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> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. >Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules

> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. >Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship. I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.

privateSFacct 7y ago
And for many not being dictated too about what is acceptable might be another feature. I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted. Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well). He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
ncmncm 7y ago
Surveillance is always, ultimately, about extortion. People are forced to do what they would not for many reasons besides risk of criminal prosecution.
superkuh 7y ago
Discord is a bad decision for security reasons, for privacy reasons, reliability, and for ethical reasons. it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_discord_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis... In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response). Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
- crgwbr 7y ago
  > They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() And that is why you encrypt your SSH keys with a passphrase, use a Keychain, etc. Discord isn’t unique in its ability to read file on the FS. Pretty much anything can do that.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    Does that really help much? It still has access to .bash_profile
    - crgwbr 7y ago
      What secrets are you putting in your bash profile? I used to be guilty of putting AWS keys in there, I guess, but nowadays we have aws-vault.
      - ubercow13 7y ago
        For example it could register a fake ssh-agent that just grabs your password first time you type it
  - clarry 7y ago
    > Pretty much anything can do that. Nah, pretty much anything except proprietary software has a higher chance of being written by people I trust and packaged by people I trust and probably audited by me and other people, and is not capable of loading executable code from any server after installation.
- drngdds 7y ago
  Most programs can download new code and open whatever files they want as long as their process has the permissions. You can certainly argue that that shouldn't be the case, but calling Discord a RAT because of it is pretty silly. (Not defending it on the other counts, though. If I wanted a platform for anything controversial or privacy-sensitive, I wouldn't trust Discord or any other centralized, unencrypted service.)
_bxg1 7y ago
Yeah, this whole posts reads as paranoid rantings. We're not talking about communications between journalists and sources, we're talking about projects whose express purpose is to be open and public. The only actual connection between FOSS projects and the use of secret communication channels is the author's general ethos of distrust.
- keb_ 7y ago
  Being concerned with or principled about privacy is not "being paranoid." Frankly, it's kind of creepy that someone would equate the two.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Seeing a sentence like: > You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. in a post about [checks notes] FOSS software development, puts things in a certain light. FWIW I'm privacy-conscious myself. If the author had just made a general effort to point out the privacy implications of using Discord, that would be one thing. Instead he made a contrived effort to connect it to FOSS development - arguably one of the least-private activities one might be doing online - and then went on to call Discord altogether "unacceptable", instead of just saying "don't assume that what you say on Discord is private".
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Agreed, and that part (regarding ratting on the cops) is a bad argument. In any public chat, anyone can log. People log in IRC as well. As can servers. E2E encryption makes little sense there. If you do FOSS development, you might actually prefer to know the realnames of the people you develop with. You might want to (temporary) log chats between developers, to read them later. Surely, Mattermost and Discourse allow this as well. Also, Slack is barely mentioned in the article, while I'd say the same argument counts for Slack (but perhaps worse). The alternatives (Discourse, Mattermost, and Mumble), are three, which all 3 would replace Discord. But not on their own...
      - 7y ago
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL. And a lot of projects have codes of conduct explicitly to prohibit participants from mocking and ridiculing others, in fact. (As a note, I refuse to install the actual Discord client on my PC, because it's default behavior includes "detecting" accounts you can link on other software on your PC. Aka, it, by default, noses around in other apps on your PC for data.)
- sneak 7y ago
  > The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL. You can use it via tor, so it can’t access a persistent record of your location history, as Discord can. The public logget doesn’t log DMs. Likely, anyone can join without being forced to give up PII. As for the CoCs, that’s a good thing! That’s the right way to do it. Demanding that your users enter into an absurd legal agreement with a third party to be able to participate is not.
- steeleduncan 7y ago
  Regarding what you mention about Discord nosing around - is there any easy way of launching an app in a sandboxed environment on Windows to stop this sort of thing? For software that works under wine, I guess it wouldn't be too hard to simply set a wineprefix and do it like that, but that is a bit of a hack, and wouldn't work with a lot of software.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    There's actually a new feature for this! https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windows-10-may-2019-update https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windo... However, I use Virtualbox and/or VMware Player a lot, and Hyper-V doesn't play well with others, so I can't use any features of Windows that depend on Hyper-V virtualization. I personally use a UWP app that embeds Discord's web interface. It's surprisingly serviceable.
  - 7y ago
dleslie 7y ago
Indeed, it's not censorship this author dislikes, it's social repercussions for anti-social behaviour that they dislike.
- sneak 7y ago
  Entirely false. I have been blocked from participating in these groups not by humans, but by machines, before I had the opportunity to engage in any behavior. I haven’t even had the ability to participate whilst maintaining my location privacy. In retrospect, I should not have included that portion of the essay. It was used as an example of why demanding users agree to an unreasonable legal agreement that demands they give up basic rights is not a good hoop to make them jump through, not a defense of that sort of behavior. I thought that part was clear but I guess it wasn’t.
- 29083011397778 7y ago
  If we have the tools to do better, why shouldn't we do things a better way? One-way surveillance is never a good thing, so why settle for it?
