14 ms·

PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for posting ASNs

502 points by bottiger1 3y ago

There's been a trend of startups basing their entire business on Discord like Midjourney AI, and Discord themselves pushing for people to do so with their subscriptions system. Well just a few days ago I found out that my account of 7 years was just banned without a warning for a very obvious error on their part. Just hours before my account was banned I posted a list of ASNs (basically ISPs) connected to a non-discord server I had that looked like this: 22773 ASN-CXA-ALL-CCI-22773-RDC, US 5432 PROXIMUS-ISP-AS, BE 577 BACOM, CA To someone who doesn't know what ASNs are, they would probably assume they are addresses. This is not personal information, and there's no way to tie this information to any individual. I opened a ticket and the only reply I get is that the ban will not be reversed and that the account will be deleted in 14 days. I've tried posting on Twitter and they have selectively ignored me while replying to everyone else. Any submission I make on the subreddit gets instantly deleted. Screenshots for proof. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=900x900 This also isn't the first issue we've had with Discord. They threatened to delete my server a few years ago because 1 person said they were underage amongst thousands of lines of chat and we did not see it and ban them. They refused to tell us who it was so I had to spend hours looking through chat to find the offending user. Think twice before you decide to base your business around Discord.

jtchang 3y ago
Does Discord charge or have some type of contractual agreement with you? It does seem odd -- they must have some checking on addresses and personal information and what you posted just happens to match that regex.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  Does there exist a Discord business plan / any way to even get such a contractual agreement in place? We use Discord as a support channel for our developer tool and I've never heard of an option to get enterprise support...but if such a thing does exist and Discord offers it, I'd probably take it given OPs story
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    For dev support, why choose Discord over Gitter, or even IRC? Slack and Teams also allow free guest access for this scenario too. That said, group-chat-based support seems like the wrong solution in the first place - simply because Discord is a silo and they don’t make it easy to get your own data back out of it (this page is an infuriating read: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-Requesting-a-Copy-of-your-Data https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R... ). Also, the fact that Discord themselves are using ZenDesk for their own support (instead of, y’know… using Discord) is another reason to not use Discord like this. Orgs using Discord today are giving me the same vibes as those SaaS that thought they could do everything with only Redis and NodeJS (with no RDBMS in sight) - yes, it works and might even work very well in some cases, right up until it doesn’t and there’s no plan B.
- Macha 3y ago
  Given the reaction by the other users to that comment, it's possible one or more of them reported it as misunderstanding them to be addresses, and the discord content moderation team also adopted a shoot first attitude.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Your average CS agent slogging through helpdesk tickets (particularly for a company whose core users are gamers and normies) might not even know what an ASN is. So if you're faced with something that looks to you like a bunch of addresses, and your employer has a strict no-doxxing policy... I can see why they're not budging on this one.
    - Macha 3y ago
      Sure, you can see the incentives for the CS agent to act that way, but I don't think that negates the point of this post - if you're relying on it for business, you should probably consider a provider that has not set up their CS staff's incentives this way.
      - spondylosaurus 3y ago
        Which is totally fair, especially in this context. In general (not you specifically) people don't always have a ton of sympathy for CS agents, so I just like to offer reminders that what they do is tough. Particularly if you're fielding requests or moderating content in contexts you're not familiar with, or in a language that you didn't grow up speaking. And really, to your point—Discord is a general-purpose platform, not a technical platform or business platform, and its CS agents probably aren't equipped to deal with complex technical or business problems. It's kind of on OP for trying to use it that way.
        account42 3y ago
        > Which is totally fair, especially in this context. In general (not you specifically) people don't always have a ton of sympathy for CS agents, so I just like to offer reminders that what they do is tough. Particularly if you're fielding requests or moderating content in contexts you're not familiar with, or in a language that you didn't grow up speaking. CS agents are literally there so the rest of the company can avoid dealing with customers. If that means worse results for the customer then ire at the support agent makes sense. Don't take a job making the world worse if you don't like beeing blamed for that. Is the company forcing to make peoples life worse rather than better? Quit. Not always that easy, I know, but that's hardly the customer's fault either.
predictabl3 3y ago
Did you not see people warning against this previously? These warnings are like "make backups", "use a password manager". Afaict, people are either going to, and have, or they're going to be lazy and assume it won't hurt them until it does.
slau 3y ago
[flagged]
- bottiger1 3y ago
  It was deleted by the discord support. I presume it was deleted when I got banned. I don't have a screenshot of what it was before because there is no way to log all activity on discord, nor did I expect to get banned. You can confirm the contents of the message from the people talking about it here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=... And yes this is also a campaign to get my account unbanned and also a PSA that you should be thinking about alternatives to Discord like Slack. The moderation and support system displayed here is atrocious.
