11 ms·

The Future of discord.py

493 points by AngelOnFira 5y ago

iratewizard 5y ago
Based purely on speculation and timing, this sort of stuff was probably brought up during gap analysis done by Microsoft when considering acquisition. Discord is not filled with the best and brightest engineers, but they've done a lot right. I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt and we should not treat them like they've always been a $15B company.
AngelOnFira 5y ago
tl;dr, Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022. So no more `!pause`, or whatever else you might normally type. And this change isn't easy to implement for Discord.py, and would require full bot rewrites for devs using the library. So along with a lot of other negligence towards bot developers from Discord, Discord.py's single developer has stepped down, and no other core library developers chose to step up.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- momothereal 5y ago
  > Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022 Can someone explain why that is? My understanding is that adding bots to a server requires Admin/Owner access, who are already at liberty to read all messages. If you don't trust bots scraping your messages in a server, don't you implicitely distrust the owners? Just leave the server?
  - Macha 5y ago
    I wonder if it's the real target here is bridges - without being able to relay messages (without ToS violating puppeting), it's going to get a lot harder to migrate users from discord.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Is there much use of giant bridge bots? I run a bridge but that's just one server.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      I doubt bridges are a threat. It's all about capturing revenue streams.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      I was using bridges to migrate to Discord, so… Guess I’m back to IRC.
    - Wingy 5y ago
      This sounds like you might be able to get Discord to approve your privileged intent
  - vore 5y ago
    There is a third party you have to implicitly trust, the bot developer. Given most of these bots are used to provide specific functionality, them being able to read messages seems too broad in scope – I know I don't want to have to trust another invisible party to also do the right thing. That said, this looks like very poor communication and imposition of a lot of developer toil on Discord's part.
    - huibf 5y ago
      They should allow server owners to choose whether every bot they have added can read every message or just /commands. But that would require too much intelligence on their part :P
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        That's already in the permissions system unless they did something weird to it.
        huibf 5y ago
        Then I don't understand what the problem is, really.
        judge2020 5y ago
        The problem is admins haphazardly adding tons of toy bots to servers with sometimes hundreds or thousands of members, and those bots being a front for storing tons of user data (including eg. user online status, user tag (name#1234) history, a large DB of the users' messages across years). The users in these servers aren't informed of such change and Discord can't trust these developers to say "we don't log messages" without requiring them tie a legal identity to any potential malicious logging.
        platz 5y ago
        This is an interesting comment and was totally missing from the OP's description of the issue; I had to dig into this tread to get it. If the OP fails to present or hide the full picture to me it harms his credibility.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    I remember a while back reading a thing where basically there were bots out there essentially scraping entire chat logs without its users really being aware of this. There's probably also a lot of stuff going around with identity (like people making bots that look like official ones but aren't) etc. I get people complaining about this situation, but there is a gradient of access between "no content access whatsoever" and "the bot can see everything". Slack's API does a pretty good job of making some of this work
  - Fabricio20 5y ago
    Yes. That is the case, and we (developers) argued that, the response we received was "but the _users_ may not know, even if the owner has authorized the bot".
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  WTF is a slash command?
  - K5EiS 5y ago
    /<command> as in /help or /rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Programs
smoldesu 5y ago
This is unfortunate, and while I do like Discord (enough to pay them $50/year), I hope transgressions like this drive more people to set up self-hosted places to hang out. Discord is responsible for driving a lot of innovation in the communication sector, and they'll always have a place for doing that: but it's going to be difficult for such a large company to keep the interests of their shareholders out of the business of their users.
- ve55 5y ago
  The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%, as unfortunate as it may be. Discord is definitely here to stay (and IMO will continue to do extremely well this decade - network effects are an amazingly strong force) as far as I can tell. Although I do think it's good news that they have a decent profit model, the future of the platform still may not be as bright as most of its users (who do not understand the business nor the data collected on them) may hope for.
  - panic 5y ago
    If there are 100 people in a server, only 1 of them needs to be able to set up a self-hosted instance to get the whole thing going. People do it all the time for Minecraft, for example. I think the problem is less the barrier to entry and more the fact that Discord is actually better than any self-hosted option available right now.
- stiltzkin 5y ago
  Is there any good self-hosted alternative to Discord?, the only good that comes to mind are rocket.chat and Matrix.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Fosscord is trying to do that: https://fosscord.com/ https://fosscord.com/
mastrsushi 5y ago
It will probably be rewritten, these python libraries that center around proprietary platforms are always a game of cat and mouse. Tweepy is a perfect example, although I don’t think they’ve halted.
mod50ack 5y ago
As someone who has used Discord for the past few years, it's kind of sad to see how dominant and arbitrary it's become. Gotta say I would prefer Matrix if the communities I participate in used it. It's gotten pretty far from the good old days of IRC --- which I'm quite aware is still alive! --- and that's both good and bad at times. But one of the biggest flaws is that it's not an open standard. (Interop is only done by prohibited programs like Ripcord!)
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  Be the change you want to see. Talk to your friends about Matrix, help run homeservers and help get folks running.
- bsder 5y ago
  In what way is Matrix not an open standard?
  - erk__ 5y ago
    As it is now it seems to be quite under control of New Vector, Ithe company behind element. And it's not a standard yet still just a specification.
    - Arathorn 5y ago
      Matrix is controlled by the Matrix.org Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation). The original team who created Matrix subsequently set up Element (New Vector) in order to fund Matrix work, but we very deliberately split Matrix into an independent foundation. Unsure what you mean by “not a standard” - all APIs of the Matrix spec have been successfully implemented at this point by indpependent developers: this makes it an open standard. Eventually, once the standard has reached maturity, we may try to contribute to W3C or IETF - or we might turn it into a dedicated standards body like W3C did for the Web.
      - erk__ 5y ago
akersten 5y ago
> When asking an innocent question to Mason, the Project Manager of the Bot & API team, about whether my bot could connect to the gateway without being verified, he responded rudely and called me a "martyr" with an unnecessarily threatening tone: Just wanted to say that I had a completely different read of Mason's response - without any other context, it seemed like he was joking around. "We won't ban you, y'know, unless you're into that kind of thing" style. Am I totally off base?
- plentyofjelly 5y ago
  'Happy to oblige however I can in the cause for a martyr' - just read this sentence in your head and tell me it doesn't sound like it's dripping with sarcasm
  - gzer0 5y ago
    No, it sounds quite serious to me actually. I don't joke around like that even with my friends.
    - plentyofjelly 5y ago
