Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse

[asdojasdosadsa]

I recently tried to make a separate work account in Discord. To do so I created a new account with my main accounts phone number. This caused discord to delete my primary account phone number and used it for the new account.

However, this alone caused me to be instantly banned. After reaching out to support, they basically told that me I could not use my present phone number for verification and that they couldn't tell me why, and couldn't help me further with that.

I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?

I have contacted Discord support through their ticket system twice, I have contacted Discord on Twitter (DM); but to no avail

[JonathanBeuys]

I don't get it.

We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?

I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.

But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.

Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"

Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.

This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.

If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.

I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.

[moss2]

Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera).

If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.

[TuringNYC]

>> If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued.

Nice example you gave, because this literally happened between 2002 and 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List The No Fly List eventually swelled to close to a million people. There was no one entity you could sue, because airlines had their own algorithms for matching, so even if you werent on the list, but the algo fuzzy-matched you, you were effectively on the list. Matching names is notoriously bad. There was an ACLU lawsuit, but it was a much bigger effort than anything being described on this thread.

In summary: lawsuits against Government systems are slow and not necessarily something to aspire to as a better system.

[toofy]

yeah, the fundamental problem doesn’t seem to be a result of government or companies as we’re seeing this happening with both. governments and as we’re seeing, across the board with companies.

there is a different fundamental problem at play.

[moss2]

Good point, thank you for sharing.

[anoonmoose]

That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property. You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".

[somenameforme]

Private vs public all comes down to the interests of society, it's not religious dogma. Prior to the 60s it was perfectly legal to refuse to serve somebody because of their race or religion. The courts decided this was not in the public interest, and so that changed. Some time before that it was private companies used to also be able to fire anybody seeking to unionize. Then that changed. There is even precedent where private land used in a public way subjects the owner to the same standards as those of the government. [1]

The current situation is pretty goofy. We've hyper centralized speech into a tiny handful of outlets, with those outlets increasingly recklessly operating with exactly 0 accountability to anybody, in spite of the dramatic and undeniable consequences of their actions are having on both individuals and society at large. IMO the one and only reason this hasn't been dealt with is because we're going through a brief phase of dystopia. Governments seems more interested in trying to myopically exploit the centralization speech to their own benefit, instead of actually thinking of the longterm, to say nothing of making society a better place.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

[abduhl]

Small point: the courts didn’t decide this in the 1960s, the legislature did with the Civil Rights Act. The courts enforced it. The courts don’t (shouldn’t) determine what is in the public’s interest, the legislature (aka the people) does.

[ncmncm]

Sometimes do, sometimes don't.

It all depends on politics. Some people have opinions on how much court "activism" should be allowed, but they reliably flip the script when one of their pet topics shows up.

People used to insist Antonin Scalia was a sort of "strict constructionist", himself among them. But the moment he got a case where he had a personal opinion that contradicted his "strict" claims, his true colors came out. Then it turned out his strictness really did just mean corporations always win and individuals always lose, as his record had always suggested and his critics had long asserted.

(Never guessed I would have cause to miss him... He was not, anyway, Bork.)

[kemiller]

They are but that’s precisely the problem. More and more of our vital communication channels are owned by single private entities. IOW public discourse is being replaced by “public” discourse. The promise of blockchain solutions is that they can return us to the status quo ante of the internet where there were open protocols that operated in a decentralized way. Whether it can fulfill that promise, I don’t know. But there’s also plenty of precedent for regulating how the private owners of public goods (such as rail and telephone networks, or even sidewalks) must behave.

[qzx_pierri]

The internet is not real life. It seems a lot of people who hold your opinion are in the 18-24 age range. Those people who grew up thinking the internet is the only way to communicate or “make things happen”. But I assure you these private companies do NOT have to let you use their services, and common excuses such as “Online communication is like a public square!” is not rooted in the desire for free speech, but is rooted in the desire for instant gratification.

Yes it’s easier to gain a following online, but throughout MOST of history, people started these movements/conversation offline. Don’t let these companies trick you into thinking you don’t have a voice, or power, without voicing your thoughts on their “platforms”. You have a voice, and you can use it. You’ll just have to get out the house and start talking to people face to face.

Edit: I didn't mean to establish a condescending tone with the second sentence - I was simply making an observation.

[horsawlarway]

I'm 33. I think you're wrong.

I suspect you're older - imagine the US without a public highway system. Imagine every highway is private. Imagine what arbitrary bans from those highways would do to impact how you live. Talk to me about how well we should communicate face to face in that situation?

Idea not that appealing? That's what you're advocating for today.

A complete loss of a highway system that has no public replacement. By the way - those "18-24 age range" are all being forced to help pay for those "private highways" with their tax dollars anyways, in the form of govt subsidies to private cable companies.

Should we discount the ability to still communicate face to face? Nope. Damn well shouldn't.

Does that make this ok? Nope, Damn well doesn't.

[TakeBlaster16]

https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...

Most couples now meet online. Good luck convincing them all the internet is not real life. And those stats are from 2017. Given a few years of lockdown the trend has surely accelerated.

Discord is how a lot of young people talk these days. If you're banned from Discord, it's not very comforting to hear "you don't need Discord son, in my day we didn't have Discord and we wrote to our pen pals. I'm sure you'll make some new friends."

[conradfr]

Losing my gmail account would have way more effect on my "real life" than if I had suddenly no letter box.

Why can't it be regulated? Phone is and it's provided by private companies. The law even allows me to port my number between them.

[kemiller]

For the record, I'm 46. I clearly remember what it was like before, during, and after the internet revolution and I've seen how things have changed. I actually partially agree with you that part of the solution may be to simply stop relying on these new media quite so much and rediscover more analog ways of relating to one another, and I actually see signs of a movement to do just that (among young people!) but that doesn't change that they are very useful and here to stay, and for better or worse a vital part of how we relate to people near and far.

Consider the postal service — imagine if you could permanently lose the right to send things in the mail at the whim of an unaccountable customer service rep in the USPS. No trial, no recourse. Unthinkable. I suspect you CAN be banned if, e.g. you commit mail fraud or send something hazardous, but only after you're convicted with due process. That's the part that's missing. You can argue that the USPS is a government-owned entity and thus different rules apply... but again, that's the point. The carrier of last resort, at least, should be run in a way that is accountable, whether technically government or not.

[mistermann]

> The internet is not real life.

Ok, if the internet is not "real" life, then what is it?

Is it "in" reality? Do we interact with it? Does it interact with us, or within the ineffable, largely unseen soup of causality from which how things are/become in this world emerges? Does anything matter?

[sriram_malhar]

No, it isn't always about social media, or free speech, or 18-24 year olds.

An NGO I consult for runs its entire business on Google. All its documents are on Google docs, all digital assets on google drive, using google play store for their mobile app, using firebase on the backend ....

They work on children's education, and have lots of photos of children attending their workshops. My biggest fear is that Google AI will identify some photo as objectionable and shut the entire operation down in a hurry. Without recourse.

[ruined]

the internet is, unfortunately, real life

[temp_account_32]

They pretty much are de facto public services. The town square is now digital, and the laws have failed to adapt. Just because some big corporation owns it doesn't make it different in practice. Do you really want to defend a future where you can be banned from doing anything because some random $BIGCORP's algorithm decides so on a whim?

[anoonmoose]

Yes, I want that future, because their right to restrict service is the same right to restrict service that I personally have, and diminishing their rights diminishes my rights.

If you want government-run services that act as public versions of these services, advocate for that. But I don't support this particular method of socializing private businesses.

