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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

#21
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)

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.

>American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration. That's not a form of brand identification you want.

The only "people" at fault here are journalists, putting Discord in the title of the article. They do it to put pressure on the service providers so they ban those people, but they will just go elsewhere. It's frankly stupid. The only side who's hurt with those articles is Discord, who don't deserve it.

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

#22
post #6

Discord is awesome! Very easy to use, easy to connect with other player in the clan and organize events and raids. Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little. I really like it a lot and I was always wondering why it is not used more in business setting or for coordination in teams, because it could totally do that and it is ligher solution then slack or god forbid hipcha…

The Sublime Text community has adopted Discord as the predominant real-time chat platform. Initially I was skeptical, but it has worked out fairly well. IRC suffered from not being very accessible for many, and not having rich formatting nor history scroll back. It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Granted, I don’t think we’ve got more than a couple of hundred users on our Discord server, but it h…

The ReasonML group have done the same[1], and to great success IMO.

[1]: https://discord.gg/reasonml

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

#23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)

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.

So by that same logic, then Reddit should be sued into oblivion because both left and ring wing extremists have used Reddit subreddits for harassment campaigns. They even left up an anarchy thread that posted all of the phone numbers in the White House so people could fill the lines with hate speech... because... Trump... and everyone in the white house answering phones is automatically a trump supporter and deserving of harassment.

Multiple people filed complaints directly to the admins. They did nothing and left it up.

That's far worse than Discord merely having some users that are Nazis, and haven't been sued.

And if we're talking about harassment, and bigotry, why not the holy grail of the toxic internet? Twitter.

If Discord "needs" to remove bigots from their lines (yes, or, no, pick one), then don't cell phone companies need to do the exact same thing? Why should cell phone companies be allowed to "give Nazis a platform" over texts and phone calls? What's the difference between a group text chat and a Discord text chat? Nothing. Except one is directly using the internet, and the other ... is using the internet as a backbone. Discord even runs on a phone. So isn't Verizon a "Nazi enabler" by the same logic?

So let's do it. Let's scan everyone's text message and phone calls to stop the Nazis. Clearly the ends justify the means, so let's do it.

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

#24
post #16

Discord's come a long way on this stuff. About a year ago they started getting used by hate groups for organizing and I was worried the platform would get taken over by bad people. I don't know that they've solved all the social problems but at least they're making an honest effort.

It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)

Nazis and white supremacists might not have you in their sights but that can't be said about everyone.

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

#25
I my startup company our dev team is pread across paris, copenhagen, dubai and beirut. We with struggled using slack and skype for communication but have recently went for discord, it really boosts the morale and connects the offices in such a cool way. Always being able to talk in a voice channel is just amazing, and everything works incredibly smooth.

You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your channel though

Would recommend for other small companies in same boat

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

#26
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right groups, etc. I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as he doesn't bother me personally :/ (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)

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.

So it's every communication service's responsibility to keep only the people they like using their service?

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

#27
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack, it is a very similar product but I feel like by marketing it primarily to gamers they are positioning themselves in a far less profitable market than Slack is.

> Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack I see several reasons. 1. It's impossible to not be in a public channel. Yes, you can mute it, but you can't ever leave it. In a large company with thousands of channels, this creates cognitive overhead. 2. You can create private channels, but this requires the ability to assign permissions. This has two problems - one, if you have a lot of teams that need to…

You can hide muted channels.. then you don't see them

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

#28
It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private political speech.

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

#29

I my startup company our dev team is pread across paris, copenhagen, dubai and beirut. We with struggled using slack and skype for communication but have recently went for discord, it really boosts the morale and connects the offices in such a cool way. Always being able to talk in a voice channel is just amazing, and everything works incredibly smooth. You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your…

Similarly, some time ago I ran a team of 9 through Ventrilo (TeamSpeak alternative) after we struggled with Skype and IRC. It worked great, but we missed text for historical reasons; to supplement text we whipped up another IRC channel.

Discord really hit it off with gamers giving them the chat application they want (such as Steam, Battle.NET; formally Xfire) with the VOIP they used in conjunction. It's really an amazing product (who says Electron doesn't work?!) — I'm hoping they can stay around for a long time.

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

#30

Discord's come a long way on this stuff. About a year ago they started getting used by hate groups for organizing and I was worried the platform would get taken over by bad people. I don't know that they've solved all the social problems but at least they're making an honest effort.

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