      we're not disagreeing here - I'm saying he's being sarcastic and rude. the tone of that message is patronising and it's just an unnecessary jab.
    - JoeQuery 5y ago
      Assuming you're not a jerk and you don't say jerk things, you wouldn't have said this jerk thing being quoted. So saying you wouldn't have said it doesn't change the meaning of what was said.
- npinsker 5y ago
  I wouldn't have personally said it -- saying he's looking to martyr himself could be read as insulting his judgment, as perhaps it was -- but I read it as a joke too.
- DetroitThrow 5y ago
ve55 5y ago
I'm always very thankful that we even have people that work so hard towards FOSS libraries to begin with. It must feel pretty bad to receive those responses from employees telling him about the things he should do that are 'um', 'easy' and 'dope' when there's clearly been many longstanding feature and communication issues already (as if being the person working on a FOSS library for no compensation in your spare time that empowers a company whose employees' are getting 7-8 figure exits within a few years wasn't already bad enough). My general pessimism with this situation is how proprietary everything has to be to begin with; the idea of a single company storing the full history of everyone's messages and interactions is already bad enough without them requiring the government ID of their users.
- ve55 5y ago
  I should add about the government ID part, that I understand why they do it. I've worked with anti-abuse in online ecosystems before, and I undertsand how difficult their challenges are at their scale, but it's nonetheless a pattern that I'm just tired of at this point. I'm tired of platforms asking me for my government-ID to allow me to use them. I'm tired of having every message I type 'privately' to someone being stored and owned by a company that has no obligation nor motive to treat it the way I'd want. I'm tired of being forced to 'log in' to services just to read important information (now being trialed by Twitter and Reddit as well!). Honestly I am just tired of having what feels like no rights or control whatsoever in the general online sense of my life, having to deal with and accept whichever new 'feature' or 'usage of my data to improve my experience' the products I 'choose' to use decide to rollout. I apologize for this turning into a such a rant, but this has been upsetting me a lot lately. I have this wonderful illusion of choice of which products I use, but the punishments I receive for trying to opt-out have become untenable in the last few years. I can't even pay my rent without using a finance app that scrapes and sells my transaction data (which app does this? almost all of them), let alone get help with free software when the answers to my questions are now all contained within Discord chat history which asks for my phone-number to join so that I may even search it, rather than on an openly-searchable forum. While I still am able to use the software I prefer like Signal, IRC, and Matrix with some of my unique technically-gifted friends, the network effects of having millions/billions of users and owning all of their data are a particularly strong force that I have not yet found a way to reckon with.
joncrane 5y ago
Knowing none of the background, that post was a wild ride. I can 100% relate to his feelings of futility while working really hard to try to make something great.
cfgghsj 5y ago
Meanwhile, I see fleets of user-bots happily chugging along under the radar hoovering up data. Just like the post author said: > the crux of malicious bots were, and still are, user-bots. Seems almost laughable that Discord is making hoops for legitimate bot developers to jump through while taking little action against user-bots. I suspect that Discord wants to get a chunk of the big money that game bot developers are making, and are pushing bot developers into a more rigid API that will eventually include in-app-purchases. The article author also said: > No longer will bots thrive with a sandbox limited only by your imagination, but instead Discord is now the sole gatekeeper of approved use cases. The future of Discord bots relies solely on the interaction system; things have to be explicitly written and supported by Discord employees
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I wonder if they are going to try to kill Mee6 and then offer its features to server owners for a fee.
  - ikiris 5y ago
    That's likely a major part of this is neutering the ability for any other service to do generic message functionality.
    - bozhark 5y ago
      fuck those that bought the lifetime package, eh?
      - ikiris 5y ago
        generally, yes.
- Kiro 5y ago
  What's a user-bot?
  - 5y ago
Waterluvian 5y ago
What I’m learning from reading these kinds of posts over the years: whenever possible, don’t let your passion have external dependencies.
ikiris 5y ago
Sounds like they're fixing (what discord considers) some major security issues in basic discord, but the project management is a disaster, and there are no stakeholders that care about api access actually working for developers. That doesn't sound fun.
akersten 5y ago
In case any Discord employees are reading this: please don't remove the ability for bots to read message_content , or make me jump through verification hoops either. Reading raw messages is absolutely crucial for moderation bots and, well, just about every other fun and interesting bot. I don't write discord bots so you can type a slash command to do a thing. That's boring. Good bots can read messages. Discord will be very "not dope" and "not cool" if bots are forced to become a sterilized pick-list of interaction options.
- w-ll 5y ago
  A better argument would be that "slash commands lack the same accessibility", than to say they are boring. I have many friends that use a variety of accessibility tools and well aware of how changes can really frustrate and block them from communicating.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The verification requirement is only for bots in over 100 servers. https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055-Message-Content-Access-Deprecation-for-Verified-Bots#:~:text=This%20change%20applies,guild%20member%20data https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028....
  - akersten 5y ago
    Reading that placates my concerns a little. The bot API community's reported morale deflation after the NDA-sealed meeting mentioned in the Gist kind of trounces it though. I've got a sinking feeling that the ultimate vision for this applies to all bots, and it's only "bots used in 100+ servers" for now. Time will tell, I hope I'm proven wrong. I hope that preemptively voicing my concerns helps keep the conversation going to make sure small bot authors aren't left in the dark.
    - piemadd 5y ago
      The thing is, you're probably right. Over time they've been restricting items for bots in over 100 servers. Right now its to see the users in the server and also to see the statuses of these users.
okdjnfweonfe 5y ago
Since he's stepping down, I hope he opens an avenue for donations. Watching some of the earlier drama as it was happening (fwiw only hinted at in the gist) was disheartening. I'm surprised that he managed to not only make it through 1 rewrite but almost make it through another, of a relatively complete codebase too. Even though unpaid in the programming field, very much a professional IMO.
nerdponx 5y ago
The arrogance of these corporate reps is incredible. They clearly do not care about supporting bot devs. Perhaps the goal is to kill the bot dev community in order to centralize it around Discord corporate, and then start putting more bot-related features behind Nitro and other subscription paywalls. Seems like a nasty way to go about it, but I can't imagine any other reason to behave this way towards a community of unpaid volunteers who add tremendous value to your platform. I think there's a lot of potential for a VC-funded startup to pour some cash into Matrix and then swoop in when the Discord ecosystem eventually starts falling apart.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Discord is likely burning a lot of money on servers & payroll. I would be surprised if they broke even in 2020 given their revenue numbers[0]. Why any VC would back an open source, modifiable project like Matrix just to compete with Discord's existing stranglehold on the market is beyond me. 0: > Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled. 0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-gamer-roots/#:~:text=Discord%20declined%20to%20share%20how%20many%20Nitro%20subscribers%20it%20has%2C%20but%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20reported%20that%20Discord%20generated%20%24130%20million%20in%20revenue%20last%20year%2C%20up%20from%20%2445%20million%20in%202019.%20In%20the%20same%20time%20period%2C%20its%20monthly%20user%20base%20doubled https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game...
