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Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone

Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone retarded and a mod doesn't step in, that is considered hateful. Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Then saying that only retards buy the shit hedgefunds are peddling would also be considered discriminatory. I'm tired of this fucking bullshit and ready to go thru as many proxy accounts as needed to get my point across. Discord needs to go out of business or grow some balls. Everything in this world could be construed into being hateful or discriminatory if you stretch enough.

6nf 6y ago
I don't agree with the way you get your point across but I support your right to get your point across this way.
- ace_of_spades 6y ago
  I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?
  - Teever 6y ago
    “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides. If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.
    - ace_of_spades 6y ago
      I mean, you do have a point. Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal. But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet. And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?
      - ttt0 6y ago
        > Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.
        ace_of_spades 6y ago
        I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle. In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see. All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.
        6y ago
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ttt0 6y ago
    Slowly, but surely, more and more words are being chipped away from the definition of free speech. Putting the free speech thing aside, the problem here is that it can and it is being used as a pretext to silence the dissidents and the opposition.
    - ace_of_spades 6y ago
      So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition. And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony. The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).
      - ttt0 6y ago
        > So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people. > If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there. > More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive. > The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to. School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions. Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    > This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Sure, but I also support the mods’ right to ban them for getting their point across this way. Deplatforming is itself guaranteed by freedom of speech.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    They banned everyone, not just a few users. Imagine if HN’s host killed all of HN because someone used the “r word” and it wasn’t removed.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Yes, that's freedom of speech. You can criticize the decision, but it's their decision to make.
      - oxford_comma 6y ago
        In this very thread you can find discussion on what makes a public forum a public forum.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > Yes, that's freedom of speech. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Censorship is Freedom of Speech.
        jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "I demand that you refrain from exercising your full range of free speech so that I feel more comfortable exercising mine."
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        "Si vis pacem, para bellum." "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." "What you don't know can't hurt you." You're only making the case that it does fit.
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  I do not. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Uh, since we’re talking about intolerance... you should be careful how you wield Popper, you might even realize you’ve become your own enemy
  - MrStonedOne 6y ago
    Since we are linking to wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym I read in a circular delivered by the express that sometimes words express different meanings then the mean read of the word.
  - dalmo3 6y ago
    Heh, two weeks ago people on HN were citing the the paradox of tolerance to promote anti-free-speech.
nextlevelwizard 6y ago
Problem is there are no competitors worth mentioning.
- sneakernets 6y ago
  There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it. And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I'm not a user of screencast, but I don't remember aim having that. Am i wrong ?
    - sneakernets 6y ago
      I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it. There's not much left from that specific era.
  - nextlevelwizard 6y ago
    Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums. Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP. As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
agumonkey 6y ago
discord is filled with 'snowflakes' (apologies if that seems insulting) I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument. if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.
- sneakernets 6y ago
  I really think it's just the majority of Discord users being from everything but IRC. Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling. [1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
- px43 6y ago
  Discord is an app for kids to talk about playing video games. That's like being upset that you got banned for cussing someone out on Club Penguin. The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    should have read the fine print at the back of the box :) /quit
    - anilakar 6y ago
      Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content. In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users. I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).
oscribinn 6y ago
I'm going to get downvoted for this for sure, but man it's nice to see a hacker news commentator that actually has a pair.
- system2 6y ago
  I always get this 50+ years old super serious programmer men talking about serious things and us under 40 years olds cannot say anything without their approval. I guess I am not alone.
  - atoav 6y ago
    Huh? As someone under 40 I never remotwly had that feeling when talking to e.g. Unix greybeards or other programmers above 50. Some of their experiences and tricks are great to learn from, some of the stuff they complain abput has been solved for a decade but they don't know it yet. I think if everybody has the feeling that we can learn from each other, we profit more from our interactions.
- notRobot 6y ago
  ...they have "a pair" because they use words that as a society we've decided shouldn't be used because they're derogatory to a certain group of people?
  - oxford_comma 6y ago
    I understood GP as talking about what is in the 'overton window' or not. You and I may have qualms about saying retard but I've worked in industries where that is not the case. I've met people who would call an unprofitable VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client telling them what is or is not acceptable to say something I wouldn't say here.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    Society is not as monolithic as you think it is. "as a society we" for sure have not decided that these words should not be used or that they are derogatory. Maybe this is true for your circle of friends or for the communities that you enage in but it is not true for the wider world.
non-cotton 6y ago
Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.
- echelon 6y ago
  They made $120 million in revenue last year from selling Nitro custom user ids, emoji packs, etc.
  - richrichardsson 6y ago
    100 million MAUs can't be cheap to maintain. You're probably getting downvoted because revenue != profit.
    - echelon 6y ago
      They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle. I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts. It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    Revenue != profits
- anticensor 6y ago
  > ad-friendly discourse Discord has zero ads, FYI.
  - raziel2p 6y ago
    They still want to keep their reputation good (in the eyes of potential advertisers) if/when they want to add it in the future.
swiley 6y ago
This is what everyone on discord gets for using an app like this. We all warned you years ago when you moved to it. Mailing lists for slow stuff and IRC for throw away realtime chats.
- CodeArtisan 6y ago
  There is ##wallstreetbets on freenode but has only around 30 connected users.
- vasama 6y ago
  Some people care about UX.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    Some people care about freedom.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Then find/write a mail client with good UX. If you have too much ADHD there's delta chat.
- Tepix 6y ago
  > This is what everyone on discord gets A ban for a channel that for after repeated warnings still is full of insults, threats and abusive language? Bravo!
jakelazaroff 6y ago
It’s very easy to make this point without using slurs yourself.
calpaterson 6y ago
The problem for you is that you can make the exactly same argument without the words that people object to and it will upset no one and lie unmoderated. You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ziftface 6y ago
  I'm not convinced. I think that gives discord and others an easy excuse to censor people or communities they don't want on their platform, but I just don't buy that their real objection was rudeness. This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  > You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion. They aren't. I'm in like three different Discords and retard is just another common word. Why aren't they policed/banned over using retard?
ohyes 6y ago
Get your point across without stomping a category of disabled person and making me think you're an immature shit-for-brains who I don't want to associate with. You act like your dictionary definition of the word 'retard' is some brilliant insight. It's garbage. Everyone, everywhere, would be better off without the 'content' that you're providing. You have the right to say whatever you want and I have the right to throw you out of my house for it. Don't complain about the 'PC police' when the truth is that no one is interested in unoriginal arguments made poorly. Grow up.
- threevox 6y ago
  Fuck off dude, your argument here is nothing better than an ad hominem despite you claiming the supposed intellectual high ground. Discord is cowardly and aggressively normative and so are you
  - dang 6y ago
    We ban accounts that post like this. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN. You may not feel that you owe the person you're arguing with any better, but you definitely owe this community better—much better—if you're participating here. Your account has already done this more than once, as well as posting unsubstantively and baitingly in other ways. That's a poor track record for only 11 comments. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. On HN we want thoughtful, curious conversation. Bashing each other like this is obviously at the far extreme from that. No more of this, please.
- 14u2c 6y ago
  Is this not the classic problem with all censorship? Of course the majority (and I) would agree that the language used is not productive, but the question of whether something should be allowed, despite its "goodness" (or lack there of), is much more nuanced. I think an argument can be made that the definition of a public forum has changed.
  - 6y ago
offby37years 6y ago
Hate speech has been wilfully misconstrued to mean speech you hate.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Censorship always serves those with the power to censor.
pensatoio 6y ago
I agree. 100%
retardfromwsb 6y ago
We are calling ourselfs retards in /r/wallstreetbets that alone would be instaban anywhere.
newswasboring 6y ago
> Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. All curse words are in the dictionary. Dictionaries are for looking up meaning, not moral arbiters. What are you on about?
- jjcon 6y ago
  I think they mean it is in the dictionary as meaning idiotic person, not just a disabled person.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    Presence in a dictionary doesn't mean it's not hateful though.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- WA 6y ago
  I agree. Small nitpick: retard in WSB context is not entirely an insult. You can swap letters and come up with trader. It’s WSBs special way of saying you belong to it’s retail trader group that does stupid bets.
  - elliotec 6y ago
    Yeah this is just bastardized internet dialect. The word's increasing offensiveness (for good reason of course) in most of the rest of the English speaking world isn't reflected in WSB using it as a term of endearment. I call my dogs and cat the cutest shithead fuckers all the time while feeding them off my plate, sounds bad in public but in my house with my little group it's, well, pet names.
  - nindalf 6y ago
    This is really important context. WSB traders use words that some would consider offensive in an affectionate way. “Degenerate gambling addict” sounds terrible but it’s a compliment there. Criticising people’s language without their context reminds me of Americans getting upset when they hear Spanish speakers say the word “black”.
jhanschoo 6y ago
Considering that Discord has a lot of gaming communities with underaged people, I can see the need for heavy moderation wrt language that tend to be used for cyberbullying. Whether or not just deleting the server is a good idea I disagree.
nathias 6y ago
yes, soon all the pejoratives that I can use to describe a person believing in language policing will be banned...
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  The phrase 'language policing' will be offensive. Thoughtcrime!
montagg 6y ago
I’d really like to underhand this: Why should you be allowed to be an asshole anywhere you want? And why should everyone else support that idea?
- toxik 6y ago
  The WSB community calls each other a bunch of names as a form of... I don’t know, acceptance? It’s not meant to hurt. It’s a David versus Goliath mentality, the little guy, the underdog. That’s why they call each other these names. I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.
monadic3 6y ago
> Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Many slurs are in dictionaries. This doesn't change the fact that there are people who don't accept this usage. The dictionary is a way to distract from your anti-social behavior.
aSockPuppeteer 6y ago
The discord was terribly moderated long ago. Apparently nothing changed but maybe a few more rules and auto mutes. I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say. If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages. Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium
eznzt 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I hope this means people go back to IRC instead of using centralised services run by retards.

