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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

#71

Post by Tobba_ »

sergiotapia wrote: post #13
brightball wrote: post #3

It's cool seeing an Elixir company have such explosive growth.

Elixir is part of their great performance! Their engineering blog is really interesting and full of neat information scaling Elixir (which is really hard to find since Elixir scales for a VERY long time).

Have we really regressed to the point where simply relaying data with reasonable performance is considered impressive? Figuring out where to relay everything and keeping it all in sync is obviously hard, but that's a distributed systems problem, not (strictly) a performance problem.

We've been able to handle millions of concurrent HTTP(!) connections on a single machine for years; it feels like a pretty solved problem. Although, a lot of that involved userspace TCP stacks and really high-end networking hardware, so if you want to stay within saner territories you can scale that number back a bit.

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

#72

Post by jonreem »

Tobba_ wrote: post #59
joshmn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ama…

I wouldn't really say their client works in that sense considering how notorious it is for flunking out in completely random ways (i.e missing push-to-talk release events, suddenly deciding your speakers or mic don't exist, not lighting up people who are speaking, the UI randomly blanking out, etc). It's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of bugs other than maybe Skype. Not that anyone picks their chat/VoIP cli…

Just have to chime in with my own anecdote that I find discord to be mostly bug free and an excellent, easy to use piece of software.

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

#73

Post by Tobba_ »

jonreem wrote: post #72
Tobba_ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't really say their client works in that sense considering how notorious it is for flunking out in completely random ways (i.e missing push-to-talk release events, suddenly deciding your speakers or mic don't exist, not lighting up people who are speaking, the UI randomly blanking out, etc). It's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of bugs other than maybe Skype. Not that anyone picks their chat/VoIP cli…

Just have to chime in with my own anecdote that I find discord to be mostly bug free and an excellent, easy to use piece of software.

I can definitely agree with it being easy to use at least. I'd figure that's the main reason it's as popular as it is (together with the feature set, of course).

Being able to click a link and simply join a channel without all the fudging it can take when using TeamSpeak or even IRC is great, not to mention how easy it makes setting up your own "server".

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

#74

Post by rxhernandez »

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…

"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.

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

#75

Post by PeCaN »

geofft wrote: post #55
casione wrote: 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)

> (My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P) Hm, I looked at your account and you posted another comment which looks for all the world like an attempt to imply by dogwhistle that the Jews are planning on replacing you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15870471 Are you sure you were not banned for being a Nazi, hiding behind the label "alt-right"? People dissatisfied with mainstream right-wing politics are o…

While this may or may not be true, I'm still shadowbanned by sctb and that raises some questions about moderation.

You're welcome to check my comment history. It may be somewhat snarky but I hope it is mostly positive contributions. Unfortunately, I tend to dislike YC's business and silicon valley in general.

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

#76

Post by lewisl9029 »

mikkelam wrote: post #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…

I feel it's unfortunate that they couldn't also extend the channel paradigm to video, where anyone can at any time pop in and out of topics that they're interested in. Voice channels was the main appeal of Discord for me in a team setting.

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

#77

Post by rdtsc »

Tobba_ wrote: post #71
sergiotapia wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir is part of their great performance! Their engineering blog is really interesting and full of neat information scaling Elixir (which is really hard to find since Elixir scales for a VERY long time).

Have we really regressed to the point where simply relaying data with reasonable performance is considered impressive? Figuring out where to relay everything and keeping it all in sync is obviously hard, but that's a distributed systems problem, not (strictly) a performance problem. We've been able to handle millions of concurrent HTTP(!) connections on a single machine for years ; it feels like a pretty solved probl…

> We've been able to handle millions of concurrent HTTP(!) connections on a single machine for years;

> Have we really regressed to the point where simply relaying data with reasonable performance is considered impressive?

Sure but it's like saying Facebook is just a silly PHP app to share posts with friends and family, and Tesla is just an electric car those have been around for 100 years.

If you read their page, they do more than just serve static pages to users. It is a distributed systems problem, solving that in a performant and cost-effective way is not as easy.

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

#78

Post by lewisl9029 »

distantsounds wrote: post #15
AFNobody wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is nice not to have the gated access like Slack does. Fyi, it is gated by Discord and (for instance) I'm unable to create an account under this psuedonym. So, I (personally) will never use Discord as they locked my account when I attempted to create one.

your account name is not the same as your display name, which you can customize on a per-server basis. Also, signups are done via email. And your "username" is not unique by design, it gives you a numeric identity alongside it (much like how Blizzard's battle tags work).

I wish you could also change your profile picture per-server. I'd like to be able to use the same account for work and play, and this is my only blocker.

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

#79

Post by ben-schaaf »

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 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.

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

#80

Post by pmarreck »

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?

(CTO of Discord, in case anyone doesn’t realize)

also as a phoenix dev (just released my first big site), you picked the right stack :)

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