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    With somewhere in the thousand plus range of employees they'd have to be spending a hundred million on servers. I'd sure hope costs aren't that high. I'm pretty sure I could host every discord server I'm on for the price of a nitro subscription. Edit: I mean, imgur has an estimated revenue of twelve million. Staple a hundred IRC servers on the side and you have most of discord's functionality accounted for. Unless the voice calls are really tough, and they're actually a streaming company by majority of expenses, where would the costs come from?
Matthias1 5y ago
Edit: Leaving this comment up, but my updated understanding is that Discord's policy change only effects bots >100 servers. So it's less applicable to the 'learning how to code' demographic. It seems to me like Discord has, for some reason, decided that small bots are a problem. Which is a bummer. I've been on Discord since 2016, in programming and academic circles, and the grassroots bot community has always been amazing. I'm in a server with 30 of friends, which has 4 bots made by members of the server. Something about the simplicity of listening for messages, parsing them how you want, and sending back text that shows up just like a user is really satisfying. I know it's been a motivation for many people who have little to no interest in programming anything else.
sergiotapia 5y ago
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1695103/128839762-7f7e6b9c-ef66-496b-ad69-5bd544ac78f0.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1695103/128839762-... Can you imagine such a tool to one of your customers like that? It seems unfathomable. Is Discord full of these types of people?
- nectarlife42 5y ago
  Seriously, these people are building value and contributing so much to the platform only for the project manager to turn around and treat them this way.. Embarrassing.
- meibo 5y ago
  Judging by my previous interactions with their engineering and "Trust & Safety" team, yes, this is generally how it goes. Working for Discord and getting that badge must give you quite the ego boost. Conversations with them feel very arbitrary and it's like they consider any word they say to you wasted - of course this doesn't have to apply to all of their staff, but it's certainly a pattern.
  - livueta 5y ago
    Incoming unsupported generalization: this is what happens when you mostly hire fanbois. I think (had a couple acquaintances move from hobby bot/gateway development to Discord employment) they source a lot of their team from people who were evangelists of some sort for the platform pre-employment. You also see it in gaming sometimes - OSRS comes to mind - where community members end up in community management/dev roles. There's something about that elevation from unwashed peon to One Of The Big Boys With A Forum Badge that really messes with the ego.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
I feel back for all the suckers that have invested time and money into the discord ecosystem. They are going to milk you dry. If you aren't in the know as to the intent of discord straight from the beginning, it's to build a freemium monopoly and then extort you for every penny they can get.
fabianhjr 5y ago
If one doesn't own a platform then one is at risk of being kicked out in the name of owners' (shareholders') profits. This is a recurring theme and I am puzzled that there isn't a bigger dev audience at internet of ownership ( https://ioo.coop/ https://ioo.coop/ ) or for platform cooperativism ( https://platform.coop/ https://platform.coop/ )
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  I'm sure devs would be happy to sign on to these things if any of these platforms had significant pull with users. For some reason the people who are interested in building these types of coop platforms seem unable to acquire the types of mega-userbases that plugin and bot devs are interested in targeting.
  - reificator 5y ago
    My plugin and bot development is targeted first and foremost at my own needs. Anything I can share with others is gravy. Which means if your platform doesn't let me talk to the users I personally want to talk to/do the things I want to do, I'm not going to write anything for it without compensation.
Kaze404 5y ago
Discord is the reason I'm a software engineer. I joined back in 2015 and after a few months of usage I had an idea for a bot, which prompted me to learn programming and develop it. I did so, and eventually my little bot was in over 1500 guilds / servers, which eventually lead me to getting my first internship as a software engineer. Now, 6 years later, programming is how I'm able to live a life I did not think was possible to make by having fun at work every day, and I'm incredibly thankful for Discord for giving me the opportunity to do what I love for a living. That said, I can't express how frustrating it is to see a platform you're so grateful for grow so much in such a short amount of time, and gradually become worse because of it (or, at best, see no significant improvements). Over the years I have vented over and over to anyone who would listen about the ways I want Discord to be better (not for me, but for everyone), and I don't think I have the energy to do so anymore. I could write huge lists about the basic features Discord is missing, but to me it's a slap in the face whenever Discord prompts me to "join my university's server by inputting my e-mail" (even though I'm not a student), while 6 years after launch you still cannot collapse the sidebar on the left that insists to take up 300px of your screen no matter what. I understand that it's pointless to complain to deaf ears. Over the years I have applied to work at Discord countless times, even talking to one of their managers over LinkedIn, but unfortunately we couldn't make it happen because of USA Visa restrictions. Because of this, I'm forced to sit at home watching a platform that has given me so much deteriorate over the years. I have considered building a competitor, alternative clients, and even bridges to other services like Matrix, but alas I'm stuck here.
- computershit 5y ago
  > I have considered building a competitor, alternative clients, and even bridges to other services like Matrix, but alas I'm stuck here. Despite it's recent missteps, Discord has, if nothing else, provided us with an excellent technical foundation of what a modern one stop shop communications platform should look like. I'm keen to be involved at any level of a competitor.
- bccdee 5y ago
  > you still cannot collapse the sidebar on the left The sidebar bothers me all the time, when I want to have two windows side-by-side on my screen. The actual chat ends up being smaller than the sidebar. I wrote a javascript bookmarklet that automatically shows/hides the sidebar element on hover. I've gotten a lot of use out of it. It's 821 characters --- less than three tweets long. Why haven't they solved this problem for users? It's shocking that the only way to shrink the sidebar is to inject javascript.
noodlesUK 5y ago
I’m not pleased about this. I maintain a bot for work (not bigcorp), and this is going to waste a tonne of my time. This isn’t just a little breaking change that you can code around, getting rid of message content will make many bots impossible, or will necessitate a rewrite. Discord needs to listen to its community. /rant
- oefrha 5y ago
  I'm in a similar situation. Unless your bot for work is used in 100 servers, locking message content behind a privileged intent will only affect you minimally, unless of course the library your bot is based on languishes like discord.py, which is a very real concern. The general trend of locking things down and hint at moving to an approved-interactions-only model is worrisome too.
DoctorNick 5y ago
I mean, they're just following the same pattern that every other social media company has with their API: make it very open to help capture user share, then gradually scale it back to shut down abuse and facilitate monetization.
- segfaultbuserr 5y ago
  Can't agree more. Now I see all "Open" APIs as bait-and-switch and vendor lock-in.
- DoctorNick 5y ago
  To me, this is a good indicator that they're going to start (or are already in the process of) monetizing user data directly and they are shutting down avenues for third parties to hoover up that data.
  - nabakin 5y ago