[falcolas]

You can keep a private/public company as a company while still restricting some of its activities via laws. This is reality for every company in existence.

There's even precedence when a private company is a de-facto public space (and must follow the governments' mandates on public spaces) in the physical world; extending this to the digital world makes sense.

[ekianjo]

Or you know, you could choose to use decentralized services just like we used IRC back in the days. Dont blame the platform when the users created their own problems in the first place.

[coldtea]

>That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property.

That's not some law of physics. Just a man made law that game them those "use of their private proverty" rights (or rather, rich and powerful people lobbied and bought legislation, and got them for themselves).

We can take them back. And we can also stop treating them as legal "persons" while we're at it.

>You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".

Public in the legal sense is just what we deem public in the legal sense.

As for public in the dictionary sense, that's irrelevant here.

Besides, after offering a service used by millions, that's basically a public service (I mean in the dictionary sense: directed at a mass public) - and even legal scholars have argued that they function as a kind of public utility (and could/should be regulated as such).

If we're to take it even further, then it's also a historical fact that all countries, including the USA, have nationalized companies (made some private companies public the same way public libraries are, either entirely or in part - e.g. having the state be shareholders of large part of them). So it's not like it's some unprecedent thing.

https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-....

[bambax]

This is incredibly short-sighted.

Just because a company is "private" doesn't mean they can do anything (manufacturing illegal goods, selling things that are harmful, not hire a certain category of people, etc.) We could add to the list of illegal behaviors the fact of denying service without justification and recourse.

Secondly, when those companies confiscate our accounts, they deprive us of what we had stored there (emails, messages, etc.), which should be considered stealing, even if they don't directly profit from the steal.

But most importantly, the size of these companies make them akin to utilities; while not impossible, it's incredibly difficult to operate in today's world without a Gmail account, or in certain circles without access to Instagram, Facebook, Discord, etc.

Given the impact to someone's life to be deprived of such access, the decision should not be left to companies, "private" or not, but supervised public authorities.

In France, the fact, for a professional, of refusing to sell something for no reason is punishable by up to three years in prison[0]. (If the victim sues, the reasons for not selling have to be presented to the judge, who then decides if they're valid or not.) I don't think this has ever been used against a FAANG but it would be a very interesting test.

[0] https://www.economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf/Publications/Vie-pratiqu...

[anoonmoose]

If the US wants "email as a utility" then they can build and fund it themselves. I wouldn't even complain about proposals for the US Government to buy Google- I am a demsoc, after all. But I do think that half-measures like forcing private organizations to operate under the same rules as private ones are a "worst of both worlds" proposition.

[MichaelCollins]

The entire premise of limited liability corporations is a creation of government; these are artificial entities, not people, they have privileges not rights. Every single right you might think a corporation has is a privilege, not a right, and can be taken away. They don't even have the right to exist at all.

[anoonmoose]

I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not sure that current SCOTUS precedent agrees with you, and that's the framework I'm working under.

[MichaelCollins]

> I'm not sure that current SCOTUS precedent agrees with you,

I know it doesn't, but that doesn't change anything I said. All of the privileges corporations enjoy are negotiable and can be revoked by that which created them in the first place: governments.

[wang_li]

Your argument was lost a hundred years ago or more. There are many regulations on businesses. On their speech, on their pricing, on the products, on hiring practices. The list is quite large.

AT&T can't restrict who can use their network to make phone calls based on the political views or the content of the call. Why should Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Especially when special liability exemptions were made without which they likely wouldn't even be in business.

[anoonmoose]

I mean the simple answer is that I think AT&T should be able to restrict their network based on those criteria. If the people of the US don't like that, they should vote to either build out equal infrastructure to replicate that functionality publicly, or vote to buy out AT&T's infrastructure.

[wang_li]

Or we can cancel all their easements, remove their right to run fiber and copper over public lands, and not renew their radio spectrum leases. These networks exist because the public gave them privileges in order to build the networks. Without those privileges they wouldn't exist.

Plus we could make them civilly and criminally liable for every bit of fraud, defamation, child porn, copyright violation, and etc. that involves their network.

[JohnHaugeland]

Fortunately, in a great many ways, that just isn't how this country works.

[teeray]

We don’t have the same standard in place for physical private companies. If Walmart started issuing lifetime bans to people because they didn’t fill out the customer survey on the receipt, they would be well within their rights by the same argument. It would also probably not be tolerated by society, because it impacts food security for those people where Walmart is the only grocery store around.

[anoonmoose]

I am fine with Walmart issuing those bans, as is within their rights, because the correct mechanism to respond to that would be for it to be "not tolerated by society", aka, the market will respond.

[teeray]

> the market will respond

Maybe they roll a D20 if you don't fill out the survey and if you roll a 1, you're banned for life (what can I say, they make up the rules for bans). Would the almighty free market really build another grocery store for that 5% of banned people? No... they would go hungry.

[macspoofing]

>That should absolutely not apply to Discord, Google Mail, or Amazon AWS, because those are all private companies restricting the use of their private property.

We don't live in a libertarian utopia where private property is not regulated. If you're a store-owner, for example, there are some things you simply cannot do or must allow. In California, for example, a private space, like a mall, has to allow constitutionally protected speech[1].

You can regulate platforms to allow for, say, free speech rights.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

"under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers"

[anoonmoose]

When quoting from the Pruneyard Wikipedia article, I would suggest you include "In refusing to follow Pruneyard, the state supreme courts of New York and Wisconsin both attacked it as an unprincipled and whimsical decision", and not just the parts you like.

[macspoofing]

>and not just the parts you like.

I made no judgment on the decision. The decision itself is periphery to my argument, namely that governments are perfectly capable regulating speech on platforms ... because they already are in many many other domains.

[unloco]

This is a horrible way of thinking. It's always good that "the others" are getting banned with no recourse, up until the point that YOU get banned with no recourse.

I know, because it happened to me, and it will happen to you, too. Eventually, you'll have a "hot take" on a topic against the hive mind of whatever media you use, and you're done.

If media companies allow public access to their services, they MUST become public spaces, and/or public services. TOS be damned.

If they want to restrict users when they sign up (just an example) "you must be liberal or conservative," fine. They are preemptively limiting their customers to certain conversations. But if they allow everyone in, you cannot mute one set of people.

[CodeWriter23]

I’m here to tell you in all probability, the “public” bus you ride every day is owned by a private company.

[anoonmoose]

The bus is owned by a private company, but they're being contracted by the government. It's still public.

If the USG were to approve a publicly-funded centralized chat program and contracted that work out to Discord, I would support/approve subjecting them to the rules people are suggesting here. But that hasn't happened and most likely will not happen.

[yamtaddle]

When you invite the public in, it's public. Maybe not quite the same way as a city park, but it's not wholly private either. That's both obvious in a common-sense way, and part of the law. It's just not really been applied to the Internet yet.

[tsukikage]

They can’t have it both ways. Either they should not be able to be selective about who they serve, or they should not be able to hide behind the figleaf of “we are just an indiscriminate carrier and not really responsible when our users use our services for illegal things” to avoid having to build sufficient support and moderation infrastructure to do the job properly and provide recourse when mistakes are made.

[moss2]

What I wrote was a political opinion. How I think things should be, not a description of what they are. I absolutely think private companies should be restricted in their use of their private property.

[ChoGGi]

Hate to break it to you, but Facebook is the biggest public square in the world.

[anoonmoose]

Sure, as long as you acknowledge you're not using any legal definition of the word "public". You're not really even using any dictionary definition of the word "public".

