[NelsonMinar]

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.

[hellbanner]

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

[skybrian]

Companies that try to prevent their customers from attacking each other tend to do better than companies that don't protect their customers. This isn't new. For example, Gmail hit it big in part by being better at spam filtering. The specific issues have changed, though.

[astrodust]

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, but when you start to include those that seek to exclude you'll find your community being hijacked and perverted into someting that reflects the wants and needs of a tiny, dedicated, often highly motivated minority.

It's the responsibility of anyone running a community to police and weed out bad actors. I they don't the good citizens will leave and your community will be worthless. That's probably a bad thing if you've got shareholders to answer to.

[chongli]

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.

[astrodust]

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.

[chongli]

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.

[astrodust]

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.

[chmln]

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 dangers of allowing private companies such power.

Today they're booting off "neo-nazis", tomorrow they'll be booting off you.

[astrodust]

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.

[rxhernandez]

"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.

[nyolfen]

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

[rxhernandez]

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 eye. Now because they got legitimized by gullible people, everyone screams about their lack of freedom on private platforms.

[astrodust]

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!

[meowface]

You're exactly right, but Discord is a carrier and not a social platform or community.

[koolba]

I bet they use Gmail too.

[pluma]

I wager some of them even have Facebook accounts. Clearly Corporate America is in on this.

[meowface]

Discord was right to ban them once they became aware of them, but it's very easy to create a private Discord server to do bad things just as it's very easy to create an AIM/MSN/Skype group chat to do bad things. The portrayal of Discord as somehow naturally encouraging or inducing neo-Nazis to use their platform is silly. Once a communication system (telephone, email, IM) becomes popular enough, bad people are inevitably going to use it as well.