    If they started monetizing user data, I would immediately leave Discord and so would my entire community of software developer friends. The best way to push all of us to Matrix. That being said, they already have a revenue stream in Nitro. I don't see them caving into advertising and selling user data very easily. Especially this late in the game where all their users are used to not having them.
    - f1refly 5y ago
      No you won't. You may think that right now, but when the day comes the majority of your group will be too lazy to switch and you'll be stuck. Which is exactly discords plan.
      - nabakin 5y ago
        You know nothing about me and my friends.
        5y ago
vortico 5y ago
If any application developers want to update the "Playing ..." status on Discord, I wrote a C++ implementation that interfaces with Discord's not-very-well-documented IPC API. https://gist.github.com/AndrewBelt/2b386003f949b79f73e9f21c64983f3f https://gist.github.com/AndrewBelt/2b386003f949b79f73e9f21c6...
- judge2020 5y ago
  If you were willing to create a new discord developer application (which can be any name) you could use https://discord.com/developers/docs/rich-presence/how-to https://discord.com/developers/docs/rich-presence/how-to which is well-documented.
  - vortico 5y ago
    I tried recently, but that documentation is insufficient to update a developer application's Activity status. I think they removed some vital information when they replaced it with GameSDK. Perhaps you will have better luck. GameSDK is not an option for some applications, such as those wishing to include only open-source dependencies.
rc-1140 5y ago
This is a shame, almost every Discord server I'm in has a bot of some kind to serve some purpose: humor, moderation, utility, etc. I have my own bot I use as a playground for expanding my development skills. My friends get to mess around with it and I've got a project I can talk about and demonstrate to the subsection of my friends who are into software development. Think a lot of companies who were in the bidding war for Discord dodged a bullet when Discord pulled themselves off the market. Reading the way the people "Mason" and "kadybat" mentioned in the gist conduct themselves with users, especially competent library developers, of the service is concerning. Might even prefer if a BigCorp™ expand their more sterile chat client into Discord's market at this rate.
hisham_hm 5y ago
Nothing new here unfortunately: this is pretty much how every story of open source development targeting proprietary platforms end, especially web-based platforms such as *aaS or social media. I remember the same thing happening with Twitter 9 years ago.
ivraatiems 5y ago
So Discord has begun the slow slide into being unusable while its developers ignore everyone. I speculated about this a while ago, I think after there were rumors of it being acquired, though that hasn't happened yet. First it was AIM/YIM, then MSN, then Skype, then Discord, and so on. Some people used IRC or ICQ or whatever, or still do, I know. But many of us have migrated from one platform to the next as each one was ruined in turn. By the way, check out how hard Discord makes it to report abuse: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291932-How-to-Properly-Report-Issues-to-Trust-Safety https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291932-H... This is, funnily enough, easier than it used to be - you used to have to enable an "advanced setting" to even see the message ID.
- spidersouris 5y ago
  > By the way, check out how hard Discord makes it to report abuse: From a dev POV, I'd say it is a deliberate choice from Discord. If they added a "Report" button to every message, people would assume that the report is sent to the server manager and mods, so there'd be a heap of reports while the messages do not necessarily break Discord's TOS, but rather the server's rules. It's the kind of thing that you need to establish/take into account when enabling customers to create their own "platforms."
  - ivraatiems 5y ago
    There are far better solutions to that problem than just making it extremely difficult to report anything. Show a pop-up that says "this will send the abuse information to Discord staff" to clarify. Or, add true reporting functionality for mods themselves.
    - spidersouris 5y ago
      > Show a pop-up that says "this will send the abuse information to Discord staff" to clarify. Always assume that customers do not read everything, even the most important messages. (Because they don't.) > Or, add true reporting functionality for mods themselves. Yes, this could be a solution.
kureikain 5y ago
For anyone look into another bot/chat platform. I really like the telegram bot API. The API is very practical where they can accept both of GET or POST request, and the token is in the URL. The bot can do interactive button/menu etc. I have been putting lot of my automation into Telegram bot.
swiley 5y ago
If you’re worried about the future of anything you wouldn’t be using discord.
Kiro 5y ago
So Discord is the new thing that Hacker News loves to hate. Why does this happen to every company?
- onedr0p 5y ago
  Mismanagement.
noobermin 5y ago
Thinking back to that article on discord that was shared earlier this week and how people went on about how matrix sucked, IRC sucked, etc etc sucked. I guess this is one thing I don't need to worry about.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
I have never used Discord, never mind writing bots for it, so most of these explanations are pretty incomprehensible to me.
Aeolun 5y ago
I don’t follow. All users in the server are able to read the messages. Why would a bot you invite to the server not be? That kind of defeats the point of having a bot…
Popegaf 5y ago
This reminds me of the words in the video "Why Bing Isn't a Failure (& the Future of the Internet)" [0] > At the very bottom are plugins, extensions, mods and hacks. They fundamentally depend on the indifference or obliviousness of a larger company, who they often mean very little to. And when their goals differ the larger company always wins. Any third-party dependent on another party will be at the whims of the other party. yt-dl can see it happening with age-restricted videos, people using tools to migrate from Spotify depend on them turning a blind eye to leaving customers taking their data with them, fan-made games that continue a story (pokemon for example) and get a cease-and-desist, probably many other examples, and now this too. Kudos to this dude for writing an entire framework for bots as a friggin' doctor in his spare time. Hats off for staying at it for so long. Also, respect for drawing a line in the sand and not giving in to any demands from Discord or users to just lie down, take it, and continue developing the framework with more constraints. [0]: https://youtu.be/mviTS_cIWXg?t=277 https://youtu.be/mviTS_cIWXg?t=277
npteljes 5y ago
I mean, what else are we expecting of proprietary services? No matter how friendly they seem, it's their platform.
iforgotpassword 5y ago
"Guy spends six years developing library to interface with proprietary non-self-hosted platform for free, gets fscked over by said platform." In other news, water is wet. Sorry for the snark, but WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? Is it just not happening frequently enough for people to take note or learn? Quick, move your whole infra to the azure cloud, M365! 3000% price hike? Better accept it or you'll be shut down. Can't even just keep running the old version, cause you're not actually running anything anymore yourself.
CodesInChaos 5y ago
1. If facebook can be blamed cambridge analytica, discord can be blamed for bots collecting data. Locking down the bot API with exceptions for verified operators is a natural step to avoid such an incident. In a similar vein, discord doesn't allow custom clients. I think this is a situation where the legal situation should be adjusted. This also explains why discord is so focused on bots using the bot-api, instead of user-bots. Bots using the API are in some sense condoned by discord, so it's much easier to argue that they're liable for abuse. While user-bots are already disallowed and get banned when detected, so they can already argue that those aren't their fault. 2. Bots often require excessive privileges. For example music bots wanting the right to read messages in all channels or even manage channels (presumably for easier setup), while they should be fine with slash commands and other harmless privileges. I would like to see bots reduce the privileges required to use them. 3. It sounds like the transition was mishandled by discord
jwithington 5y ago
Such an opportunity for a competitor to rise up out of this debacle.
mikestaub 5y ago
Twitter's Bluesky project will solve this if successful. Join the community discord to help us!