[ChoGGi]

Deal :)

[mdrzn]

This feels like the only way to move forward.

I can't wait for EU to propose something similar to fix these kind of issues, or a minimum level of customer service per every thousand users.

[bewaretheirs]

For many services, I think the right model would be analogous to how landlord-tenant relationships are regulated -- with significant constraints on how and when services can be terminated once they've started.

This should be the case even if the tenant isn't paying cash for services.

[ekianjo]

> Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera).

That will inevitably lead to more government spying at the end of the day. No thanks.

[slim]

what's your reasoning?

[ekianjo]

Government implements regulations about public discourse then eventually goes on to decide what is considered OK to publish and acts as a censor in the end. Since these become now effectively government driven platforms you lose the possibility of alternatives.

[Cameri]

This could be done using code without the need for a central authority.

[pjc50]

Unfortunately as we've seen from email, if there's no system for silencing posters you get drowned in spam. The history evolved as follows, and this is how I'd expect it to go for any "decentralized" comms system:

- various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular

- deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist

- people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability

- after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.

[bdw5204]

That's why there should be laws requiring large services to provide due process for users who have invested significant time and energy into the platform.

Its just common sense that a spam bot should be nuked on sight but a legitimate user should get a fair hearing before you ban them. Ideally the social media platforms would do something akin to Wikipedia's arbitration committee (basically the Supreme Court of Wikipedia) but scalable by hiring a suitably diverse pool of "unskilled" people for a $15 an hour or so remote job where they decide if a longtime legitimate user should be banned. I think this system would do a much better job of avoiding false positives. A properly functioning spam bot detector shouldn't be detecting any legitimate longtime users whatsoever.

Banning email addresses without sufficient notice to allow accounts tied to that email to be moved to another email should be illegal. You should also have a legal right to access your digital purchases even if your account is banned. There's nothing wrong with not wanting a customer any longer but you shouldn't be able to cause irreparable harm to your customer on their way out the door and there should be safeguards in place to ensure you don't fire any customers by mistake.

[wbsss4412]

Email is a different beast though, as it is set up to replicate snail mail. You need to be able to receive mail from anyone at any time.

For private, personal use at least, you don’t need this for a service that competes with discord. I’m not allowing random strangers into my chats, having an allowlist basically makes spam a non issue.

Now, that doesn’t fix the problem for public channels, but spam/trolling is always an issue on those anyways, and frankly, I don’t understand how people can use discord for that purpose in the first place.

[MikePlacid]

If the filter is in every participant’s individual hands, then:

1. if a person I am interesting in delivery to blocks me by mistake - I have an option to ask him to unblock me by other communication means.

2. if my opponent in a public discussion blocks me, other people can still see my arguments.

Both these benefits are absent in a centralized blocking system, no? And I do not see any drawbacks, are there some?

[amerkhalid]

However, email is easily portable, you can download your messages, and even own your domain, so you can switch email providers without changing emails.

[GoblinSlayer]

Spam doesn't have to managed by an opinionated central banlist. For email the solution is aliases like anonaddy or SimpleLogin.

[Sebb767]

For each unreasonably banned user, there are 5 concerned ones and 100 ones who joined the platform blue-eyed. It'll be hard for the few of us to fight the network effect.

[Bilal_io]

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop?

I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.

[rglullis]

OP is arguing about us stop relying on over centralized corporations and to start using the tools (that already exist!) based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible.

Your response is "mah regulation".

On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we can only choose the lesser of two evils.

Where has that spirit gone, really? Is it a generational thing?

[viraptor]

You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive. They're not. I want both regulation of massive internet services and for mastodon and others to become more common choices.

> based on free software where such type of arbitrary rulings are impossible.

Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible. If you're found to be doing something illegal, it's on you to figure out how to deal with that. It may involve not using that software.

But we don't live in a Cyberpunk dystopia. Government regulation is useful for many things. The answer to corps running wild does not have to be starting an isolated system from scratch.

[rglullis]

> You wrote this like the ideas are mutually exclusive.

No, I am writing like one of them has shown to be completely useless in effecting any type of real change, while the other is an equalizing force.

> Software license has nothing to do with what rulings are possible.

The software license has nothing to do with it. It is the economic and social forces that differ.

[drekk]

I wouldn't consider the abolishment of child labor or enforcement of the 40 hr standard workweek as "completely useless"

If government is supposedly accountable to the people it should serve public ends. If it doesn't it should be replaced. I thought that was the entire "Amwrican experiment"? Huh, guess it's a generational thing

[giraffe_lady]

No I'm likely older than you and definitely older than the median on this site and have always basically believed regulation is a more effective solution than blaming users for their problems.

[rglullis]

Saying that people are complacent and expecting the audience of a site called Hacker News to be mindful of their self-sovereignty is far from "blaming users for their problems".

The fact that an older individual shares one idea with the younger generation does not exclude the possibility of it being a generational divide.

Kudos, though, for also sharing the younger trait of treating every argument as something about their own identities.

[giraffe_lady]

Something I also share with the younger generation is the understanding that the cowardice of their elders is what got us all in this situation to start with. "Self-sovereignty" and individualism are failed ideologies: we will solve this for all of us or for none of us.

A large contingent of ""hackers"" throws up their hands and say "fine none of us then as long as I can insulate myself from the worse effects of it" and yes that is a shameful abdication of the responsibilities we have towards each other. Sorry if you find your own identity in there but you don't have to be so complacent about it yourself either.

[marcosdumay]

At the end of the day, the only way the OP's idea has any chance is if regulations mandate it.

The government is not supposed to be oppressive. And if it is, you are better out of mainstream communication channels anyway.

[rglullis]

> The government is not supposed to be oppressive.

All "Big" Governments are oppressive, as all "Big" anything is. The only difference is in how they exert their power, and what type of people are at the top of each pyramid.

Even "totally democratic" powers of the west will quickly attempt to crush anything that takes that power away from them and show potential to liberate people.

[notsapiensatall]

Users keep using. Why would the companies change?

If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with.

It's like a prisoner's dilemma. You can complain about how people always defect on you, but you're doing the exact same thing.

[bakugo]

>If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with.

Meanwhile everyone you know clicks "I agree" and you are now excluded from communicating with them. What did this accomplish?

[notsapiensatall]

Well, it prevents you from communicating with the sort of people who will blithely participate in these sorts of destructive systems.

More seriously, it's like an act of civil disobedience. If everybody acted similarly, we would not have these problems. Most people won't wise up until their kin are personally harmed by one of these massive unaccountable institutions, and until that happens to enough people, you have to recognize that acting in accordance with your principles will not always be the most convenient path through life.

[coldtea]

>Feels very 1984.

More like "Brazil". In 1984 at least things wasn't also commercialized, and shit worked.

[qzx_pierri]

You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket. Also, connect with these important people outside of Discord. You have to assume these sites/services will ban you at any moment. Contingency planning isn’t just for projects at work!

[kaibee]

> You gotta stop putting all of your eggs in one basket.

This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.

[GoblinSlayer]

Voting with legs isn't painless, but is the right thing to do.

[ekianjo]

so you mean its preferable for Google and Discord to own the public discourse instead of users trying to switch to something else? thats a rich idea.

[macspoofing]

>We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop?

I don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale.

>I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.

You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.

[LanceH]

> I don't think it can.

A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.

[macspoofing]

>A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.

1) Not really .. people can steal your private key. And then you have to same problem.