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  anti-social behaviour can be anything. A few years back it was homosexual sex. Anti-social behaviour simply means "things that most people disprove" - which includes all kinds of victimless crimes. Even worse, this specific case is not based on "things that most people disprove" but more like "things that this company does not want you to say". Do you think that a 3rd party should be able to judge and ban you at will for something that you say in a group chat when everyone else in said group chat is fine with it? I presume that the author of the article is not fine with it, which is why they suggest to avoid discord. What would you do in their place?
  - favorited 7y ago
    > Do you think that a 3rd party should be able to judge and ban you at will for something that you say in a group chat when everyone else in said group chat is fine with it? Yes. If I were running Discord and learned that there was some Klan group advocating hate against black people, I'd shut it down – even if everyone in that chat was fine with the discussion. It wouldn't be beneficial to me to have my platform be a host for that content, and it's not beneficial to society for me to facilitate hateful people easily connecting with each other.
mumblemumble 7y ago
I'm inclined to agree, but it's also true that the key distinction between open source and Free Software is ideological. And identifying strongly with Free Software over open source tends to go along with an ideological distrust of governments, corporations, or both. For reasons that are reasonable, if not universally agreed upon. IOW, it's not necessarily because I think Discord is actually going to tell Joseph McCarthy how often I pick my nose. (You'd be amazed how rarely I manage to work that into group chat conversations about code style, anyway.) It's more the principle of the thing.
sneak 7y ago
Any chat tool that has DMs and has people who are friends using it will have discussion of illegal activity eventually. It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day. Nobody is immune from this. Simply talking about your day with a friend in DMs that are logged/unencrypted is dangerous. The part about ridicule/mocking is an example of why Discord’s legal agreement is unreasonable, not advocating for the ability to mock or ridicule people. The tools should not enforce censorship.
- hellotomyrars 7y ago
  `It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day.` [citation needed]
  - delecti 7y ago
    It's from a semi-popular book [1]. The author admits it's not a precise studied value; for some people it's likely much higher [2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-ebook/dp/B00505UZ4G https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-eb... [2] http://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-today-an-interview-with-harvey-silverglate/ http://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-toda...
  - xenophonf 7y ago
    It comes from this book about prosecutorial overreach: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp... It's not without its criticisms: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-average-american-unwittingly-commit-three-felonies-a-day https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-...
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day. It has also been estimated that the above statement is poppycock (just now.)
zpallin 7y ago
That's sorta how I felt. The article has plenty of valid reasons not to use discord, but it's somewhat of a ridiculous idea that we should not just expect but protect people who practice illegal and toxic behaviors in our chats. I just feel like saying this here: I don't find that censorship itself is a problem. Self-censorship, for example, is generally not problematic, and everyone does it. A great example of voluntary self-censorship is with swearing -- it's not illegal to swear in public, but most people choose not to do it. That's not to say self-censorship is always problematic, but simply that it is not inherently oppressive. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do. However, in larger group contexts, censorship earns legitimacy when it is agreed upon by those who are participating in that group. If a group of people agree to not swear in the context of their organization, then by all means it is fair for them to censor. In broader forms of censorship, such as the example of FOSS projects censoring toxic and illegal behaviors, as long as it is decided democratically, then it's absolutely a feature and not a bug.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  I suppose the project can do this censorship if they want to (although I should think usually it should be avoided), but then that project should do it themself, rather than Discord or someone else.
  - zpallin 7y ago
    Absolutely agreed, although technically a project group could democratically decide they are willing to accept discord's censorship standards. I don't think this decision should be made lightly, but it's okay if the group decides it.
blendergeek 7y ago
I don't think you understand at all. The author is saying the platform (discord) should not be censoring communication. Different open source projects have different community standards. Discord doesn't and shouldn't write them for us. If a specific open source project wants to moderate their communication systems, all the alternatives promoted in the article allow this.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Discord, a private company that does not enjoy any sort of common carrier status, may not have any obligation to make up its own rules, but it also doesn't have any obligation not to make up its own rules.
  - blendergeek 7y ago
    It is under no legal obligation. The authorvis arguing that it has a moral obligation not to censor. Everything you say about 'common carrier' and 'private company' is only relevant to legal, not moral arguments. The author of the paper is arguing that open source projects SHOULD use something other than Discord because Discord is censoring when they SHOULD not. The author brings up no legal arguments.
    - mumblemumble 7y ago
      And I'm saying it has no moral obligation not to censor, either. As a private organization, by default, they get the right to set their own standards of conduct. In the USA, at least, the law adds some restrictions in how this can be done, but only in limited ways. I honestly have a hard time seeing eye to eye with the idea that private organizations have to let users of their platforms do whatever they want. It strikes me as representing a rather solipsistic concept of freedom. One could argue that the specific restrictions Discord is making are shitty. It certainly sounds to me like they are, and one could then mount an argument that people should steer clear of them because they are acting shitty. But doing shitty things is not necessarily the same thing as violating a moral obligation.
el_cujo 7y ago
I tend to agree, but I also think this borders on a "think of the children!" type argument that's led to our current privacy ecosystem (the patriot act, snowden, etc.). No I'm not suggesting some silly video game chat app clamping down on trolls is some sort of dramatic slippery slope into an authoritarian state, but I do think it's interesting that the "I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" attitude has even become popular on HN.