493 points by AngelOnFira 5y ago

Based purely on speculation and timing, this sort of stuff was probably brought up during gap analysis done by Microsoft when considering acquisition. Discord is not filled with the best and brightest engineers, but they've done a lot right. I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt and we should not treat them like they've always been a $15B company.

AngelOnFira 5y ago

tl;dr, Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022. So no more `!pause`, or whatever else you might normally type. And this change isn't easy to implement for Discord.py, and would require full bot rewrites for devs using the library. So along with a lot of other negligence towards bot developers from Discord, Discord.py's single developer has stepped down, and no other core library developers chose to step up.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
momothereal 5y ago
> Discord is forcing bots that are in over 75 servers to make use of slash commands, because Discord will no longer send raw messages starting April 2022 Can someone explain why that is? My understanding is that adding bots to a server requires Admin/Owner access, who are already at liberty to read all messages. If you don't trust bots scraping your messages in a server, don't you implicitely distrust the owners? Just leave the server?
- Macha 5y ago
  I wonder if it's the real target here is bridges - without being able to relay messages (without ToS violating puppeting), it's going to get a lot harder to migrate users from discord.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Is there much use of giant bridge bots? I run a bridge but that's just one server.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I doubt bridges are a threat. It's all about capturing revenue streams.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    I was using bridges to migrate to Discord, so… Guess I’m back to IRC.
  - Wingy 5y ago
    This sounds like you might be able to get Discord to approve your privileged intent
- vore 5y ago
  There is a third party you have to implicitly trust, the bot developer. Given most of these bots are used to provide specific functionality, them being able to read messages seems too broad in scope – I know I don't want to have to trust another invisible party to also do the right thing. That said, this looks like very poor communication and imposition of a lot of developer toil on Discord's part.
  - huibf 5y ago
    They should allow server owners to choose whether every bot they have added can read every message or just /commands. But that would require too much intelligence on their part :P
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      That's already in the permissions system unless they did something weird to it.
      - huibf 5y ago
        Then I don't understand what the problem is, really.
        judge2020 5y ago
        The problem is admins haphazardly adding tons of toy bots to servers with sometimes hundreds or thousands of members, and those bots being a front for storing tons of user data (including eg. user online status, user tag (name#1234) history, a large DB of the users' messages across years). The users in these servers aren't informed of such change and Discord can't trust these developers to say "we don't log messages" without requiring them tie a legal identity to any potential malicious logging.
        platz 5y ago
        This is an interesting comment and was totally missing from the OP's description of the issue; I had to dig into this tread to get it. If the OP fails to present or hide the full picture to me it harms his credibility.
- rtpg 5y ago
  I remember a while back reading a thing where basically there were bots out there essentially scraping entire chat logs without its users really being aware of this. There's probably also a lot of stuff going around with identity (like people making bots that look like official ones but aren't) etc. I get people complaining about this situation, but there is a gradient of access between "no content access whatsoever" and "the bot can see everything". Slack's API does a pretty good job of making some of this work
- Fabricio20 5y ago
  Yes. That is the case, and we (developers) argued that, the response we received was "but the _users_ may not know, even if the owner has authorized the bot".
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
WTF is a slash command?
- K5EiS 5y ago
  /<command> as in /help or /rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)#Programs

smoldesu 5y ago

This is unfortunate, and while I do like Discord (enough to pay them $50/year), I hope transgressions like this drive more people to set up self-hosted places to hang out. Discord is responsible for driving a lot of innovation in the communication sector, and they'll always have a place for doing that: but it's going to be difficult for such a large company to keep the interests of their shareholders out of the business of their users.

ve55 5y ago
The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%, as unfortunate as it may be. Discord is definitely here to stay (and IMO will continue to do extremely well this decade - network effects are an amazingly strong force) as far as I can tell. Although I do think it's good news that they have a decent profit model, the future of the platform still may not be as bright as most of its users (who do not understand the business nor the data collected on them) may hope for.
- panic 5y ago
  If there are 100 people in a server, only 1 of them needs to be able to set up a self-hosted instance to get the whole thing going. People do it all the time for Minecraft, for example. I think the problem is less the barrier to entry and more the fact that Discord is actually better than any self-hosted option available right now.
stiltzkin 5y ago
Is there any good self-hosted alternative to Discord?, the only good that comes to mind are rocket.chat and Matrix.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Fosscord is trying to do that: https://fosscord.com/ https://fosscord.com/

mastrsushi 5y ago

It will probably be rewritten, these python libraries that center around proprietary platforms are always a game of cat and mouse. Tweepy is a perfect example, although I don’t think they’ve halted.

mod50ack 5y ago

As someone who has used Discord for the past few years, it's kind of sad to see how dominant and arbitrary it's become. Gotta say I would prefer Matrix if the communities I participate in used it. It's gotten pretty far from the good old days of IRC --- which I'm quite aware is still alive! --- and that's both good and bad at times. But one of the biggest flaws is that it's not an open standard. (Interop is only done by prohibited programs like Ripcord!)

vorpalhex 5y ago
Be the change you want to see. Talk to your friends about Matrix, help run homeservers and help get folks running.
bsder 5y ago
In what way is Matrix not an open standard?
- erk__ 5y ago
  As it is now it seems to be quite under control of New Vector, Ithe company behind element. And it's not a standard yet still just a specification.
  - Arathorn 5y ago
    Matrix is controlled by the Matrix.org Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation https://matrix.org/foundation). The original team who created Matrix subsequently set up Element (New Vector) in order to fund Matrix work, but we very deliberately split Matrix into an independent foundation. Unsure what you mean by “not a standard” - all APIs of the Matrix spec have been successfully implemented at this point by indpependent developers: this makes it an open standard. Eventually, once the standard has reached maturity, we may try to contribute to W3C or IETF - or we might turn it into a dedicated standards body like W3C did for the Web.
    - erk__ 5y ago

akersten 5y ago

> When asking an innocent question to Mason, the Project Manager of the Bot & API team, about whether my bot could connect to the gateway without being verified, he responded rudely and called me a "martyr" with an unnecessarily threatening tone: Just wanted to say that I had a completely different read of Mason's response - without any other context, it seemed like he was joking around. "We won't ban you, y'know, unless you're into that kind of thing" style. Am I totally off base?

plentyofjelly 5y ago
'Happy to oblige however I can in the cause for a martyr' - just read this sentence in your head and tell me it doesn't sound like it's dripping with sarcasm
- gzer0 5y ago
  No, it sounds quite serious to me actually. I don't joke around like that even with my friends.
  - plentyofjelly 5y ago
    we're not disagreeing here - I'm saying he's being sarcastic and rude. the tone of that message is patronising and it's just an unnecessary jab.
  - JoeQuery 5y ago
    Assuming you're not a jerk and you don't say jerk things, you wouldn't have said this jerk thing being quoted. So saying you wouldn't have said it doesn't change the meaning of what was said.
npinsker 5y ago
I wouldn't have personally said it -- saying he's looking to martyr himself could be read as insulting his judgment, as perhaps it was -- but I read it as a joke too.
DetroitThrow 5y ago

ve55 5y ago

I'm always very thankful that we even have people that work so hard towards FOSS libraries to begin with. It must feel pretty bad to receive those responses from employees telling him about the things he should do that are 'um', 'easy' and 'dope' when there's clearly been many longstanding feature and communication issues already (as if being the person working on a FOSS library for no compensation in your spare time that empowers a company whose employees' are getting 7-8 figure exits within a few years wasn't already bad enough). My general pessimism with this situation is how proprietary everything has to be to begin with; the idea of a single company storing the full history of everyone's messages and interactions is already bad enough without them requiring the government ID of their users.

