6 ms·

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the

by mjr00 4y ago

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn. People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

culturestate 4y ago
> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>". We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.
- mmcdermott 4y ago
  That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).
  - solveit 4y ago
    I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting privacy.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Privacy should be the default so that people who go for privacy don't stick out.
      - solveit 4y ago
        Sorry, my comment was overly brief and flippant. I see this change as a net positive for privacy, and the fact that it's of only limited benefit for people who are less scrupulous about privacy is unfortunate but I am still pleased on the balance.
  - culturestate 4y ago
    > Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility. 1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their account settings, etc.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.
      - culturestate 4y ago
        > Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility. I find it difficult to believe that people choose Discord over eg Reddit because they value privacy - you can create a private subreddit much more easily than you can create a new Discord instance. People choose Discord because they want live chat that works. Anyone who is consciously choosing Discord for privacy reasons shouldn’t have a problem policing themselves when it comes to public vs. private channels, no?
        madeofpalk 4y ago
        I think people chose Discord because they want a private place to chat with friends.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people think they are. What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing. The solution to this problem is to have a very clear indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If you really want to, make it a link that explains what that means. And you're done. This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern software that went to crap, not the users.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
> Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are. Maybe if you use forums with a real name policy? I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)
- softfalcon 4y ago
  Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name. Frequently used for high profile job positions and their “background” checks.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me. Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, they have this annoying registration process with photo ID that also has to be renewed every once in a while).
    - softfalcon 4y ago
      It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life. They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public. He told me all of this a few weeks into the job. It was shocking just how much info he could pull on me by just being corporate and asking the right people and paying some cash/using a background check.
      - GekkePrutser 4y ago
Cu3PO42 4y ago
I wholeheartedly agreed. Ironically, I already feel that Discord is a lot less private than IRC used to be. In a way, history not being accessible to those not currently in a channel is also a feature.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Scrollback is actually a permission that you can disable; but it's on by default and I've never seen someone turn it off.
  - gwillen 4y ago
    Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let you still see history from when you joined; it just lets you see whatever bits of history your client has cached, which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop) or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make much sense. I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but it's not what Discord users expect; the mobile behavior is just random, since you can't control when the client is "connected" or not.
    - SomeBoolshit 4y ago
      So it's really just IRC mode?
      - plorkyeran 4y ago
        No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just switching between channels on the same server doesn't reliably retain chat history, so it basically just doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.
    - Cu3PO42 4y ago
      Doesn't it? I'd argue that this is a perfectly reasonable outcome. Server-side history is disabled -- for everyone. Sure, you could have saved the conversation when you saw it, but it doesn't do it for you. Ephemerality can be desirable. However, I do agree there should ideally be three options, including the one you're describing.
jotm 4y ago
That's where the anonymity comes in. Why the hell would you use any personally identifiable info? Just use mjr69420. It's this ability to find random comments on obscure stuff that really made me love the Internet. Nowadays, the social media stuff, and frankly, the influx of idiots, has turned into garbage. Their thoughts should still be archived and searchable though.
kbyatnal 4y ago
If you post on a public Discord, I think you are accepting that your comments will be made public. I totally agree with you on private Discords though.
bakugo 4y ago
Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  > Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason. Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-related posts.
  - max51 4y ago
    >I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. people can be extremely naïve. It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.
    - robotguy 4y ago
      >it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    In the 90s we were taught, never give out your name, your age, where you live, or anything that can be tied back to you.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
      And then came LinkedIn that asked for full access to your inbox (yes, username and password! and people gave it away), Facebook with their "real name policy" (and people complied!), Android with automatic access to your contacts without your consent (I believe they fixed it at some point though) and so on. Everything seems upside down.
recursivedoubts 4y ago
> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. I have some bad news for you.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?
  - recursivedoubts 4y ago
    people don't think it be like it is, but it do
mbesto 4y ago
(1) Most forums are pseudo anonymous. You happen to be on one right now. > People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. (2) This is a very "techie" take. Facebook has proven most people don't care about their privacy. Note - not saying privacy ISN'T an issue per se, I'm just saying that we've already proven the general population really doesn't care. (3) AVS Forums, Tesla Forums, Malibu boat owners, etc. are all forums I regularly use and have great indexed content that would easily get lost in a Discord server. Also, no one knows who I am there. So as long as YOU want to stay pseudo anonymous while still contributing...you most certainly can.
bee_rider 4y ago
This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that people had to sign up and you could set things so that only friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends network is eventually infiltrated and scraped. Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense -- the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team, not because they are benevolent.
rrix2 4y ago
> the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn. but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for information sharing within the fighting game community, for example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and there's no way to search for questions across them, so everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still access with information about character matchups, frame data, etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a new game is basically difficult to solve in this decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed chat rooms and google docs.
rektide 4y ago
> On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search & find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity. Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on. All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown, especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so rarely a real issue. The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly, saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the public-ness of these mediums. Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes. Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see whose gotten world. Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private, exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make a public conscious possible).
still_grokking 4y ago
> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. I have bad news for you. As long as you're leaving unencrypted info on other peoples computers you're being watched. This info can and will be used against you should someone in the right position feels like that. Only proper end-to-end encryption (combined with plausible deniability where required) can protect you from that, iff of course you're in full control of the keys at any given time. In any other circumstance there is no privacy on the internet. You're being watched, as the internet became the ultimate surveillance machine by now. Since Snowden this—since a long time actually quite obvious—fact can't be talked away even by the most ignorant people. The only sane way to deal with this given reality is to consider just everything done on the internet, where no very special protection measures have been applied to, to be compromised. As you're being watched you better behave like you're being watched. There is no other option, sad as it is. Btw. in the days of the yore everybody knew that you never ever put any personal info on the internet. This was one of the first things you told people before you showed them how to use a news server. But today people seem to act without due consideration about just nothing on the net. For example people today hand out happily credit card info to more or less whoever asks, and than wonder that they get robed. I actually still remember the times when people were saying that it's extremely unlikely that anybody could do business on the internet because "Who would be so stupid to type in their name, address, and credit card number into some form on a 'webpage'? Trusting someone on the internet, LOL!". Now the trust goes even so far that most people really think that there are "private spaces" on the web, where they're not watched. Well, LOL.