privateSFacct 7y ago

And for many not being dictated too about what is acceptable might be another feature. I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted. Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well). He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.

ncmncm 7y ago

Surveillance is always, ultimately, about extortion. People are forced to do what they would not for many reasons besides risk of criminal prosecution.

superkuh 7y ago

Discord is a bad decision for security reasons, for privacy reasons, reliability, and for ethical reasons. it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_discord_banned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis... In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response). Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).

crgwbr 7y ago
> They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() And that is why you encrypt your SSH keys with a passphrase, use a Keychain, etc. Discord isn’t unique in its ability to read file on the FS. Pretty much anything can do that.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Does that really help much? It still has access to .bash_profile
  - crgwbr 7y ago
    What secrets are you putting in your bash profile? I used to be guilty of putting AWS keys in there, I guess, but nowadays we have aws-vault.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      For example it could register a fake ssh-agent that just grabs your password first time you type it
- clarry 7y ago
  > Pretty much anything can do that. Nah, pretty much anything except proprietary software has a higher chance of being written by people I trust and packaged by people I trust and probably audited by me and other people, and is not capable of loading executable code from any server after installation.
drngdds 7y ago
Most programs can download new code and open whatever files they want as long as their process has the permissions. You can certainly argue that that shouldn't be the case, but calling Discord a RAT because of it is pretty silly. (Not defending it on the other counts, though. If I wanted a platform for anything controversial or privacy-sensitive, I wouldn't trust Discord or any other centralized, unencrypted service.)