ve55 5y ago
I should add about the government ID part, that I understand why they do it. I've worked with anti-abuse in online ecosystems before, and I undertsand how difficult their challenges are at their scale, but it's nonetheless a pattern that I'm just tired of at this point. I'm tired of platforms asking me for my government-ID to allow me to use them. I'm tired of having every message I type 'privately' to someone being stored and owned by a company that has no obligation nor motive to treat it the way I'd want. I'm tired of being forced to 'log in' to services just to read important information (now being trialed by Twitter and Reddit as well!). Honestly I am just tired of having what feels like no rights or control whatsoever in the general online sense of my life, having to deal with and accept whichever new 'feature' or 'usage of my data to improve my experience' the products I 'choose' to use decide to rollout. I apologize for this turning into a such a rant, but this has been upsetting me a lot lately. I have this wonderful illusion of choice of which products I use, but the punishments I receive for trying to opt-out have become untenable in the last few years. I can't even pay my rent without using a finance app that scrapes and sells my transaction data (which app does this? almost all of them), let alone get help with free software when the answers to my questions are now all contained within Discord chat history which asks for my phone-number to join so that I may even search it, rather than on an openly-searchable forum. While I still am able to use the software I prefer like Signal, IRC, and Matrix with some of my unique technically-gifted friends, the network effects of having millions/billions of users and owning all of their data are a particularly strong force that I have not yet found a way to reckon with.

joncrane 5y ago

Knowing none of the background, that post was a wild ride. I can 100% relate to his feelings of futility while working really hard to try to make something great.

cfgghsj 5y ago

Meanwhile, I see fleets of user-bots happily chugging along under the radar hoovering up data. Just like the post author said: > the crux of malicious bots were, and still are, user-bots. Seems almost laughable that Discord is making hoops for legitimate bot developers to jump through while taking little action against user-bots. I suspect that Discord wants to get a chunk of the big money that game bot developers are making, and are pushing bot developers into a more rigid API that will eventually include in-app-purchases. The article author also said: > No longer will bots thrive with a sandbox limited only by your imagination, but instead Discord is now the sole gatekeeper of approved use cases. The future of Discord bots relies solely on the interaction system; things have to be explicitly written and supported by Discord employees

nerdponx 5y ago
I wonder if they are going to try to kill Mee6 and then offer its features to server owners for a fee.
- ikiris 5y ago
  That's likely a major part of this is neutering the ability for any other service to do generic message functionality.
  - bozhark 5y ago
    fuck those that bought the lifetime package, eh?
    - ikiris 5y ago
      generally, yes.
Kiro 5y ago
What's a user-bot?
- 5y ago

Waterluvian 5y ago

What I’m learning from reading these kinds of posts over the years: whenever possible, don’t let your passion have external dependencies.

ikiris 5y ago

Sounds like they're fixing (what discord considers) some major security issues in basic discord, but the project management is a disaster, and there are no stakeholders that care about api access actually working for developers. That doesn't sound fun.

akersten 5y ago

In case any Discord employees are reading this: please don't remove the ability for bots to read message_content , or make me jump through verification hoops either. Reading raw messages is absolutely crucial for moderation bots and, well, just about every other fun and interesting bot. I don't write discord bots so you can type a slash command to do a thing. That's boring. Good bots can read messages. Discord will be very "not dope" and "not cool" if bots are forced to become a sterilized pick-list of interaction options.

w-ll 5y ago
A better argument would be that "slash commands lack the same accessibility", than to say they are boring. I have many friends that use a variety of accessibility tools and well aware of how changes can really frustrate and block them from communicating.
judge2020 5y ago
The verification requirement is only for bots in over 100 servers. https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055-Message-Content-Access-Deprecation-for-Verified-Bots#:~:text=This%20change%20applies,guild%20member%20data https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028....
- akersten 5y ago
  Reading that placates my concerns a little. The bot API community's reported morale deflation after the NDA-sealed meeting mentioned in the Gist kind of trounces it though. I've got a sinking feeling that the ultimate vision for this applies to all bots, and it's only "bots used in 100+ servers" for now. Time will tell, I hope I'm proven wrong. I hope that preemptively voicing my concerns helps keep the conversation going to make sure small bot authors aren't left in the dark.
  - piemadd 5y ago
    The thing is, you're probably right. Over time they've been restricting items for bots in over 100 servers. Right now its to see the users in the server and also to see the statuses of these users.

okdjnfweonfe 5y ago

Since he's stepping down, I hope he opens an avenue for donations. Watching some of the earlier drama as it was happening (fwiw only hinted at in the gist) was disheartening. I'm surprised that he managed to not only make it through 1 rewrite but almost make it through another, of a relatively complete codebase too. Even though unpaid in the programming field, very much a professional IMO.

nerdponx 5y ago

The arrogance of these corporate reps is incredible. They clearly do not care about supporting bot devs. Perhaps the goal is to kill the bot dev community in order to centralize it around Discord corporate, and then start putting more bot-related features behind Nitro and other subscription paywalls. Seems like a nasty way to go about it, but I can't imagine any other reason to behave this way towards a community of unpaid volunteers who add tremendous value to your platform. I think there's a lot of potential for a VC-funded startup to pour some cash into Matrix and then swoop in when the Discord ecosystem eventually starts falling apart.

judge2020 5y ago
Discord is likely burning a lot of money on servers & payroll. I would be surprised if they broke even in 2020 given their revenue numbers[0]. Why any VC would back an open source, modifiable project like Matrix just to compete with Discord's existing stranglehold on the market is beyond me. 0: > Discord declined to share how many Nitro subscribers it has, but the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord generated $130 million in revenue last year, up from $45 million in 2019. In the same time period, its monthly user base doubled. 0: https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-gamer-roots/#:~:text=Discord%20declined%20to%20share%20how%20many%20Nitro%20subscribers%20it%20has%2C%20but%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20reported%20that%20Discord%20generated%20%24130%20million%20in%20revenue%20last%20year%2C%20up%20from%20%2445%20million%20in%202019.%20In%20the%20same%20time%20period%2C%20its%20monthly%20user%20base%20doubled https://qz.com/2034087/chat-app-discord-is-shedding-its-game...
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  With somewhere in the thousand plus range of employees they'd have to be spending a hundred million on servers. I'd sure hope costs aren't that high. I'm pretty sure I could host every discord server I'm on for the price of a nitro subscription. Edit: I mean, imgur has an estimated revenue of twelve million. Staple a hundred IRC servers on the side and you have most of discord's functionality accounted for. Unless the voice calls are really tough, and they're actually a streaming company by majority of expenses, where would the costs come from?

