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There's a lot to be said for low/nonexistent barrier to entry. But like any large platform, such success comes at a price. Discord is privacy-invasive and heavi

• slymon99 6y ago
  Multi billion dollar does not mean revenue, it means valuation, which discord has well surpassed [0]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-valuation-and-100m-for-a-sales-pitch-lighter-on-the-gaming/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/30/discord-now-has-a-3-5b-val...
  • branon 6y ago
    Ah, thanks, that makes much more sense.
• Kiro 6y ago
  Really unnecessary edit on an otherwise good comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
  • branon 6y ago
    Sorry, I've altered my edit to remove the explicit insinuation of astroturfing. I was just a little shocked when I finished my submission and saw the sameness of all the other comments.
    • Jweb_Guru 6y ago
      People here like Discord. We didn't carefully cultivate accounts for years and years just to blow them on some astroturfing campaign.
• elithrar 6y ago
  > Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same). IRC, the famously secure communications platform? [sorry, I couldn't help it: I loved IRC growing up, but something something glass houses?]
  • progval 6y ago
    Arguably on IRC you can use OTR (you need a secure medium to exchange a secret or fingerprints). Its usability is awful so barely anyone uses it, but at least you can.
    • eertami 6y ago
      But... surely you could then also use OTR on Discord?
      • lukeramsden 6y ago
        There was actually a plugin for BetterDiscord that did that that I used (probably 2 years ago now). Can't find it anymore, but it did exist and worked pretty well.
      • progval 6y ago
        Their official client doesn't support it. And using third-party clients is forbidden. https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_unofficial_native_discord_client_no/e1adbu5/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_... I guess you could do it with a browser extension, but they'll probably think you use a third-party client if they notice you're sending encrypted text.
  • kortilla 6y ago
    IRC isn’t a glass house when it comes to lack of a central censor/arbiter of the protocol.
    • lmm 6y ago
• stryan 6y ago
  > Discord is a running joke on comparatively less-frequented communication protocols like IRC (possibly just out of spite, but all the same). To be fair, most of those other communication protocols are running jokes outside of tech.
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    I want to like IRC. Discord is great for gaming or chatting with friends and random people casually, but certain IRC channels tend to have extremely knowledgeable, helpful people you can't find much elsewhere. But IRC clients are just so frustrating. Just today I open the IRC client on my phone and the IP I'm currently assigned is banned from one server? I also tend to have random connection issues to certain servers and trying to Google errors messages shows me forum posts 15 years old that are vague and not helpful in diagnosing the issue.
    • jdu9 6y ago
      You'd probably be better off by using a service like https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ If you can spare a few more minutes, hosting an IRC client on your own server would probably be the best choice. For example: ZNC (bouncer), WeeChat (relay -> app) or Quassel.
      • nexuist 6y ago
        This is the great irony, isn't it? You want to escape Discord, because it's centralized, so you jump to a decentralized service, whose user experience sucks, so you sign up for another centralized service, just so you can use the decentralized service that was supposed to get you away from centralization in the first place.
        • encom 6y ago
          IRC has a objectively better user experience, since I didn't have to dox myself to some shady corporation to start using it.
• livueta 6y ago
  >It is not a viable option for secure communication Security from whom? This seems like a textbook threat model problem, and one that I'm not sure how to address as a proponent of federated/decentralized services. I used to (and still kinda do, but times change) run IRC/TS3/Mumble servers for MMO guilds. At least in this specific MMO, DDoSing was a significant issue since gear was lost on death - an attacker finds a rich target, gets their IP somehow, fights them, knocks them offline, takes their stuff. Most/many IP leaks were via out-of-game communication services. Since a guild's Teamspeak is probably administered by a guild member, it is trivial to pull connection info on a given user. At this point in time, Skype was still largely p2p and it was fairly trivial to obtain the IP of a call participant, so it was also a big vector. There was an IRC network "for" the game, so the situation there was better than Skype+individual guild audio chats, but opers getting bribed to leak IPs was unfortunately common. All of this meant that when Discord showed up on the scene, a lot of people in this community went "finally, a communication service where I can both 1) talk to people I don't necessarily fully trust and 2) not have to go full perfect 100% of the time opsec to do it" and gratefully signed up. Anecdotally, this class of IP harvesting has gotten a lot rarer, largely thanks to Discord. Most of these people, despite often having some degree of technical sophistication, don't care about Discord privacy-invasion or censorship because it isn't in their threat model - they've got more immediate fish to fry. Should it be? It's easy for us to sit in our IRC ivory towers and say so, but I think having a communication service where your privacy isn't contingent on the local admin whose court you end up in being a good person is an obvious advantage of centralization. Of course, Discord isn't immune to issues of compromise (when you're the central point of a juicy system, attackers will try, as shown by Twitter's Saudi subversion thing and various other examples), but compromising a Discord employee is a higher bar than compromising the person running a 500-person IRC server out of their basement. Likewise, many of these sort of privacy issues in decentralized and/or federated services have technical mitigations, but not requiring technical mitigations is an advantage in and of itself. Anyway, that's how Discord was plausibly a security upgrade for many people I knew who switched to it from IRC/Mumble. I dislike closed, proprietary communication protocols as much as the next person, but I think we've got to treat server subversion/local corruption as a higher class of problem than it usually is treated as, though that gets into a lot of hard problems all the way down the stack.
• Jetrel 6y ago
  I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it's my number-one most hated software program in my life. Exceeding even the sins of Adobe and Microsoft. It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC. And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude). That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc. --- The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology. Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days). That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.
  • branon 6y ago
    Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS). I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client. Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
• caconym_ 6y ago
  > Discord is privacy-invasive and heavily censored. It is not a viable option for secure communication, but instead tends to be a great place for fluff. Apart from the bit about “secure communication”, which is obvious—Discord is proprietary software that doesn’t bill itself as security-focused—could you explain the basis for these judgments? I’ve been using it for years and I’ve never been censored, have never felt like my privacy was invaded, and far from being “a great place for fluff” it’s been (for me) a source of great happiness, connection with good friends old and new, and a godsend during the pandemic. If I were looking down on it from some Stallman-esque ivory tower, I imagine I’d have a lot more to complain about. But when I’m not in full-on tinfoil hat mode, it honestly seems like one of the least-worst offenders in the consumer-facing SaaS world today. I’d rather send somebody (my) nudes and SSN over Discord than bring one of those fucking “smart TVs” into my house, for instance.
  • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    The censorship angle is likely how discord shuts down servers used to organise gatherings that are borderline terrorism and servers used to share anime under age content. Its worlds away from china level where your DMs are being monitored for problematic keywords.