2) Don't payment processor already have inordinate amount of (government-issued) identity data they collect from you? Everything from Driver's license, to Passport, to Social Insurance numbers? How would another piece of information make any difference?

[pjc50]

Works for Metafilter. Surprised it's not more popular.

[littlestymaar]

> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.

I really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized.

Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization.

If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless.

Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions.

Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.

[CodeWriter23]

> “But what if you lose your private key?

Answer: then you have lost access due to circumstances completely within your control. Contrast that with the amount of control you have over losing your account with a social company. IOW, that’s a total bullshit argument.

[vachina]

Not your server, not your data.

Host your own mission critical services, and don’t commit too much to (especially free) third party services.

[JonathanBeuys]

You cannot self-host identity. You cannot self-host a social graph.

If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend.

People go on social media for the social graph.

You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via cryptographic proof. Self hosting is not a solution.

You also cannot host identity.

If your domain gets stolen from you (search for the horror stories on Google or HN search), your identity is gone. Nothing you can do against it, since you are at the mercy of authorities again: The registrars.

[devmor]

>If people would host "xyz liked my tweet" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets.

This problem is what public key verification is literally made to solve.

If Billie Eilish likes your tweet, her client signs the like with her private key and sends the result to your server. Other clients can verify the like is real by looking at the result you send back with the "like" and verifying it against her public key.

Edit: The person I'm replying to has edited their post at least 3 separate times in the past couple minutes, adding multiple new lines to say different things, so if this disagreement to it ends up making no sense, you know why.

[rhn_mk1]

Sure you can self-host identity. Why would it be tied to a domain name? It is tied to a public key already, in e-ID systems, S/MIME, or GPG, Tor, blockchain, etc.

[ranger_danger]

have you not heard of the fediverse?

[mavhc]

only if you rely on a domain name for identity, instead of private/public keypairs

[GoblinSlayer]

>then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend

Twitter bots already do that.

[onion2k]

In the case of the user who started this thread, there's no option to 'host it yourself'. They're trying to be part of the community that Discord hosts. Discord is stopping them. You can't just fire up an IRC server and ask everyone on the Discord to move because you can't join in. That's not how life works.

[leephillips]

Exactly right. People choose to give these companies power over them; they choose to submit to tyranny.

Nobody can ban me from email, or from my own website.

[ranger_danger]

That's not entirely accurate.

For email see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437

For website see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32706673

[leephillips]

Neither one of those are counterexamples. One guy decided to give up solving his deliverability problems (problems I don’t have after self-hosting my email for 20 years). Nobody banned him. The second example is cloudflare banning a site. I don’t (and wouldn’t) use cloudflare, and even in that case, nobody banned anybody from his own website—just from cloudfare.

[ranger_danger]

Regarding email, it's still possible for practically every other mailserver on the Internet to block messages from you, effectively banning you. That's what happened to OP I believe.

On the second one you might want to look further into that case... people have been frantically going after every possible company that does any business with them trying to get them off the internet, whether that's hosting providers, DDoS protection services, IP allocation providers, upstream ISPs, nameservers, domain registrars, etc.

[bombcar]

They can, it just takes extra steps and so probably won’t happen as nobody is likely to run a coordinated campaign to do it.

[leephillips]

How would it work? I mean, I can imagine framing me for a felony and getting me banned from internet access as part of my sentence, but are there less extreme procedures?

EDIT: Maybe breaking into my email server and sending out spam to poison my IP. That’s conceivable, and would partially ban me from sending out email.

[bombcar]

DDOS, reporting your server/domain for TOS violations, etc.

As long as nobody cares enough to do it, it probably won’t happen.

Just never piss off the wrong person.

[enriquto]

> Does anybody really believe it will ever stop?

As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.

[nonameiguess]

I always wonder what I should take in terms of behavioral modification from these kinds of stories. They're certainly spectacular. So are stories of mass school shootings, of police murdering people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of children being kidnapped out of their own front yards by strangers and held in basements. None of those stories cause me to avoid school, avoid police, not let children into yards, though, because I'm aware of the actual prevalence of occurrence as a proportion of time spent living in places where these things sometimes happen and the risk level is sufficiently low, in spite of how spectacular the stories are.

Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it.

Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about.

Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.

[rocket_surgeron]

There is no solution, you just have to deal with it. There will always be noise in the signal.

If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm".

C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it.

What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved.

Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is.

"Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does.

You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do.

We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem.

So you're gonna just have to deal with it.

[dorkwood]

I also lost my Instagram to a weird bug/ban thing. If I try to access my account on desktop it says "confirm your information using the Instagram app to try to get back to your account". Opening the app on my phone results in a black screen. This happens on both Android and iOS. Android has some buttons that appear, but they're really buggy (appearing and disappearing) and none of them do anything except give me an error. It kind of seems like there's some sort of verification process I'm supposed to go through, but the app won't let me access it.

I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.

[soulofmischief]

I'm working on this right now for two different experiences, topic-oriented chat (Discord, etc) and media blogging (Instagram, YouTube) using a distributed graph database + cryptographic primitives, and user-hosted data.

Happy to connect with you or anyone else reading this and trade ideas / give updates, email in bio.

[Cameri]

This is exactly what Nostr solves.

Just simple JSON messages signed with public-key cryptography (Schnorr) relayed over Websockets. Send your events to many relays so if one chooses to evict you it's not an issue.

Just don't rely on a third party to keep your private key. Not your key, not your identity.

[TomSwirly]

> But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.

No, the hatred is for the next sentence, which is "Buy my cryptocurrency".

[green-salt]

I would love to have people move to this model, but its an extra layer of complexity that the masses will balk at, so they will stick to Facebook or Discord or even Slack.

[intelVISA]

I'm surprised Discord bans anybody these days -- they have telemetry that rivals Palantir it would be silly to willingly remove data sources like that.

[eternalban]

> Feels very 1984.

I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.

[daniel-cussen]

Oh, I could google myself right now, nonstop cockroach pictures, piece of cake. Just need to tease the algorithms a bit. Like why would I? That's old news. Better for both that I not look right now. Like objectively what happens? 1984 was erased, The Metamorphosis also erased, so in fact Kafka was dredged before 1984, means it's not as harmful probably. Eh. Like oh this was gone, the idea that if something did happen to me I had to report it as soon as possible, first opportunity. Wrote down the date I recollected that. Clearly the opportunity went stale, there's exceptions and this was it. Sacred? Memories? Consistency? Why would anything conform to that? Sue whom where how? Forget it.

Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time.

Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time!

Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame!

No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=imag...

Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.

[daniel-cussen]

I might add subtitles for this later.

[faangiq]

It’s not going to stop. It’s going to get much worse. And you will be happy.

[scrollaway]

Technical solutions are not usually the answer to legal problems.

These theoretical cyberpunk-like crypto-networks only work in practice if you're uploaded to the matrix. Otherwise they fail the XKCD/538 Wrench Test.

[GoblinSlayer]

Discord fails the wrench test too. The difference is that it also fails without wrench, but cyberpunk doesn't.

[bbstats]

So dystopian

[cloudwalk9]

Discord Trust and Safety in particular is downright useless. I feel I should share my story. It's a personal hell I've been stuck in for a while.

I'm disabled from severe depression resistant to first line treatments, bedridden a lot of the time, and I rely on the platform for most of my social interaction and resources for my hobbies, as far as I can pursue them of course. Discord is invaluable and is basically a monopoly in my cultural bubble.