Matthias1 5y ago

Edit: Leaving this comment up, but my updated understanding is that Discord's policy change only effects bots >100 servers. So it's less applicable to the 'learning how to code' demographic. It seems to me like Discord has, for some reason, decided that small bots are a problem. Which is a bummer. I've been on Discord since 2016, in programming and academic circles, and the grassroots bot community has always been amazing. I'm in a server with 30 of friends, which has 4 bots made by members of the server. Something about the simplicity of listening for messages, parsing them how you want, and sending back text that shows up just like a user is really satisfying. I know it's been a motivation for many people who have little to no interest in programming anything else.

sergiotapia 5y ago

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1695103/128839762-7f7e6b9c-ef66-496b-ad69-5bd544ac78f0.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1695103/128839762-... Can you imagine such a tool to one of your customers like that? It seems unfathomable. Is Discord full of these types of people?

nectarlife42 5y ago
Seriously, these people are building value and contributing so much to the platform only for the project manager to turn around and treat them this way.. Embarrassing.
meibo 5y ago
Judging by my previous interactions with their engineering and "Trust & Safety" team, yes, this is generally how it goes. Working for Discord and getting that badge must give you quite the ego boost. Conversations with them feel very arbitrary and it's like they consider any word they say to you wasted - of course this doesn't have to apply to all of their staff, but it's certainly a pattern.
- livueta 5y ago
  Incoming unsupported generalization: this is what happens when you mostly hire fanbois. I think (had a couple acquaintances move from hobby bot/gateway development to Discord employment) they source a lot of their team from people who were evangelists of some sort for the platform pre-employment. You also see it in gaming sometimes - OSRS comes to mind - where community members end up in community management/dev roles. There's something about that elevation from unwashed peon to One Of The Big Boys With A Forum Badge that really messes with the ego.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

I feel back for all the suckers that have invested time and money into the discord ecosystem. They are going to milk you dry. If you aren't in the know as to the intent of discord straight from the beginning, it's to build a freemium monopoly and then extort you for every penny they can get.

fabianhjr 5y ago

If one doesn't own a platform then one is at risk of being kicked out in the name of owners' (shareholders') profits. This is a recurring theme and I am puzzled that there isn't a bigger dev audience at internet of ownership ( https://ioo.coop/ https://ioo.coop/ ) or for platform cooperativism ( https://platform.coop/ https://platform.coop/ )

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
I'm sure devs would be happy to sign on to these things if any of these platforms had significant pull with users. For some reason the people who are interested in building these types of coop platforms seem unable to acquire the types of mega-userbases that plugin and bot devs are interested in targeting.
- reificator 5y ago
  My plugin and bot development is targeted first and foremost at my own needs. Anything I can share with others is gravy. Which means if your platform doesn't let me talk to the users I personally want to talk to/do the things I want to do, I'm not going to write anything for it without compensation.

Kaze404 5y ago

Discord is the reason I'm a software engineer. I joined back in 2015 and after a few months of usage I had an idea for a bot, which prompted me to learn programming and develop it. I did so, and eventually my little bot was in over 1500 guilds / servers, which eventually lead me to getting my first internship as a software engineer. Now, 6 years later, programming is how I'm able to live a life I did not think was possible to make by having fun at work every day, and I'm incredibly thankful for Discord for giving me the opportunity to do what I love for a living. That said, I can't express how frustrating it is to see a platform you're so grateful for grow so much in such a short amount of time, and gradually become worse because of it (or, at best, see no significant improvements). Over the years I have vented over and over to anyone who would listen about the ways I want Discord to be better (not for me, but for everyone), and I don't think I have the energy to do so anymore. I could write huge lists about the basic features Discord is missing, but to me it's a slap in the face whenever Discord prompts me to "join my university's server by inputting my e-mail" (even though I'm not a student), while 6 years after launch you still cannot collapse the sidebar on the left that insists to take up 300px of your screen no matter what. I understand that it's pointless to complain to deaf ears. Over the years I have applied to work at Discord countless times, even talking to one of their managers over LinkedIn, but unfortunately we couldn't make it happen because of USA Visa restrictions. Because of this, I'm forced to sit at home watching a platform that has given me so much deteriorate over the years. I have considered building a competitor, alternative clients, and even bridges to other services like Matrix, but alas I'm stuck here.

computershit 5y ago
> I have considered building a competitor, alternative clients, and even bridges to other services like Matrix, but alas I'm stuck here. Despite it's recent missteps, Discord has, if nothing else, provided us with an excellent technical foundation of what a modern one stop shop communications platform should look like. I'm keen to be involved at any level of a competitor.
bccdee 5y ago
> you still cannot collapse the sidebar on the left The sidebar bothers me all the time, when I want to have two windows side-by-side on my screen. The actual chat ends up being smaller than the sidebar. I wrote a javascript bookmarklet that automatically shows/hides the sidebar element on hover. I've gotten a lot of use out of it. It's 821 characters --- less than three tweets long. Why haven't they solved this problem for users? It's shocking that the only way to shrink the sidebar is to inject javascript.

noodlesUK 5y ago

I’m not pleased about this. I maintain a bot for work (not bigcorp), and this is going to waste a tonne of my time. This isn’t just a little breaking change that you can code around, getting rid of message content will make many bots impossible, or will necessitate a rewrite. Discord needs to listen to its community. /rant

oefrha 5y ago
I'm in a similar situation. Unless your bot for work is used in 100 servers, locking message content behind a privileged intent will only affect you minimally, unless of course the library your bot is based on languishes like discord.py, which is a very real concern. The general trend of locking things down and hint at moving to an approved-interactions-only model is worrisome too.