  - slau 3y ago
    Is there any chance someone reported you (the message, more specifically) for doxxing? I use Discord with a variety of clients, and there’s _a lot_ of technical logs, including lists of locations, and in some cases even addresses. I’ve never had an issue. I also run a small community of a few thousand users, and haven’t seen anything like this… unless someone was reported. In any case, commiserations, and I hope you weren’t the only owner/admin of some servers.
    - bottiger1 3y ago
      Yes it is very possible. I have also posted asns in private channels before and nothing ever happened. It was only after I posted it in a public channel that I got banned. There are a few competitors that are really jealous of our success.
      - Earwig 3y ago
        From googling your username, it sounds like you are connected to Skial, the TF2 server? So I'm guessing you posted ASNs of (in your words, basically ISPs) of some players on your server, indicating generally where they live. Was it connected to specific people? I can see why Discord would consider that private info.
asu_thomas 3y ago
[flagged]
swyx 3y ago
i mean, Midjourney would beg to differ, I think they've done plenty well basing their business on discord.
- rat9988 3y ago
  Midjourney has been successful and then what?
- julienreszka 3y ago
  it's a huge business risk
- bottiger1 3y ago
  Ok and what if randomly one day they get banned? They lose 90% of their customers that don't want to move off Discord?
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I doubt that Discord is the driver behind their success. They could have used IRC and people would go out of their way to engage with them because what they're doing was so interesting at the time. If they get banned from Discord, the vast majority of the community will move to wherever they go. This is a different situation than something like app stores where if Apple bans you, that's the end of your company. Users simply cannot get your app from somewhere else, at least not without giving an Android vendor $1000. Nobody will do that.
    - bottiger1 3y ago
      That might have been true before, but there are viable competitors popping up.
    - playday 3y ago
      I wish they used irc instead of discord, the UX options available are much better. As it is I can barely use mid journey.
Ekaros 3y ago
I'm not sure if Verified & Partnered servers are treated different, but unless you have explicit contract with Discord their moderation can be rather flaky. That should be understood reality if you use any third-party platform. Also it is open to question was it this activity. Or something else. Or just being present or member of some server where something against ToS happened.
- bottiger1 3y ago
  I am quite confident that it was this activity. It is the only thing that fit this description: "Your account maliciously shared or participated in the sharing of the personal or private information of another user." It was also the only message of mine that was deleted in the past week.
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  Is it a common practice for Discord to enter in contractual obligations with businesses that use Discord as a central support or distribution channel? I've never heard of this before and given what happened to OP it seems like this should be (a) common knowledge that you can do this and (b) a default option for businesses to consider, if Discord is indeed a big channel for your business. We use Discord as a primary support and community channel and it never crossed our minds to make a contract with them, but now I'm thinking about it..
- Macha 3y ago
  Partnered servers are definitely not. There was a kneejerk moderation action taking in the past to ban the primary FFXIV server after a user posted some illegal content there, reported their own illegal content, and deleted the message afterwards so mods couldn't locate it. Considering where Discord came from, it was a surprising move to not even ask the operators of the server or share any information until they were facing user pitchforks.
lldb 3y ago
If what you say is true, take them to arbitration. They usually have to pay the arbitrator’s fees and you can typically do it over email/video call.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Is that a Discord specific arbitration that's available, or something else?
  - ivanmontillam 3y ago
    Arbitration court. A court where businesses can resolve minor disputes before going to higher instances.
version_five 3y ago
I'm super risk averse so I would never build a business around a single point of failure like that - but I know that there is money to be made taking this risk (at least VC money, presumably real money). Look at everybody building off OpenAI, look at AWS, Shopify, etc. I'll never base my business around a platform, but I'll miss out on many opportunities, even if it's a big risk. All that to say the warning won't stop people.