_bxg1 7y ago

Yeah, this whole posts reads as paranoid rantings. We're not talking about communications between journalists and sources, we're talking about projects whose express purpose is to be open and public. The only actual connection between FOSS projects and the use of secret communication channels is the author's general ethos of distrust.

keb_ 7y ago
Being concerned with or principled about privacy is not "being paranoid." Frankly, it's kind of creepy that someone would equate the two.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Seeing a sentence like: > You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops. in a post about [checks notes] FOSS software development, puts things in a certain light. FWIW I'm privacy-conscious myself. If the author had just made a general effort to point out the privacy implications of using Discord, that would be one thing. Instead he made a contrived effort to connect it to FOSS development - arguably one of the least-private activities one might be doing online - and then went on to call Discord altogether "unacceptable", instead of just saying "don't assume that what you say on Discord is private".
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Agreed, and that part (regarding ratting on the cops) is a bad argument. In any public chat, anyone can log. People log in IRC as well. As can servers. E2E encryption makes little sense there. If you do FOSS development, you might actually prefer to know the realnames of the people you develop with. You might want to (temporary) log chats between developers, to read them later. Surely, Mattermost and Discourse allow this as well. Also, Slack is barely mentioned in the article, while I'd say the same argument counts for Slack (but perhaps worse). The alternatives (Discourse, Mattermost, and Mumble), are three, which all 3 would replace Discord. But not on their own...
    - 7y ago

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL. And a lot of projects have codes of conduct explicitly to prohibit participants from mocking and ridiculing others, in fact. (As a note, I refuse to install the actual Discord client on my PC, because it's default behavior includes "detecting" accounts you can link on other software on your PC. Aka, it, by default, noses around in other apps on your PC for data.)

sneak 7y ago
> The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL. You can use it via tor, so it can’t access a persistent record of your location history, as Discord can. The public logget doesn’t log DMs. Likely, anyone can join without being forced to give up PII. As for the CoCs, that’s a good thing! That’s the right way to do it. Demanding that your users enter into an absurd legal agreement with a third party to be able to participate is not.
steeleduncan 7y ago
Regarding what you mention about Discord nosing around - is there any easy way of launching an app in a sandboxed environment on Windows to stop this sort of thing? For software that works under wine, I guess it wouldn't be too hard to simply set a wineprefix and do it like that, but that is a bit of a hack, and wouldn't work with a lot of software.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  There's actually a new feature for this! https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windows-10-may-2019-update https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-windows-sandbox-windo... However, I use Virtualbox and/or VMware Player a lot, and Hyper-V doesn't play well with others, so I can't use any features of Windows that depend on Hyper-V virtualization. I personally use a UWP app that embeds Discord's web interface. It's surprisingly serviceable.
- 7y ago

dleslie 7y ago

Indeed, it's not censorship this author dislikes, it's social repercussions for anti-social behaviour that they dislike.

sneak 7y ago
Entirely false. I have been blocked from participating in these groups not by humans, but by machines, before I had the opportunity to engage in any behavior. I haven’t even had the ability to participate whilst maintaining my location privacy. In retrospect, I should not have included that portion of the essay. It was used as an example of why demanding users agree to an unreasonable legal agreement that demands they give up basic rights is not a good hoop to make them jump through, not a defense of that sort of behavior. I thought that part was clear but I guess it wasn’t.
29083011397778 7y ago
If we have the tools to do better, why shouldn't we do things a better way? One-way surveillance is never a good thing, so why settle for it?
dependenttypes 7y ago
anti-social behaviour can be anything. A few years back it was homosexual sex. Anti-social behaviour simply means "things that most people disprove" - which includes all kinds of victimless crimes. Even worse, this specific case is not based on "things that most people disprove" but more like "things that this company does not want you to say". Do you think that a 3rd party should be able to judge and ban you at will for something that you say in a group chat when everyone else in said group chat is fine with it? I presume that the author of the article is not fine with it, which is why they suggest to avoid discord. What would you do in their place?
- favorited 7y ago
  > Do you think that a 3rd party should be able to judge and ban you at will for something that you say in a group chat when everyone else in said group chat is fine with it? Yes. If I were running Discord and learned that there was some Klan group advocating hate against black people, I'd shut it down – even if everyone in that chat was fine with the discussion. It wouldn't be beneficial to me to have my platform be a host for that content, and it's not beneficial to society for me to facilitate hateful people easily connecting with each other.

mumblemumble 7y ago

I'm inclined to agree, but it's also true that the key distinction between open source and Free Software is ideological. And identifying strongly with Free Software over open source tends to go along with an ideological distrust of governments, corporations, or both. For reasons that are reasonable, if not universally agreed upon. IOW, it's not necessarily because I think Discord is actually going to tell Joseph McCarthy how often I pick my nose. (You'd be amazed how rarely I manage to work that into group chat conversations about code style, anyway.) It's more the principle of the thing.