DoctorNick 5y ago

I mean, they're just following the same pattern that every other social media company has with their API: make it very open to help capture user share, then gradually scale it back to shut down abuse and facilitate monetization.

segfaultbuserr 5y ago
Can't agree more. Now I see all "Open" APIs as bait-and-switch and vendor lock-in.
DoctorNick 5y ago
To me, this is a good indicator that they're going to start (or are already in the process of) monetizing user data directly and they are shutting down avenues for third parties to hoover up that data.
- nabakin 5y ago
  If they started monetizing user data, I would immediately leave Discord and so would my entire community of software developer friends. The best way to push all of us to Matrix. That being said, they already have a revenue stream in Nitro. I don't see them caving into advertising and selling user data very easily. Especially this late in the game where all their users are used to not having them.
  - f1refly 5y ago
    No you won't. You may think that right now, but when the day comes the majority of your group will be too lazy to switch and you'll be stuck. Which is exactly discords plan.
    - nabakin 5y ago
      You know nothing about me and my friends.
      - 5y ago

vortico 5y ago

If any application developers want to update the "Playing ..." status on Discord, I wrote a C++ implementation that interfaces with Discord's not-very-well-documented IPC API. https://gist.github.com/AndrewBelt/2b386003f949b79f73e9f21c64983f3f https://gist.github.com/AndrewBelt/2b386003f949b79f73e9f21c6...

judge2020 5y ago
If you were willing to create a new discord developer application (which can be any name) you could use https://discord.com/developers/docs/rich-presence/how-to https://discord.com/developers/docs/rich-presence/how-to which is well-documented.
- vortico 5y ago
  I tried recently, but that documentation is insufficient to update a developer application's Activity status. I think they removed some vital information when they replaced it with GameSDK. Perhaps you will have better luck. GameSDK is not an option for some applications, such as those wishing to include only open-source dependencies.

rc-1140 5y ago

This is a shame, almost every Discord server I'm in has a bot of some kind to serve some purpose: humor, moderation, utility, etc. I have my own bot I use as a playground for expanding my development skills. My friends get to mess around with it and I've got a project I can talk about and demonstrate to the subsection of my friends who are into software development. Think a lot of companies who were in the bidding war for Discord dodged a bullet when Discord pulled themselves off the market. Reading the way the people "Mason" and "kadybat" mentioned in the gist conduct themselves with users, especially competent library developers, of the service is concerning. Might even prefer if a BigCorp™ expand their more sterile chat client into Discord's market at this rate.

hisham_hm 5y ago

Nothing new here unfortunately: this is pretty much how every story of open source development targeting proprietary platforms end, especially web-based platforms such as *aaS or social media. I remember the same thing happening with Twitter 9 years ago.

ivraatiems 5y ago

So Discord has begun the slow slide into being unusable while its developers ignore everyone. I speculated about this a while ago, I think after there were rumors of it being acquired, though that hasn't happened yet. First it was AIM/YIM, then MSN, then Skype, then Discord, and so on. Some people used IRC or ICQ or whatever, or still do, I know. But many of us have migrated from one platform to the next as each one was ruined in turn. By the way, check out how hard Discord makes it to report abuse: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291932-How-to-Properly-Report-Issues-to-Trust-Safety https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291932-H... This is, funnily enough, easier than it used to be - you used to have to enable an "advanced setting" to even see the message ID.

spidersouris 5y ago
> By the way, check out how hard Discord makes it to report abuse: From a dev POV, I'd say it is a deliberate choice from Discord. If they added a "Report" button to every message, people would assume that the report is sent to the server manager and mods, so there'd be a heap of reports while the messages do not necessarily break Discord's TOS, but rather the server's rules. It's the kind of thing that you need to establish/take into account when enabling customers to create their own "platforms."
- ivraatiems 5y ago
  There are far better solutions to that problem than just making it extremely difficult to report anything. Show a pop-up that says "this will send the abuse information to Discord staff" to clarify. Or, add true reporting functionality for mods themselves.
  - spidersouris 5y ago
    > Show a pop-up that says "this will send the abuse information to Discord staff" to clarify. Always assume that customers do not read everything, even the most important messages. (Because they don't.) > Or, add true reporting functionality for mods themselves. Yes, this could be a solution.

kureikain 5y ago

For anyone look into another bot/chat platform. I really like the telegram bot API. The API is very practical where they can accept both of GET or POST request, and the token is in the URL. The bot can do interactive button/menu etc. I have been putting lot of my automation into Telegram bot.

swiley 5y ago

If you’re worried about the future of anything you wouldn’t be using discord.

Kiro 5y ago

So Discord is the new thing that Hacker News loves to hate. Why does this happen to every company?

onedr0p 5y ago
Mismanagement.

noobermin 5y ago

Thinking back to that article on discord that was shared earlier this week and how people went on about how matrix sucked, IRC sucked, etc etc sucked. I guess this is one thing I don't need to worry about.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

I have never used Discord, never mind writing bots for it, so most of these explanations are pretty incomprehensible to me.

Aeolun 5y ago

I don’t follow. All users in the server are able to read the messages. Why would a bot you invite to the server not be? That kind of defeats the point of having a bot…

Popegaf 5y ago

This reminds me of the words in the video "Why Bing Isn't a Failure (& the Future of the Internet)" [0] > At the very bottom are plugins, extensions, mods and hacks. They fundamentally depend on the indifference or obliviousness of a larger company, who they often mean very little to. And when their goals differ the larger company always wins. Any third-party dependent on another party will be at the whims of the other party. yt-dl can see it happening with age-restricted videos, people using tools to migrate from Spotify depend on them turning a blind eye to leaving customers taking their data with them, fan-made games that continue a story (pokemon for example) and get a cease-and-desist, probably many other examples, and now this too. Kudos to this dude for writing an entire framework for bots as a friggin' doctor in his spare time. Hats off for staying at it for so long. Also, respect for drawing a line in the sand and not giving in to any demands from Discord or users to just lie down, take it, and continue developing the framework with more constraints. [0]: https://youtu.be/mviTS_cIWXg?t=277 https://youtu.be/mviTS_cIWXg?t=277

npteljes 5y ago

I mean, what else are we expecting of proprietary services? No matter how friendly they seem, it's their platform.

iforgotpassword 5y ago

"Guy spends six years developing library to interface with proprietary non-self-hosted platform for free, gets fscked over by said platform." In other news, water is wet. Sorry for the snark, but WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING? Is it just not happening frequently enough for people to take note or learn? Quick, move your whole infra to the azure cloud, M365! 3000% price hike? Better accept it or you'll be shut down. Can't even just keep running the old version, cause you're not actually running anything anymore yourself.

CodesInChaos 5y ago

1. If facebook can be blamed cambridge analytica, discord can be blamed for bots collecting data. Locking down the bot API with exceptions for verified operators is a natural step to avoid such an incident. In a similar vein, discord doesn't allow custom clients. I think this is a situation where the legal situation should be adjusted. This also explains why discord is so focused on bots using the bot-api, instead of user-bots. Bots using the API are in some sense condoned by discord, so it's much easier to argue that they're liable for abuse. While user-bots are already disallowed and get banned when detected, so they can already argue that those aren't their fault. 2. Bots often require excessive privileges. For example music bots wanting the right to read messages in all channels or even manage channels (presumably for easier setup), while they should be fine with slash commands and other harmless privileges. I would like to see bots reduce the privileges required to use them. 3. It sounds like the transition was mishandled by discord

jwithington 5y ago

Such an opportunity for a competitor to rise up out of this debacle.

mikestaub 5y ago

Twitter's Bluesky project will solve this if successful. Join the community discord to help us!