On Jan 13, they disabled a 7 year old early supporter account with an active Nitro subscription with the reason "Your account posted content that sexualized individuals under the age of 18, or was involved in servers dedicated to such unacceptable content". I've never done this. I learned a lot of people were getting disabled for being in a server that they haven't touched in years and it went rogue or was raided and that stuff was posted there, so I figured I was a victim of a carpet bombing and it was a one-off.

But they continued to disable every new account (12 so far, I lost count). Most of the accounts were disabled in the last two weeks. They left me alone for 6 months until Sep 1 when my 4th account was disabled without the usual explanation email. I made an appeal and not only was it ignored, it was marked solved within 4 hours.

In fact they have not communicated with me at all. They have ignored all of my tickets, have not sent emails for each account that was disabled after the first. Except one time I got an email but the reason was left blank.

A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.

In the last two weeks it was always the same Discord staff assigning themselves to my appeals, "Violet". This includes the one that was marked solved without communication. And they're supposedly experiencing increased ticket volumes.

I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. Only thing I can hope for is Discord to basically die and everyone moves elsewhere, or they leave me alone.

[quikoa]

Perhaps it's worth to consider taking them to a small claims court. I don't know what the odds of winning are but it's quite the hassle for a company.

[cloudwalk9]

I've considered it. But they have a right to refuse service for any reason. Only damages I could claim is 10 dollars from my last month of Nitro. Not sure what they're doing counts as disability discrimination either. Probably don't have a case.

[TakeBlaster16]

I would claim the total amount you've spent on Nitro since you first made your account. That was an investment into your account and its history, and now it's gone. You sound like a sympathetic plaintiff. You have a shot. Best case, you get an actual human to look at your situation. Worst case, you're out filing fees and end up back where you started.

[cloudwalk9]

I also live in a state that permits injunctive relief in small claims court, I think. Although I'm not sure how much teeth that would have. I'm kinda concerned about them digging into my old DMs because I'm sure they'll find a reason to make everything relevant they possibly can, and they end up on a record I can't seal or something, costing me all sense of privacy and dignity.

I'm generally clueless about the process in depth, admittedly.

[evanwolf]

They lose if they don't show up in small claims court to defend themselves. It's a few hundred bucks in the US for them to hire a lawyer to show.

[geoelectric]

Depending on the area, lawyers (as outside representation) may not be allowed in small claims court, too. At that point, I believe they generally have to send someone working for the company who can represent them directly.

[ncmncm]

Slightly off topic, but the US FDA has just approved an analog of the miraculous ketamine depression treatment. Basically you can chug a 4oz /100 ml of dextromethorphan (US brand "Delsym") for the same effect, a couple of weeks' absolute relief via a poorly understood metabolic pathway. "If it works, it works."

I will be eager to hear about others' results. (No effect, + or -, for me, on a smaller dose. Do, always, start with a smaller dose, in case it works badly for you; and check warnings on drug interactions carefully.) Maybe ask your Dr.

[rthomas6]

Are you claiming drinking 4 oz of cough syrup cures depression for a few weeks? Do you have any studies I can read about this? I'm not being snarky, this is really interesting and something I have not heard before. Where are you getting that dosage from? How dangerous is it?

[ncmncm]

Dextromethorphan is available over-the-counter in the US and, I believe, most places.

A single dose of ketamine was discovered a couple of years back to provide a complete remission for weeks, for some varieties of depression including some that did not respond to any approved meds. But unfortunately ketamine is a "schedule 3" drug in the US, for reasons (strongly addictive, tends to persistent hallucination; cf. John Lilly).

Then somebody observed that DM operated on some of the same receptors, or something, and tried it, and then initiated a full RCT on a very limited dose. Approval for that coupled with a low-ish dose of bupropion just came out a few weeks ago. Presumably higher-dose trials are in the works now.

Depression is what is often called a "wastebasket diagnosis", analog to a wastebasket, or paraphyletic, taxon in biology, where unrelated species have been lumped together because their actual relationships were too hard to tease out before DNA analysis became practical. (Falcons ended up having to be split from hawks, on DNA evidence they are sister to e.g. pigeons, over birders' outrage.)

Numerous unrelated pathologies get called "depression", so the only way to distinguish them is by what med they respond to, if any. It is why we keep seeing spurious media reports that depression meds "don't work": RCTs depend utterly for validity on accurate diagnosis, which for depression does not exist.

So, search anywhere for "ketamine depression" for the original discovery, and "dextromethorphan bupropion" for the recent FDA announcement.

[ridgered4]

> A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.

Curious what the mechanism for identifying the VPS account was. Phone number? Some sort of client signature? I don't use discord.

[cloudwalk9]

Well, I was very vague but still identified myself to a few friends in a trusted server using subtle cues like the cloud emoji. This was a mistake in hindsight because I'm sure they could put two and two together, but it also made me realize how dedicated they are to keeping me away that they're now watching the server I join for any sign of me.

There should have been no other link to me, no fingerprint. This was an environment that has never touched Discord.

As of now I set up a new account that is less-than-discreet, obviously me if they're paying attention, and another account that is very discreet, on a VPN. I'm testing to see if an Android work profile is leaking anything. If both accounts get disabled, then it's back to the drawing board. If the not-so-discreet account gets disabled, the work profile is working and I'm on the right track. Although it sucks to have to abandon my friends and identity over this nonsense, just to stay hidden and be fearful of seeing that damn login screen again.

Hey, if neither get disabled in the next, say, month, maybe this Violet person was fired or they gave up. I can only assume it's them if they're the ones intercepting my appeals every time.

[breakingcups]

Alternatively, they ban any new accounts made from a known VPS ip range due to scam bot issues and that ban was just unrelated.

[celdon25]

The vps account was banned because it was created on a vps. Probably wasn’t linked to you if you ask me.

[cloudwalk9]

I dunno. All three accounts were banned at the same time.

[celdon25]

The process that does the bans will do them in batches. It is not a person pressing a button for each account.

[cloudwalk9]

Huh. That's reassuring.

[workethics]

They probably use the user's social graph. Taking all those precautions won't help if the new account just rejoins the same servers and talks to the same people as the banned account.

[steanne]

you may be able to participate in servers that have bridges, like to irc or matrix. that's a minority, though.

[cloudwalk9]

As much as possible, I've done this, but then it's Discord server after server for every single new thing of interest.

I'm a budding programmer and I maintain(ed) the DarkPlaces engine. In August 2020, I created a Discord server for it with LadyHavoc's blessing, creating a community that brought together professional developers making commercial games using the engine.

...only for me to not be able to participate unless I can poke someone to make time to set up a bridge. Even then, if I'm banned from Discord, who is to say they won't see me talking through a bridge as ban evasion and wipe the bridge, or even the whole server out?

I certainly have my regrets.

[ncmncm]

A burner account, used just to announce a new platform?

[cloudwalk9]

Oh, nah. I created that server in August 2020.

[ncmncm]

I am suggesting making on a new, less volatile platform, and announcing via a burner Discord account.

[iLoveOncall]

> "Your account posted content that sexualized individuals under the age of 18, or was involved in servers dedicated to such unacceptable content". I've never done this.

You shared furry porn picturing subjects of a questionable age, didn't you?

[cloudwalk9]

No. And they have a different ban reason for that https://twitter.com/Really_Tall/status/1438986482430193666

[dannyw]

There's no foolproof way for them to ban you; something is leaking. Do you know any technical friends why may be able to test ideas?

[theo1996]

>using discord after 2014+2

[ctrlmeta]

The popularity of Discord always surprises me! It takes hard work and time to create an active community. Why put all that hard work and time into a corporate-controlled platform that can lock you out of it anytime they want? How do people feel ok taking such a big risk? Why not use an open protocol like Matrix (or IRC if you're savvy) to form your community?

