Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 177 posts

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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

j_s wrote: post #19
eberkund wrote: 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.

One major roadblock is there is no concept of separate identities managed under one login, or switching accounts easily. I think there is a half-way-there "server nickname" option new this year but it's not quite the same. The primary motivation for most is a clear separation between personal and professional. https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-... https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/arti…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by sandGorgon »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
eberkund wrote: 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…

Exactly - the permission structure is the single biggest problem. This will pretty much kill slack if they can build this in.

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

#93

Post by amk_ »

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 than Slack already, too.

If you haven't checked out an OSS community on Discord yet here are a few:

- https://www.reactiflux.com/

- https://chat.vuejs.org

- https://discord.gg/reasonml

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

#94

Post by Dylan16807 »

illumin8 wrote: post #85
Tobba_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, I have to call this out as false - you can't handle millions of HTTP connections on a single machine, because there are only 65,535 available TCP ports. I think you meant that you can handle millions of HTTP connections on a few dozen machines... Please try again, and stop spouting obviously false facts.

Ports are not used up by connections. One port can support 65K simultaneous connections from a single IP. If a thousand machines connect, each with their own IP, one port can handle 65 million connections. If you decide to accept HTTP requests on all ports, then each port of your 65K ports supports millions of connections or more. Suddenly you're talking about a total of billions or trillions of connections all going to one machine. And that's still only using a thousand machines to connect. Open up to the entire internet and you can push that to quintillions of theoretically possible simultaneous connections.

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

#95

Post by GauntletWizard »

illumin8 wrote: post #85
Tobba_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, I have to call this out as false - you can't handle millions of HTTP connections on a single machine, because there are only 65,535 available TCP ports. I think you meant that you can handle millions of HTTP connections on a few dozen machines... Please try again, and stop spouting obviously false facts.

A port doesn't actually get consumed by a TCP connection. Connections are uniquely identified by a (host, port, host, port) combination; i.e. my machine with IP 1.1.1.1 and yours with 2.2.2.2 can have only 2^32 connections between us (slightly less in practice). Even assuming I have a webserver, so my port is fixed to 443, your machine can connect from each of those 2^16 ports - as can every other of the 2^32 machines on the network. In practice, you're limited by memory, not port numbers. Many machines I know of regularly have connection counts in the hundreds of thousands.

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

#96

Post by iMarv »

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.

Also helps a lot in large communities. There will always be people that are nice and you like to have around, but are a bit "louder" during gaming sessions. We were really successful by teaching them to not hit the PTT-button when they need to drop their load of frustration.

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

#97

Post by Dylan16807 »

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 ...

Being a Skype alternative requires persistent chat, audio, and video.

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

#98

Post by eropple »

pmarreck wrote: post #81
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.

PTT is useful when you don’t want everyone else on your channel to hear your breathing, coughing and keyboard-clacking (can you tell I’ve played Overwatch?)

Yeah - there are games for which I will use voice activation, like PUBG (where I do not have the mental availability to hit a PTT key), but for Overwatch I started with PTT with one of the thumb buttons on my mouse and I still do it.

That said, I use a for-realsies dynamic microphone with tons of off-axis rejection and a wall-mounted arm (I play games in my office/recording space, that's the engineer station mic). So I probably could use voice detection and be fine. But habits die hard.

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

#99

Post by superkuh »

akoncius wrote: post #43
superkuh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with centralization, walled gardens, and proprietary protocols. You won't ever have a problem if you just don't go into the gardens. Self-host with mumble, teamspeak, matrix, or something. They all use the same Opus voice codec so it's not a quality issue.

then why cellphones are not treated same way? SMS/calls should be analyzed and then people should be banned from network if something is “wrong”. And by “wrong” I’m not talking about organising a crime such as terrorist attack or something.

Cell phone telco propviders have monopolies on radio spectrum that come with certain obligations, regulations, and conditions. That's in addition to inheriting the rules from land telephony and public infrastructure/title II stuff.

You can bet that this kind of thing will happen if they can make it happen though.

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

#100

Post by AFNobody »

jhgg wrote: post #56
AFNobody wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The account was disabled immediately after registration.

That doesn't sound right. Can you email me the email you signed up with? jh@discordapp.com We definitely don't have any rules that hard auto disable accounts.

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.imgur.com/DMiTLfo.png

I'm guessing someone discovered the email service I used originally and disabled the account before I ever bothered to actually use it.

> We definitely don't have any rules that hard auto disable accounts.

You actively oppose privacy and block registration now instead of disabling them. I guess there was a policy change but (honestly) I don't care.

Y'all actively created rules in attempt to block average users from having some privacy on your platform.

Post reply on HN