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Does Discord have open APIs that this can be built around, or will this be a callback to the IM wars when competitors kept shifting things to break compatibilit

by goda90 5y ago

Does Discord have open APIs that this can be built around, or will this be a callback to the IM wars when competitors kept shifting things to break compatibility across platforms?

T-A 5y ago
https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference
- jchw 5y ago
  While this is largely identical to the API used in the client, using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited. Usage of third party clients can get you banned, and unfortunately this has already happened at times.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0] walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about street space in a way where the car became more important than the pedestrian. What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point of having general-purpose computers available to general population. Bicycles for the mind and all. -- [0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
    - meibo 5y ago
      Well, it's a private company and it's their infrastructure, their systems and their service. We all may dislike the practice but they have the right to enact their ToS, as long as they act legally in regards to payments, etc. Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on top of something like that.
    - jchw 5y ago
      To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API under the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-SPAM, bot oversight, etc. On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users. There is a long and well-written discussion from the former developer of discord-py regarding their feelings: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1 https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028... Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      They're doing exactly what Twitter and Instagram do. They don't like people using their own automation because the companies either offer automation products themselves, or they have lucrative partnerships with companies that have exclusive API access to their platforms, who then go on to sell automation capabilities to users. There's no technical reason users can't automate how they use the services, and the security angle is an afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Discord has a bot API but using any unofficial client ("self bots") can get your account banned. The Discord Matrix bridge warns about this, saying that attempts to use the friend request API from a bit will probably get your account permabanned (and the feature isn't active by default AFAIK). Discord doesn't seem to go after unofficial clients as much as they could, but if this client becomes popular they'll probably go after them.
- Brave-Steak 5y ago
  Sorry, how is this not illegal? What happened to interoperability?

by goda90 5y ago

Does Discord have open APIs that this can be built around, or will this be a callback to the IM wars when competitors kept shifting things to break compatibility across platforms?

T-A 5y ago

https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference https://discord.com/developers/docs/reference

jchw 5y ago
While this is largely identical to the API used in the client, using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited. Usage of third party clients can get you banned, and unfortunately this has already happened at times.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0] walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about street space in a way where the car became more important than the pedestrian. What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point of having general-purpose computers available to general population. Bicycles for the mind and all. -- [0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
  - meibo 5y ago
    Well, it's a private company and it's their infrastructure, their systems and their service. We all may dislike the practice but they have the right to enact their ToS, as long as they act legally in regards to payments, etc. Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on top of something like that.
  - jchw 5y ago
    To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API under the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-SPAM, bot oversight, etc. On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users. There is a long and well-written discussion from the former developer of discord-py regarding their feelings: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1 https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028... Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    They're doing exactly what Twitter and Instagram do. They don't like people using their own automation because the companies either offer automation products themselves, or they have lucrative partnerships with companies that have exclusive API access to their platforms, who then go on to sell automation capabilities to users. There's no technical reason users can't automate how they use the services, and the security angle is an afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Discord has a bot API but using any unofficial client ("self bots") can get your account banned. The Discord Matrix bridge warns about this, saying that attempts to use the friend request API from a bit will probably get your account permabanned (and the feature isn't active by default AFAIK). Discord doesn't seem to go after unofficial clients as much as they could, but if this client becomes popular they'll probably go after them.

Brave-Steak 5y ago
Sorry, how is this not illegal? What happened to interoperability?