[gigaflop]

Discoed does a lot of things 'right' for a lot of people.

For gamers, Discord became a no-brainer after not much time. Click to create a server for some friends, send out some invites, and that's pretty much all you need. Built-in game overlay settings, voice chat, and screen sharing. Text and voice channels.

Compare this to the old TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble era, where you'd need to actually manage the installation, and tell people how to connect.

Discord makes it braindead-easy to get started, and the risks you're talking about affect less than 10% of the userbase, probably. Until a more-open platform provides a better experience, Discord will be here to stay among the masses.

[haunter]

>The popularity of Discord always surprises me! It takes hard work and time to create an active community

Free dedicated voice chat with rich text chat. It was meant to take on Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble etc. And it successfully did.

>or IRC if you're savvy

Totally different use case, not even comparable

[mavhc]

Typing to people you don't really know on the internet? Seems the same use case

[unethical_ban]

Instantaneous creation of a server with an RBAC GUI, multiple text and voice chat rooms, voice chat, screen share, app share(game streaming), and for clients, a GUI that allows people to view the status of other servers while participating in one.

Again, it's made for voice/screen/streaming share, not primarily text.

[andrewinardeer]

I respect your view and can see your point.

May I counter that Discord effectively proprietarised the open standard that is IRC and then put all the bells and whistles such as shared screen streaming, voice chat etc on top? Similar to how WhatsApp proprietarised XMPP.

Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.

That's how I see it. You are welcome to disagree.

[unethical_ban]

I won't argue that it can be used that way, and for "only" text, yeah, there are open alternatives that achieve most of what Discord can do.

My point is that it is reductive to say "Discord is just IRC with some addons" when those addons are critical to its success. If Mumble had video-conference and screen sharing, it'd be pretty easy to convince my friends to use Mumble. Other than the network effect of Discord being the entry point to multiple servers/friend groups, and Discord makes spinning up your own server trivial.

So again, it does more than "just" improve on text chat.

[xboxnolifes]

If IRC came with voice chat, I might agree. But discord didn't become popular because it was a reskinned IRC client. Seamless setup of a voice and text server was the value proposition. I still use teamspeak with some people, but discord is just so much more polished in the ease of setup area.

[aseipp]

Discord was originally designed for gaming voice chat. It marketed itself this way, it was positioned this way in its public perception, and most of the early feature development reflected this. The move towards "online communities" only came later once they realized they had a broader product: they realized they had an alternative to Slack, while originally they thought they were an alternative to Ventrillo and Mumble. But make no mistake, the gaming angle was why Discord became popular; it made it vastly easier to host and create (and eventually, find) dedicated servers for specific topics, and the voice chat quality was mostly ahead of everything else (except Mumble, but again "not hosting your own Mumble" was a selling point.)

The fact it had text channels with (very, very limited) markup was less a ripoff of IRC and more "The basic thing everyone expects from a comms client, to have basic text channels where you can type words." It's literally the most fundamental thing a "communicator" can do is to have a text box that other users can look at. Otherwise you wouldn't even be able to organize people to get in voice channels! Sorry to say but nobody except nerds know what "IRC" is, but almost everyone understands online chat. This is not new. The fact IRC diehards think Discord "proprietized" IRC is a good example of not knowing or understanding your enemy at all and just romanticizing about what you think is important. Discord was not popular because of text chat. It was popular because of voice chat, and it did voice chat very well.

Every discussion of Discord has to have IRC contrarians who reminded you "it had text chat first", all while the fact of the matter is text chat isn't what made Discord popular to begin with!

> Even the niche Discord servers have managed to replicate the community feel of the early to mid 1990's IRC channels.

That isn't because IRC is some magical happy software that makes everybody using it sit in a circle and sing campfire songs. It's because what you are describing is the natural end-point of all online communication forums like Discord, IRC, AIM, or even Twitter or whatever: "community." What you are witnessing is a community of humans congregating, not some magical special sauce that IRC gave us in 1980 or whatever.

Community has existed in human society for a long time, in fact. Seeing it replicated in different mediums with similar features and form is not surprising at all. Your wording might imply IRC gave us this or something, or that the "communities" in Discord are rather ersatz in some way -- but I argue that's a simple confusion of cause and effect.

[mavhc]

Weirdly, every server I'm on is primarily text.

I'm in multiple text chat rooms on multiple servers in irc though.

[haunter]

You can voice chat on IRC?

[Crosseye_Jack]

Most people want someone else to deal with the hassle. Most people don't want to run their own server(s), so even if people did use IRC or Matrix those people would host their community on servers that are controlled by others who could lock you out of it anytime they wanted.

> How do people feel ok taking such a big risk?

Well for most people they don't see the risks involved and those who are aware of the risks don't believe it will ever happen to them. Just look at Google accounts as an example. People use Gmail, get themselves locked out of them, and lose pretty much all their digital lives all the time but people still happily rely on Gmail.

Some quickly Googled stats about Gmail (take these number with a pinch of salt cause I've not looked into whats supporting these numbers - https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/ )

> Gmail remains the most popular email platform with over 1.8 billion users worldwide.

> As of April 2022, Gmail holds 29.5% of the email client market share.

> Gmail accounts for 27% of all email opens.

> 75% of all Gmail users access their email on mobile devices.

> 61% of 18-29-year-olds use Gmail.

[bodge5000]

Unless your whole friend group/community also cares about that, you'll have a hard time steering them towards alternatives. Even in cases where the product itself is better, privacy and control aside.

[ajkjk]

Most people don't care about anything you mentioned.

[Suzuran]

Having experience with both, the big win with Discord vs. self-hosted services is that I don't have to directly fight the losing war/arms race vs. organized spam.

[bruce343434]

They really, honestly, don't think it would happen to them. It's not a risk to them in their brains.

[bowsamic]

Well, statistically, it's probably not a significant enough probability to be a risk worth acting on

[zarzavat]

What alternative is there that has: screen sharing, voice calls, all your friends across every community in one DM list, meaning that you can make group chats across communities?

[ctrlmeta]

But once the company locks me out, I would neither have screen sharing nor video calls nor the DM list. Isn't it better to just use Matrix which may have less features but those features I can rely on for a long time without the risk of being locked out?

[the_lonely_road]

Some people refuse to get in the ocean for fear of being killed by a shark. Most people swim, boat, surf, parasail, etc and enjoy that aspect of their life without more than the most casual thought of sharks. Neither group is right but one group has a much more enriched life…assuming they don’t get eaten by a shark of course.

[paulcole]

Maybe (like most people), you never get locked out.

You can be stubborn and rely on a platform your audience/community probably doesn’t want to use and have a very steep uphill battle to success. Or you can take a risk and rely on a platform you don’t own and have a (somewhat) less steep uphill battle to success.

If the platform is good enough and the benefits of using it are significant enough, people are going to take the risk. See: App Store development, selling on Amazon instead of your own e-commerce store, etc.

[spywaregorilla]

Not enough people get locked out for this to matter to the public opinion

[BrandoElFollito]

Matrix is great, but does not immediately have a web interface, and this may push back some users.

It is not that it is difficult to use a client (though the authentication i snot obvious - but then I had to think hard about Discord authentication/servers/invitations as well) but everyone is used to have a web interface and mobile clients to start with.

