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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

#161

Post by chongli »

astrodust wrote: post #155
chongli wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you mean by nest of trolls. On the Discord channel I have with my friends I've rarely ever had to ban anyone. It's grown over time to include quite a few people but we've never had any nests of trolls.

Then again, I know pretty much everybody on that server. Perhaps you're dealing with a much larger community attached to a website or game? I don't see how that's a problem specific to Discord then.

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

#162

Post by xupybd »

ryanlol wrote: post #153
viridian wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I think you’d have a hard time proving Trump is a white supremacists. I’m also sure most of his supporters are not either. This is the problem we keep demonising the other side. Instead we should endeavour to understand them. You don’t convince people to agree with your ideas by calling them evil.

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

#163

Post by astrodust »

chongli wrote: post #161
astrodust wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what you mean by nest of trolls. On the Discord channel I have with my friends I've rarely ever had to ban anyone. It's grown over time to include quite a few people but we've never had any nests of trolls. Then again, I know pretty much everybody on that server. Perhaps you're dealing with a much larger community attached to a website or game? I don't see how that's a problem specific to Discord then.

That's fine, but what happens when you end up on the radar of some radical group, for whatever reason, and innumerable people start showing up with the singular intent of disrupting things and causing shit? What if it's multiple groups, some Twitter based, some 4chan, some Reddit, all set out to get you? What tools do you have to protect against that?

Discord needs ways of mitigating this, of going into lockdown mode, to deal with exceptional situations. As their platform grows in scale the liability increases exponentially. Without counter-measures they expose themselves and their users to ever increasing risk.

GitHub has had to make a few radical alterations in their core features to deal with rampant, malicious abuse. Discord will have to do the same or they will fail.

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

#164

Post by AFNobody »

scrollaway wrote: post #160
AFNobody wrote: post #154

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 :/ 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.

> You are reading way too much into what I'm saying. I never claimed any of what you're putting into my mouth.

The fact you persisted this long without making that claim makes me question the veracity of that statement.

> All I said is that when websites block cloudflare, it's usually because of spam and attackers.

I'm just quoting that out of incredulity at the statement.

I never said anything about Discord blocking Cloudflare.

> 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.

I am happy.

People who try to argue about how terribly misunderstood corporations are never enjoy talking to me. The same is true for people who attempt to correct me on the basis of their opinions that aren't rooted in factual necessity.

I don't need to have a positive interaction with someone who tries to starts an argument with me over how my worldview is wrong because of their personal opinion on how the world should work.

My beliefs aren't going to change just because you feel your opinion is validated by niche popularity. Niche popularity got Trump elected lol. That isn't the sort of thing you want to base your views on if you have the self-confidence to realize that _sometimes_ the majority view is wrong and something needs to be said.

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

#165

Post by chongli »

astrodust wrote: post #163
chongli wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by nest of trolls. On the Discord channel I have with my friends I've rarely ever had to ban anyone. It's grown over time to include quite a few people but we've never had any nests of trolls. Then again, I know pretty much everybody on that server. Perhaps you're dealing with a much larger community attached to a website or game? I don't see how that's a problem specific to Discord then.

That's fine, but what happens when you end up on the radar of some radical group, for whatever reason, and innumerable people start showing up with the singular intent of disrupting things and causing shit? What if it's multiple groups, some Twitter based, some 4chan, some Reddit, all set out to get you? What tools do you have to protect against that? Discord needs ways of mitigating this, of going into lockdown mode…

innumerable people start showing up

People can't start showing up because they need invitations to join your channel. If you don't want a radical group there, don't invite them. It's that simple.

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

#166

Post by gravypod »

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?

It's the web client. I haven't tested the desktop client.

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

#167

Post by gravypod »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #79
gravypod wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Push to talk is most certainly not obsolete. I (and many gamers I know) use push to talk for the privacy of being able to choose when your microphone is activated. Its even more useful in competitive gaming and/or streaming where many want to chose what to say to their team/friends and themselves/the stream.

Is push to talk a better solution than a toggle push-to-mute?

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

#168

Post by scrollaway »

AFNobody wrote: post #164
scrollaway wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You are reading way too much into what I'm saying. I never claimed any of what you're putting into my mouth. The fact you persisted this long without making that claim makes me question the veracity of that statement. > All I said is that when websites block cloudflare, it's usually because of spam and attackers. I'm just quoting that out of incredulity at the statement. I never said anything about Discord blocking…

You claim niche popularity is wrong, then you claim majority view is wrong, which is it?

> I never said anything about Discord blocking Cloudflare.

It's the same thing wrt blocking disposable emails.

You know why I told you to review that conversation? Because you are so dead set on viewing me as someone who is wrong that you haven't even considered that I agree with you. All I tried to do was give you some perspective but that's apparently as futile as talking to a 2D plane.

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

#169

Post by JCharante »

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.

Push to Talk is necessary when you regularly have 200+ people, sometimes 800 people in the same channel. We don't use discord for comms because it doesn't support shout + channel hierarchies unlike mumble. Discord is still useful for pings, as their mobile app w/ push notifications are very helpful.

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

#170

Post by pluma »

taion wrote: post #142
pluma wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

We didn’t hit a hard limit. Slack explicitly disabled new user signups for us because they thought we were getting too big.

Ah, I didn't know that. Only reinforces my point about Slack not being a good choice for community platforms though.
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