6nf 6y ago

I don't agree with the way you get your point across but I support your right to get your point across this way.

ace_of_spades 6y ago
I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?
- Teever 6y ago
  “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides. If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.
  - ace_of_spades 6y ago
    I mean, you do have a point. Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal. But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet. And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?
    - ttt0 6y ago
      > Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.
      - ace_of_spades 6y ago
        I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle. In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see. All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.
        6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ttt0 6y ago
  Slowly, but surely, more and more words are being chipped away from the definition of free speech. Putting the free speech thing aside, the problem here is that it can and it is being used as a pretext to silence the dissidents and the opposition.
  - ace_of_spades 6y ago
    So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition. And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony. The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).
    - ttt0 6y ago
      > So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people. > If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there. > More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive. > The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to. School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions. Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  > This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
Sure, but I also support the mods’ right to ban them for getting their point across this way. Deplatforming is itself guaranteed by freedom of speech.
- nostromo 6y ago
  They banned everyone, not just a few users. Imagine if HN’s host killed all of HN because someone used the “r word” and it wasn’t removed.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Yes, that's freedom of speech. You can criticize the decision, but it's their decision to make.
    - oxford_comma 6y ago
      In this very thread you can find discussion on what makes a public forum a public forum.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Yes, that's freedom of speech. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Censorship is Freedom of Speech.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "I demand that you refrain from exercising your full range of free speech so that I feel more comfortable exercising mine."
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        "Si vis pacem, para bellum." "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." "What you don't know can't hurt you." You're only making the case that it does fit.
h_anna_h 6y ago
I do not. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.
- eecc 6y ago
  Uh, since we’re talking about intolerance... you should be careful how you wield Popper, you might even realize you’ve become your own enemy
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  Since we are linking to wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym I read in a circular delivered by the express that sometimes words express different meanings then the mean read of the word.
- dalmo3 6y ago
  Heh, two weeks ago people on HN were citing the the paradox of tolerance to promote anti-free-speech.