[Ardon]

You can link people directly to https://app.element.io/

But there's definitely a lower barrier to entry with Discord right now, maybe forever. But maybe there just needs to be time to push through the network effect of discord. I'm vaguely optimistic, I'm seeing Matrix more and more often these days. Still in nerd circles, of course.

[vel0city]

> but does not immediately have a web interface

I only communicate on Matrix through a web interface.

[EamonnMR]

People will do anything for the tiniest drop of illusionary power and will take the shortest path to it.

[hotgeart]

Same for Youtube, Twitch or else. Because the ppl are there, and it's easier and gives you the spotlight at no cost.

[vouaobrasil]

It's just because other people are there and it's a trend. That is why most people do things.

[namlem]

Discord has a ton of useful features. It's a very powerful application.

[ropeladder]

I triggered some Discord flag where now they require me to give them my phone number to log in via the web. I won't give it to them. Luckily I have a still-logged-in instance on my home computer, do I can still use that for the time being. Super frustration though.

[kouteiheika]

Same here. Still logged in through Firefox, but can't login through Chrome anymore. Exact same computer, exact same IP address. I contacted support and they refused to help me, quote:

> I just checked with my team, and upon review of your account, it appears that our detection system has triggered successfully and we will not be removing the phone verification requirement on your account. You'll be required to register a phone number to your Discord account in order to continue the use of it.

This is *after* I explained that I'm still logged in and can fully use Discord in another browser without registering a phone number.

I tried to also get an answer as to whether I'll be locked out of my account if I log out of my account in Firefox, but they didn't tell me.

[aaronmdjones]

> I just checked with my team, and upon review of your account, it appears that our detection system has triggered successfully

That's exactly the same response I got, word-for-word, to my lockout ticket [1]. Initially I thought it was a human replying to my ticket, now I'm not so sure.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31398660

[whatisthiseven]

I sat alongside customer service agents working phones, email, and chat. They use copy-pasted stuff for everything. I will watch them search word for a template way slower than I could type, but that's their process.

Re-used phrases is not a sign of a bot, IMO. But it is a sign of employees who have to respond to the same thing over and over and don't have much power to effect change.

[sanitycheck]

They probably just don't have a way to invalidate tokens. When it expires you'll be locked out on Firefox too - better tie up any loose ends.

[_V_]

I have the very same problem. It seems that my IP @ home was somehow flagged and I was unable to access Discord without giving them phone number.

I will never give my phone to Discord/Twitter etc - just a matter of principle.

[GoblinSlayer]

Most likely data mining. Google does the same.

[mdrzn]

Seems like it's an old issue that hasn't been fixed [0]

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600556...

[asdojasdosadsa]

Wow, how can a system be designed like this? There is no warning or notification when creating a new account, the old account just goes to 'limbo' mode...

I still get notifications on my phone from the logged in account, but when trying to access it's asking for phone verification, which obviously doesn't work because there is no phone number tied to the account!

[desindol]

There is literally a topic with the problem in their help. Their phone number is on timeout for a week. Sucks but not being able to read sucks even more.

>>Have an alt account, or help a friend complete their verification? Your phone has just been registered and is on timeout. Unfortunately we can not lift this, and you will need to wait for the end of the timeout to use the number once more, or use a different number to verify the account.

[PaulKeeble]

When they were doing the massive bans in November/December/January it looked like it was to try and boost their new user stats for the rumoured upcoming public sale. But more and more it just looks like they have an errant security algorithm that bans legitimate customers with no recourse. I suspect much of Discord's new user signups are people who have had accounts banned and then have to make a new account, there probably isn't much real growth happening now and there is growing disquiet about their terrible customer support.

[msoucy]

Yeah you're SOL. Discord has a habit of banning people, saying that they investigated themselves and determined themselves to be correct in banning you, and then deleting accounts.

[jimktrains2]

Somehow my phone number was removed from my account and now i cannot add it again. When asking support why it was removed they've responded multiple times with the same canned email saying they can't remove the phone number requirement. I repeated said I don't want it removed, just to know why my number was removed and how to add it back, but yet i receive the same canned message.

[throwawayuydw]

This happened to me - they absolutely will not unblock your # unless you know somebody who works there beyond the support queues. I was told by a friend who did a stint at Discord that standard flow is churn new accounts, and that's acceptable because their users are already used to name churn.

[celdon25]

Wait, are you implying they’re doing it to cook the books for inflating the total # of accounts on the platform? Somebody call Elon.

[throwawayuydw]

This is not at all what I meant, my implication is that they don't care about the poor user experience. I'm sure they don't count the banned accounts.

[gaws]

> I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?

Why? Discord has no obligation to its users, and it's a volatile platform to conduct any mission-critical or business-related communications. The best thing to do is to stop using it.

[_V_]

I have also tried to contact support and it was painful.

At first you get an automated response from some bot which is unhelpfull. After some more diggin and poking around you get to a human but they just told me that they don't know details about flagging and cannot do anything in regards to these processes. So basically useless.

I really don't understand why it got so popular

edit: typo

[Sebb767]

> I really don't understand why it got so popular

Because enough people never contact support for it to not be a major problem, I assume.

[wodenokoto]

So you can just snipe peoples accounts if you know their phone number?

[jeroenhd]

Only if you can verify the phone number from what I can tell. You'd need to have access to the phone number's texts for that to work.

[chrisked]

Write abuse@ and you stand a good chance they revert this quickly.

[dannyw]

No chance whatsoever, they legitimately don't have a flow for unbanning people outside of knowing an employee.

[cinericius]

This isn't true. I've been banned and then unbanned in this exact scenario - they re-enabled my account after 2 days. I had my messages flagged as spam for a further 6 weeks, but it was eventually resolved. My only contact with Discord was emailing support@.

[chrisked]

No true for me. I was banned and recovered my account within 2 days by emailing [e-mail].

[superkuh]

Stop depending entirely on corporate systems for your personal communication and recreation (I say on HN...).

And absolutely stop calling for the use of violence (regulations by government) in these situations. Just because Bob says you cannot come over to the weekly neighborhood BBQs in his backyard does not mean it is ethical for you to call up your police friend to threaten Bob and to make sure you can go. It doesn't matter if you're right and he's wrong. It doesn't matter if everyone in the neighborhood continues to chose to go to his BBQs and you can't. It's still Bob's backyard and he isn't inititing violence against you. Don't do it to him.

[helpfulclippy]

I hear you about saying no to depending on the rings of power.

Not sure about the regulatory part with Bob’s backyard. What about when Bob intentionally persuades everyone to route all their packages and mail through his house, which he routinely opens, reads and studies to determine their preferences and desires and compile psychological profiles of everyone in the neighborhood which he then discloses to various unidentified third parties including law enforcement, debt collectors, abusers and criminals? What about when Bob uses his control to deny people access to their own communications and stuff, on the grounds that they’re actually his now because it’s at his house and he decided for unspecified reasons that they broke one of his vague and unilaterally-defined rules? What if Bob does this at such a scale that he can now assist the government in undermining the constitutional protections against unwarranted searches, or uses his influence and knowledge to purposefully stoke and manipulate anger in ways that he KNOWS he can’t control and will get people killed or at least ruin their lives, but at least makes him more money?

Do Bob’s property rights need to be balanced against other societal needs then?

[superkuh]

I can only control my own actions. If Bob does that then I'd stop being friends with Bob and stop going to his BBQs. If other people want to keep using Bob's services thats entirely up to them. And their continued use is entirely voluntary. If they want they can stop.

It's already balanced. All anyone has to do is make a personal choice rather than invoking calls for coersion.