by mjr00 4y ago

culturestate 4y ago

> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>". We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

mmcdermott 4y ago
That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).
- solveit 4y ago
  I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting privacy.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Privacy should be the default so that people who go for privacy don't stick out.
    - solveit 4y ago
      Sorry, my comment was overly brief and flippant. I see this change as a net positive for privacy, and the fact that it's of only limited benefit for people who are less scrupulous about privacy is unfortunate but I am still pleased on the balance.
- culturestate 4y ago
  > Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility. 1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their account settings, etc.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.
    - culturestate 4y ago
      > Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility. I find it difficult to believe that people choose Discord over eg Reddit because they value privacy - you can create a private subreddit much more easily than you can create a new Discord instance. People choose Discord because they want live chat that works. Anyone who is consciously choosing Discord for privacy reasons shouldn’t have a problem policing themselves when it comes to public vs. private channels, no?
      - madeofpalk 4y ago
        I think people chose Discord because they want a private place to chat with friends.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people think they are. What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing. The solution to this problem is to have a very clear indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If you really want to, make it a link that explains what that means. And you're done. This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern software that went to crap, not the users.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

> Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are. Maybe if you use forums with a real name policy? I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)

softfalcon 4y ago
Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name. Frequently used for high profile job positions and their “background” checks.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me. Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, they have this annoying registration process with photo ID that also has to be renewed every once in a while).
  - softfalcon 4y ago
    It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life. They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public. He told me all of this a few weeks into the job. It was shocking just how much info he could pull on me by just being corporate and asking the right people and paying some cash/using a background check.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago

Cu3PO42 4y ago

I wholeheartedly agreed. Ironically, I already feel that Discord is a lot less private than IRC used to be. In a way, history not being accessible to those not currently in a channel is also a feature.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Scrollback is actually a permission that you can disable; but it's on by default and I've never seen someone turn it off.
- gwillen 4y ago
  Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let you still see history from when you joined; it just lets you see whatever bits of history your client has cached, which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop) or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make much sense. I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but it's not what Discord users expect; the mobile behavior is just random, since you can't control when the client is "connected" or not.
  - SomeBoolshit 4y ago
    So it's really just IRC mode?
    - plorkyeran 4y ago
      No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just switching between channels on the same server doesn't reliably retain chat history, so it basically just doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.
  - Cu3PO42 4y ago
    Doesn't it? I'd argue that this is a perfectly reasonable outcome. Server-side history is disabled -- for everyone. Sure, you could have saved the conversation when you saw it, but it doesn't do it for you. Ephemerality can be desirable. However, I do agree there should ideally be three options, including the one you're describing.

jotm 4y ago

That's where the anonymity comes in. Why the hell would you use any personally identifiable info? Just use mjr69420. It's this ability to find random comments on obscure stuff that really made me love the Internet. Nowadays, the social media stuff, and frankly, the influx of idiots, has turned into garbage. Their thoughts should still be archived and searchable though.

kbyatnal 4y ago

If you post on a public Discord, I think you are accepting that your comments will be made public. I totally agree with you on private Discords though.

bakugo 4y ago

Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
> Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason. Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-related posts.
- max51 4y ago
  >I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. people can be extremely naïve. It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.
  - robotguy 4y ago
    >it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  In the 90s we were taught, never give out your name, your age, where you live, or anything that can be tied back to you.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
    And then came LinkedIn that asked for full access to your inbox (yes, username and password! and people gave it away), Facebook with their "real name policy" (and people complied!), Android with automatic access to your contacts without your consent (I believe they fixed it at some point though) and so on. Everything seems upside down.

recursivedoubts 4y ago

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. I have some bad news for you.

beebeepka 4y ago
Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  people don't think it be like it is, but it do

mbesto 4y ago

(1) Most forums are pseudo anonymous. You happen to be on one right now. > People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. (2) This is a very "techie" take. Facebook has proven most people don't care about their privacy. Note - not saying privacy ISN'T an issue per se, I'm just saying that we've already proven the general population really doesn't care. (3) AVS Forums, Tesla Forums, Malibu boat owners, etc. are all forums I regularly use and have great indexed content that would easily get lost in a Discord server. Also, no one knows who I am there. So as long as YOU want to stay pseudo anonymous while still contributing...you most certainly can.

bee_rider 4y ago

This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that people had to sign up and you could set things so that only friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends network is eventually infiltrated and scraped. Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense -- the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team, not because they are benevolent.

rrix2 4y ago

> the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn. but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for information sharing within the fighting game community, for example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and there's no way to search for questions across them, so everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still access with information about character matchups, frame data, etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a new game is basically difficult to solve in this decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed chat rooms and google docs.

rektide 4y ago

> On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit. Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search & find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity. Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on. All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown, especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so rarely a real issue. The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly, saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the public-ness of these mediums. Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes. Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see whose gotten world. Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private, exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make a public conscious possible).

still_grokking 4y ago

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. I have bad news for you. As long as you're leaving unencrypted info on other peoples computers you're being watched. This info can and will be used against you should someone in the right position feels like that. Only proper end-to-end encryption (combined with plausible deniability where required) can protect you from that, iff of course you're in full control of the keys at any given time. In any other circumstance there is no privacy on the internet. You're being watched, as the internet became the ultimate surveillance machine by now. Since Snowden this—since a long time actually quite obvious—fact can't be talked away even by the most ignorant people. The only sane way to deal with this given reality is to consider just everything done on the internet, where no very special protection measures have been applied to, to be compromised. As you're being watched you better behave like you're being watched. There is no other option, sad as it is. Btw. in the days of the yore everybody knew that you never ever put any personal info on the internet. This was one of the first things you told people before you showed them how to use a news server. But today people seem to act without due consideration about just nothing on the net. For example people today hand out happily credit card info to more or less whoever asks, and than wonder that they get robed. I actually still remember the times when people were saying that it's extremely unlikely that anybody could do business on the internet because "Who would be so stupid to type in their name, address, and credit card number into some form on a 'webpage'? Trusting someone on the internet, LOL!". Now the trust goes even so far that most people really think that there are "private spaces" on the web, where they're not watched. Well, LOL.