sneak 7y ago

Any chat tool that has DMs and has people who are friends using it will have discussion of illegal activity eventually. It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day. Nobody is immune from this. Simply talking about your day with a friend in DMs that are logged/unencrypted is dangerous. The part about ridicule/mocking is an example of why Discord’s legal agreement is unreasonable, not advocating for the ability to mock or ridicule people. The tools should not enforce censorship.

hellotomyrars 7y ago
`It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day.` [citation needed]
- delecti 7y ago
  It's from a semi-popular book [1]. The author admits it's not a precise studied value; for some people it's likely much higher [2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-ebook/dp/B00505UZ4G https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent-eb... [2] http://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-today-an-interview-with-harvey-silverglate/ http://ulrichboser.com/how-many-felonies-did-you-commit-toda...
- xenophonf 7y ago
  It comes from this book about prosecutorial overreach: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594032556 https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp... It's not without its criticisms: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-average-american-unwittingly-commit-three-felonies-a-day https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-...
EpicEng 7y ago
>It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day. It has also been estimated that the above statement is poppycock (just now.)

zpallin 7y ago

That's sorta how I felt. The article has plenty of valid reasons not to use discord, but it's somewhat of a ridiculous idea that we should not just expect but protect people who practice illegal and toxic behaviors in our chats. I just feel like saying this here: I don't find that censorship itself is a problem. Self-censorship, for example, is generally not problematic, and everyone does it. A great example of voluntary self-censorship is with swearing -- it's not illegal to swear in public, but most people choose not to do it. That's not to say self-censorship is always problematic, but simply that it is not inherently oppressive. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do. However, in larger group contexts, censorship earns legitimacy when it is agreed upon by those who are participating in that group. If a group of people agree to not swear in the context of their organization, then by all means it is fair for them to censor. In broader forms of censorship, such as the example of FOSS projects censoring toxic and illegal behaviors, as long as it is decided democratically, then it's absolutely a feature and not a bug.

zzo38computer 7y ago
I suppose the project can do this censorship if they want to (although I should think usually it should be avoided), but then that project should do it themself, rather than Discord or someone else.
- zpallin 7y ago
  Absolutely agreed, although technically a project group could democratically decide they are willing to accept discord's censorship standards. I don't think this decision should be made lightly, but it's okay if the group decides it.

blendergeek 7y ago

I don't think you understand at all. The author is saying the platform (discord) should not be censoring communication. Different open source projects have different community standards. Discord doesn't and shouldn't write them for us. If a specific open source project wants to moderate their communication systems, all the alternatives promoted in the article allow this.

mumblemumble 7y ago
Discord, a private company that does not enjoy any sort of common carrier status, may not have any obligation to make up its own rules, but it also doesn't have any obligation not to make up its own rules.
- blendergeek 7y ago
  It is under no legal obligation. The authorvis arguing that it has a moral obligation not to censor. Everything you say about 'common carrier' and 'private company' is only relevant to legal, not moral arguments. The author of the paper is arguing that open source projects SHOULD use something other than Discord because Discord is censoring when they SHOULD not. The author brings up no legal arguments.
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    And I'm saying it has no moral obligation not to censor, either. As a private organization, by default, they get the right to set their own standards of conduct. In the USA, at least, the law adds some restrictions in how this can be done, but only in limited ways. I honestly have a hard time seeing eye to eye with the idea that private organizations have to let users of their platforms do whatever they want. It strikes me as representing a rather solipsistic concept of freedom. One could argue that the specific restrictions Discord is making are shitty. It certainly sounds to me like they are, and one could then mount an argument that people should steer clear of them because they are acting shitty. But doing shitty things is not necessarily the same thing as violating a moral obligation.

el_cujo 7y ago

I tend to agree, but I also think this borders on a "think of the children!" type argument that's led to our current privacy ecosystem (the patriot act, snowden, etc.). No I'm not suggesting some silly video game chat app clamping down on trolls is some sort of dramatic slippery slope into an authoritarian state, but I do think it's interesting that the "I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" attitude has even become popular on HN.