nextlevelwizard 6y ago

Problem is there are no competitors worth mentioning.

sneakernets 6y ago
There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it. And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'm not a user of screencast, but I don't remember aim having that. Am i wrong ?
  - sneakernets 6y ago
    I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it. There's not much left from that specific era.
- nextlevelwizard 6y ago
  Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums. Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP. As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.
eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago

discord is filled with 'snowflakes' (apologies if that seems insulting) I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument. if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.

sneakernets 6y ago
I really think it's just the majority of Discord users being from everything but IRC. Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling. [1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
px43 6y ago
Discord is an app for kids to talk about playing video games. That's like being upset that you got banned for cussing someone out on Club Penguin. The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  should have read the fine print at the back of the box :) /quit
  - anilakar 6y ago
    Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content. In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users. I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).

oscribinn 6y ago

I'm going to get downvoted for this for sure, but man it's nice to see a hacker news commentator that actually has a pair.

system2 6y ago
I always get this 50+ years old super serious programmer men talking about serious things and us under 40 years olds cannot say anything without their approval. I guess I am not alone.
- atoav 6y ago
  Huh? As someone under 40 I never remotwly had that feeling when talking to e.g. Unix greybeards or other programmers above 50. Some of their experiences and tricks are great to learn from, some of the stuff they complain abput has been solved for a decade but they don't know it yet. I think if everybody has the feeling that we can learn from each other, we profit more from our interactions.
notRobot 6y ago
...they have "a pair" because they use words that as a society we've decided shouldn't be used because they're derogatory to a certain group of people?
- oxford_comma 6y ago
  I understood GP as talking about what is in the 'overton window' or not. You and I may have qualms about saying retard but I've worked in industries where that is not the case. I've met people who would call an unprofitable VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client telling them what is or is not acceptable to say something I wouldn't say here.
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  Society is not as monolithic as you think it is. "as a society we" for sure have not decided that these words should not be used or that they are derogatory. Maybe this is true for your circle of friends or for the communities that you enage in but it is not true for the wider world.

non-cotton 6y ago

Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.

echelon 6y ago
They made $120 million in revenue last year from selling Nitro custom user ids, emoji packs, etc.
- richrichardsson 6y ago
  100 million MAUs can't be cheap to maintain. You're probably getting downvoted because revenue != profit.
  - echelon 6y ago
    They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle. I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts. It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
- christophilus 6y ago
  Revenue != profits
anticensor 6y ago
> ad-friendly discourse Discord has zero ads, FYI.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  They still want to keep their reputation good (in the eyes of potential advertisers) if/when they want to add it in the future.

swiley 6y ago

This is what everyone on discord gets for using an app like this. We all warned you years ago when you moved to it. Mailing lists for slow stuff and IRC for throw away realtime chats.

CodeArtisan 6y ago
There is ##wallstreetbets on freenode but has only around 30 connected users.
vasama 6y ago
Some people care about UX.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Some people care about freedom.
- swiley 6y ago
  Then find/write a mail client with good UX. If you have too much ADHD there's delta chat.
Tepix 6y ago
> This is what everyone on discord gets A ban for a channel that for after repeated warnings still is full of insults, threats and abusive language? Bravo!

jakelazaroff 6y ago

It’s very easy to make this point without using slurs yourself.

calpaterson 6y ago

The problem for you is that you can make the exactly same argument without the words that people object to and it will upset no one and lie unmoderated. You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ziftface 6y ago
I'm not convinced. I think that gives discord and others an easy excuse to censor people or communities they don't want on their platform, but I just don't buy that their real objection was rudeness. This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.
Ygg2 6y ago
> You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion. They aren't. I'm in like three different Discords and retard is just another common word. Why aren't they policed/banned over using retard?