[Buttons840]

I have sympathy for the regulation is violence philosophy but it doesn't sit well with me. It seems very focused on individual ownership, putting individual ownership above the rights of everyone collectively. Is the argument that it is not violence for an individual to control his own property, but it is violence for the people the control their collective property (the nation and it's resources)? Did I understand that correctly? Again, it seems like a philosophy that places individual ownership very highly, which I definitely sympathise with, but we shouldn't be too surprised when those who are unlikely to ever have individual ownership form a different philosophy, which I also sympathise with. As with most politics, there needs to be a balance.

[namlem]

No, start calling much more loudly for the use of government force to resolve the situation. State power in a democratic system is the best vehicle to counterbalance concentrated private power. This anarcho-libertarian drivel never leads to postivie outcomes.

[wojciii]

My discord user was initially blocked as they thought I was a bot. I had to write to support several times before it was unblocked and it wasted two weeks of my life.

Discord sucks. The only reason that I use it is because of work.

[cookingrobot]

My idea is we should regulate a lot of online services like we do landlords.

I remember years ago Microsoft thought someone was pirating their software so they started reading their emails looking for evidence. That seemed wrong to me. A landlord wouldn’t be allowed to snoop through your drawers if they thought you were stealing, they’d need to convince the police to get a warrant.

And in this discord case, once a company agrees to create an account for you and start providing service, they shouldn’t be allowed to “evict” you overnight for no good reason. There should be a proper process with protections when ending the relationship.

[DrWumbo]

Legislation has actually taken us in the opposite direction. With FOSTA/SESTA online platforms were required to make an effort to go through user content. I think a better analogy to use is these platforms being like bars or cafes. You don't expect the wait staff or bartender to snoop on your conversations, but if law enforcement asks what they know they might be forced to comply. If a bar notices you pimping and doesn't act, they could be liable.

[yieldcrv]

Honestly at this point I just went to the cell phone store and added a new line with a new sim card

Its like $5-20 dollars/mo, circumvents phone number based account barriers, circumvents voip and burner number discrimination

each iphone has 2 sim card slots, can give dates and strippers a phone number that doesn't have green bubbles when texted, amplifying my broad population legitimacy by an order of magnitude (its USA obviously it matters), while still keeping them segregated

I pay more for an uber, or a drink, or some stupid SaaS seat. just a social and internet freedom tax.

at this point just make it normal

[chmod775]

I did the same thing (also wanting to create a work account) with a similar result. Luckily it was the new account that got banned instead of the old one.

I hadn't added the phone number to my old account and when I later wanted to do so I was informed it could only be assigned to one.

So I removed the number from the new account, which immediately got banned, and then added it to my old account without a problem.

Something about "new account without phone" discord seems to dislike.

My old account also had some money spent with them, which possibly saved it.

[10g1k]

Discord, Reddit, and Twitter are notorious for being infested with pedos as moderators. You're better off without them. And there are alternatives.

[senko]

We really need a platform that would run open source for you as a service.

In many cases there are reasonable OSS alternatives (here, Discord itself!) but not everyone wants to be a part-time sysadmin.

Free/Libre Open-Source Software as a Service, anyone?

[rjmunro]

There are loads, but they have to ban people too.

[meonmyphone]

I had a similar issue where the support was useless (said I triggered some flag and nothing could be done). My conclusion was to avoid using the service.

[32gbsd]

Putting your phone number into anything is a big mistake.

[IntelMiner]

This is not a helpful nor constructive answer

[jeroenhd]

Though you're not wrong, what would a constructive answer be in this case? Discord is ignoring OP and they alone can restore service.

I don't see what constructive answer you can expect in these threads other than "I work at <company> and I DM'd the CEO for you"; I've seen FAANG companies and Stripe respond that way here on HN, but never Discord.

The best alternative I can think of is "that sucks, rotate phone numbers and try with a new account" which is just as completely useless for OP. If that were an option, they'd already done so.

[32gbsd]

this a common trend with technocrates defending technology that can basically be ripped out from under you at any moment. hopefully OP will get some help but there are many in a similar situation in many other similar apps.

[_V_]

Well technically you are correct but the underlying issue is Discord and unability of their tech support to change anything in regards to these blacklistings/flaggings.

It is infuriating and I don't see why these services would need my phone number.

[AlwaysRock]

Are you using a google voice number or something? A lot of big tech wont accept that type of number for verification.

[hrbf]

It fascinates me to no end.

On the one hand many people more or less voluntarily use private companies’ free services and are surprised when they are shut out for arbitrary reasons. On the other, regulation is decried as government overreach.

Then there are the inevitable technologist voices calling for yet another technical solution for an issue created by technology and economic liberalism in the first place.

This is a social and legal issue, not a technical one.

[saati]

They did the same to me, then I asked for a GDPR delete and they restored my account instead. If you are an EU citizen it's worth a shot.

[Dr_ReD]

Really. At this point legislature is the only way out.

[raxxorraxor]

Any service that forces a telephone registration for verification is crap in my opinion.

If you need an account professionally, you need a mobile phone to be provided for you. This is in your interest and that of the company if they decide they want to use your account beyond your employment for example.

[groffee]

> Any service that forces a telephone registration for verification is crap in my opinion.

I agree with you, but it does dramatically cut down on spam registration.

[naasking]

Do you have a better way to increase the probability that the signup is a real human being and not a bot of some kind?

[SnowHill9902]

iPhone requires a phone registration no?

[sebastianconcpt]

Top G style.

[sebastianconcpt]

It's fascinating to see how the more downvotes he gets, the stronger the the expression of truth becomes evident.

[dancemethis]

Be happy they somehow think they have enough of your personal data and metadata.

[zamalek]

> I recently tried to make a separate work account in Discord.

You should explain this to your employer and not use a gaming communication platform for work purposes.

Matrix is trivial to self-host.

[huhtenberg]

HN needs a separate section for this sort of "media shaming" posts.

I understand why they are being made, but it's getting a bit tiring to see these on the front page so frequently.

[onion2k]

The answer is to promote these posts more, not less. Give services an incentive not to be stupid.

[blueflow]

At some point it just makes HN worse. People shouldn't use discord at all if its that bad.

[nosianu]

And to achieve that - you need to inform as many people as possible, no?

[blueflow]

Be consequential and quit if discord is that bad. Its the companies job to produce a good service, not yours to beg them for it!

[MisterSandman]

It makes HN worse in your opinion. The fact that these posts get so much engagement shows that most people do enjoy these kinds of posts.

[blueflow]

Engagement does not imply joy. In this case, I'm annoyed that people just don't learn their lesson.

[p49k]

When it happens to you and this is the only way you can get access to some urgently-needed account, you'll be thankful HN didn't create a special category to push these down and make them less visible.

[chinathrow]

> I understand why they are being made, but it's getting a bit tiring to see these on the front page so frequently.

It's getting a bit tiring to see that these large corporations still can't figure it out on how to treat your user base regarding de-platforming.

[bruce343434]

This is barely "hacker" and definitely not "news".

[Rathseg]

Actually, I would consider it news. I learned something new as I have considered making a second discord account, one personal, one for more professional things since orgs seem to be picking it. I only have one phone number and and now know not to use it for both if they ever ask for it. I also learned that they may ask for your phone number and lock you out for no reason if you refuse to give it them even if you already have an account(I have yet to give them my phone number). This lets me know to be even less trusting of them and to make sure I don't depend on anything from their service.

[naasking]

Hackers build these platforms. It's important for them to see and understand the common failure modes.