. I've never found anyone block cloudflare (or disposable emails) because they "hate privacy".

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

#153

Post by ryanlol »

viridian wrote: post #150
ryanlol wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 y…

>It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half the country actually agrees with you. Half the country are white supremacists? I think you should walk outside and interact with some actual human beings.

I haven’t been in the US for many years but would certainly expect to arrive at a different opinion when talking to actual people, however that is not the opinion that the elections reflect.

Either half the population are white supremacists or they’re simply too stupid to not vote for white supremacists, which isn’t any better than actually being one. It’s not like all the people who supported Hitler literally wanted to kill millions of jews, still they supported it.

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

#154

Post by AFNobody »

scrollaway wrote: post #152
AFNobody wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's easy to confuse blocking anonymity with blocking spam > 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. And yet, I somehow can do it without either of these measures. So can Reddit and Matrix and a bunch of other services. We must some sort of amazing super genius. /s This falls under "beliefs you have", not facts.

I find it really sad you would think people are more concerned with pissing off privacy-conscious citizens than with blocking spammers. What a world you live in :/ It's not a belief , it's an area I'm interested in, and I've talked to a lot of people about it. I've never found anyone block cloudflare (or disposable emails) because they "hate privacy".

> I find it really sad you would think people are more concerned with pissing off privacy-conscious citizens than with blocking spammers. What a world you live in :/

Its a false argument whose only real value is admitting "Well, we are unwilling to hire the people with the technical knowledge to be effective at anti-spam without such measures."

> It's not a belief, it's an area I'm interested in, and I've talked to a lot of people about it. I've never found anyone block cloudflare (or disposable emails) because they "hate privacy".

Yup. I must be so high on drugs I'm hallucinating every place I've ever worked at and every hobby project that has allowed UGC. (Hint: Literally all of them involved UGC with attempts to defraud and spam.)

It is a _belief_ that such measures are technically necessary and effective.

I mean, if you really think you are right, it is impossible to do this thing, and I get around to building a site for the sole purpose of proving you wrong...how much would you pay me?

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

#155

Post by astrodust »

chongli wrote: post #61
astrodust wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "communication service", as in "carrier", and "social platform" as in "community". When you run a carrier you're expected to be neutral. What people do with your service is not your responsibility. If the service is being used illegally then law enforcement can intervene. When you run a community you have an obligation to pick and choose who participates. You can strive to be inclusive, b…

Discord is a carrier, not a social platform. Its communities are isolated bubbles. To join them you need an invitation. This is completely different from something like Facebook or Twitter where anybody can join and immediately begin harassing existing users. If you invite somebody to your Discord channel and they start harassing you then you can simply ban them. There is no need for Discord staff to get involved.

There is nothing simple about bans. If you have a nest of trolls, banning each one individually will be an exercise in frustration and you'll just fucking leave the platform.

Tell me how that helps a company like Discord stay financially viable.

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

#156

Post by astrodust »

chmln wrote: post #48
astrodust wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "communication service", as in "carrier", and "social platform" as in "community". When you run a carrier you're expected to be neutral. What people do with your service is not your responsibility. If the service is being used illegally then law enforcement can intervene. When you run a community you have an obligation to pick and choose who participates. You can strive to be inclusive, b…

Yeah but discord is no hackernews. If they start arbitrarily moderating views that don't align with flavor-of-the-month ideology or even nsfw content a lot of people will be pissed too. What people talk about in Discord's independent chatrooms is their own business. I don't believe that most people advocating for strict ideological moderation on large platforms like facebook or discord understand the implications and…

If people kept to themselves and didn't cause shit there wouldn't be problems, but that's not what neo-nazis are about. They're there to cause shit, to make people feel uncomfortable and unwanted.

Disruptive elements like that destroy platforms. If I'm a disruptive element for different reasons I deserve to be booted.

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

#157

Post by astrodust »

nyolfen wrote: post #82
rxhernandez wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Today the teacher kicked my kid out of class for being loud and obnoxious, tomorrow they'll be kicking your kid out of the class too." Please do us all a favor and look into what a slippery slope is.

truly there is no historical precedent for the abuse of power along ideological lines

Yeah, it's like in World War II when we finished prosecuting Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials we kept on prosecuting people for increasingly petty things. Who knew! Today you can't so much as say "shit" on the internet without being sent to the Hague!

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

#158

Post by astrodust »

nyolfen wrote: post #149
rxhernandez wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly, modeling everything in life as montonically increasing functions because of exceptional historic precedences is a smart thing to do. "There's a historical precedence for people drinking water and dying because of it, so I'm not going to drink water anymore." The reasons you here about them is because they are so exceptional. People got banned from forums for being irreverent dicks before and no one batted an e…

>People got banned from forums for being irreverent dicks before and no one batted an eye. you're poorly versed in internet culture and history. many internet subcultures have axiomatically rejected moderation because, surprise, giving power to anonymous and unaccountable peers frequently results in abuses. you're confusing your own lack of concern and love of arbitrary authority with the opinions of others.

Managing a community is often a careful balance between handing over too much power to moderators who can abuse their powers and limiting moderators to the point where they're ineffective and the user base can't be controlled.

I've seen this dynamic play out first on tiny communities like MUDs where you'd have, at most, a thousand people. Later the pattern repeated over and over at larger and larger scales, where more recently you see entire platforms like Reddit suffering from the same issues. Each order of magnitude increase in user base makes the threats grow far more exponentially in scale.

Soon the whole internet will become rotten, culturally speaking.

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

#159

Post by na85 »

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.

I don't want to hear you chewing. Please consider push to talk.

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

#160

Post by scrollaway »

AFNobody wrote: post #154
scrollaway wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really sad you would think people are more concerned with pissing off privacy-conscious citizens than with blocking spammers. What a world you live in :/ It's not a belief , it's an area I'm interested in, and I've talked to a lot of people about it. I've never found anyone block cloudflare (or disposable emails) because they "hate privacy".

> I find it really sad you would think people are more concerned with pissing off privacy-conscious citizens than with blocking spammers. What a world you live in :/ Its a false argument whose only real value is admitting "Well, we are unwilling to hire the people with the technical knowledge to be effective at anti-spam without such measures." > It's not a belief, it's an area I'm interested in, and I've talked to a…

You are reading way too much into what I'm saying. I never claimed any of what you're putting into my mouth. All I said is that when websites block cloudflare, it's usually because of spam and attackers.

Honest feedback: You need to take a look at how this conversation went down and if you're happy with projecting this attitude you have onto the world.

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