ohyes 6y ago

Get your point across without stomping a category of disabled person and making me think you're an immature shit-for-brains who I don't want to associate with. You act like your dictionary definition of the word 'retard' is some brilliant insight. It's garbage. Everyone, everywhere, would be better off without the 'content' that you're providing. You have the right to say whatever you want and I have the right to throw you out of my house for it. Don't complain about the 'PC police' when the truth is that no one is interested in unoriginal arguments made poorly. Grow up.

threevox 6y ago
Fuck off dude, your argument here is nothing better than an ad hominem despite you claiming the supposed intellectual high ground. Discord is cowardly and aggressively normative and so are you
- dang 6y ago
  We ban accounts that post like this. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN. You may not feel that you owe the person you're arguing with any better, but you definitely owe this community better—much better—if you're participating here. Your account has already done this more than once, as well as posting unsubstantively and baitingly in other ways. That's a poor track record for only 11 comments. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. On HN we want thoughtful, curious conversation. Bashing each other like this is obviously at the far extreme from that. No more of this, please.
14u2c 6y ago
Is this not the classic problem with all censorship? Of course the majority (and I) would agree that the language used is not productive, but the question of whether something should be allowed, despite its "goodness" (or lack there of), is much more nuanced. I think an argument can be made that the definition of a public forum has changed.
- 6y ago

offby37years 6y ago

Hate speech has been wilfully misconstrued to mean speech you hate.

barry-cotter 6y ago
Censorship always serves those with the power to censor.

pensatoio 6y ago

I agree. 100%

retardfromwsb 6y ago

We are calling ourselfs retards in /r/wallstreetbets that alone would be instaban anywhere.

newswasboring 6y ago

> Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. All curse words are in the dictionary. Dictionaries are for looking up meaning, not moral arbiters. What are you on about?

jjcon 6y ago
I think they mean it is in the dictionary as meaning idiotic person, not just a disabled person.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Presence in a dictionary doesn't mean it's not hateful though.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
WA 6y ago
I agree. Small nitpick: retard in WSB context is not entirely an insult. You can swap letters and come up with trader. It’s WSBs special way of saying you belong to it’s retail trader group that does stupid bets.
- elliotec 6y ago
  Yeah this is just bastardized internet dialect. The word's increasing offensiveness (for good reason of course) in most of the rest of the English speaking world isn't reflected in WSB using it as a term of endearment. I call my dogs and cat the cutest shithead fuckers all the time while feeding them off my plate, sounds bad in public but in my house with my little group it's, well, pet names.
- nindalf 6y ago
  This is really important context. WSB traders use words that some would consider offensive in an affectionate way. “Degenerate gambling addict” sounds terrible but it’s a compliment there. Criticising people’s language without their context reminds me of Americans getting upset when they hear Spanish speakers say the word “black”.

jhanschoo 6y ago

Considering that Discord has a lot of gaming communities with underaged people, I can see the need for heavy moderation wrt language that tend to be used for cyberbullying. Whether or not just deleting the server is a good idea I disagree.

nathias 6y ago

yes, soon all the pejoratives that I can use to describe a person believing in language policing will be banned...

nickthemagicman 6y ago
The phrase 'language policing' will be offensive. Thoughtcrime!

montagg 6y ago

I’d really like to underhand this: Why should you be allowed to be an asshole anywhere you want? And why should everyone else support that idea?

toxik 6y ago
The WSB community calls each other a bunch of names as a form of... I don’t know, acceptance? It’s not meant to hurt. It’s a David versus Goliath mentality, the little guy, the underdog. That’s why they call each other these names. I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.

monadic3 6y ago

> Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Many slurs are in dictionaries. This doesn't change the fact that there are people who don't accept this usage. The dictionary is a way to distract from your anti-social behavior.

aSockPuppeteer 6y ago

The discord was terribly moderated long ago. Apparently nothing changed but maybe a few more rules and auto mutes. I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say. If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages. Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium

eznzt 6y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I hope this means people go back to IRC instead of using centralised services run by retards.