- sneak 3y ago
  The Apple App Store is a similar single point of failure and both Uber and Instagram would not have become what they are today if they had not built their businesses on the back of the concept that Apple will not arbitrarily ban them. When they launched, their web apps didn't exist (and you couldn't access gps or photos from web apps anyway, so their services were impossible except for via the App Store). Then again, so did Tumblr.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Cynically, if you run the gamut become hugely successful, the rules stop applying so strictly to you (eg banning Uber unilaterally would be a great way for Apple to create Android users, especially if you think about Uber drivers on iPhone) but become a moat to new challengers.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  AWS staples like EC2, S3, RDS are safe as long as you control the domain outside of it and have backups outside.
emrah 3y ago
Platform risk is very real
ivanmontillam 3y ago
I've always been wary of adopting Discord, at all. Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel like I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either by the platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they don't quite understand sound business principles like Platform Risk. If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a business owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you don't control? You might assume a Platform Risk, and be fully aware of it (and in the meantime, capture the capital to have your own platform or contract services from another platform less volatile), or you might not be aware of it at all, or if you're aware, you just play dumb and say "it won't be a problem, that happens to others, not to me". I just get discouraged, I never end up joining these Discord communities and I don't buy the product/service the company is selling, I feel it distasteful. In these SaaS days where providers can get away with not having a proper Support department or they are too big for you to go ahead and sue them face-to-face... why'd you put your neck on the line this way? It feels so needless.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel like I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either by the platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they don't quite understand sound business principles like Platform Risk. >If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a business owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you don't control? [...] Why is discord any different than other platforms like office365 or AWS? Do you feel the same about companies using those platforms as well?
  - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
    AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. As terrible as AWS and Microsoft are as companies, at least they have an established reputation in B2B software. It’s an apples to apple-flavored candy comparison.
    - 3y ago
travisporter 3y ago
Discord won't let you use a VOIP number so I can't even get on it
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It's bizarre how inconsistent they are with this. I signed up with a shady anonymous email, only use it through a VPN and have given them no phone number, but they're still happy to let me use this account. I'm half convinced these companies inconsistently apply these sort of policies to sow doubt and get the users gaslighting each other about what the actual policies and rules are.
  - Macha 3y ago
    I think there's definitely some level of "account reputation" based risk management going on there. My account is similar, but it also dates back to near the origin of the service.
  - deadbunny 3y ago
    "Servers" can set only phone verified users to be able to join. Depending on your usage of Discord you may have never joined a server that has thet turned on.
    - account42 3y ago
      Even outside such "servers", discord may or may not demand a phone number based on some kind of trust score. Get reported a lot -> better have a phone. Happen to get an IP previously used by someone who got reported a lot -> better have a phone. Use an uncommon browser version -> likely going to need a phone number. Have a slow connection during signup -> gib phone number "to show you are not a bot". Like any such scheme, it barely slows down determined actors since many (especially mobile) ISPs hand out new IP addresses like candy. But I bet it looks good on reports about how many evil users they stopped and lets not think too much about legit users like gp getting caught up in this - those are a small enough fraction that Discord can ignore them without consequence.
  - 3y ago
gabereiser 3y ago
Do. Not. Launch. On Discord. They are getting worse and worse towards their users. The “platform” was never designed for this, it’s painfully obvious. There’s no knowledge base, no support system, no sense of organization, no professionalism, just bots doing “stuff” as a product. Is FastAPI that hard? Is building a customer portal that difficult? I guess I’m showing my age but I use discord for gaming and chatting with friends, not to balance my checkbook or pay my bills or assist my coding or design architectural diagrams. Occasionally it will help me make a pretty image that would otherwise take me weeks… Or help be brainstorm a sketch of a creature. However, the UX of discord is problematic towards anything other than a gaming community.
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  > However, the UX of discord is problematic towards anything other than a gaming community. Discord was built with a core target market and really they've nailed it. But I really have to wonder what a business is doing when they have their support chat or whatever on discord. I have no idea why someone thinks a chat platform that talks about school clubs, gaming groups, and art communities is the place to conduct business. To me, it's a bit of a red flag when a company chooses a tool that is clearly not designed for business and doesn't even try to pretend like it is when there are tons that are.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    I think it says a lot about the 'designed for business' apps that discord is doing well in competing with them despite not being designed for business. If Slack and Teams had any sense they would be taking notes from discord (Matrix is, which is good, but they are still lacking in implementation quality and the network effects are pretty killer)
    - that_guy_iain 3y ago
      For me, it's more of a sign that the company isn't mature enough to use the correct tools and they've just used the chat system they use to chat with their buddies because it's easier.
temp0826 3y ago
[flagged]
opheliate 3y ago
I agree it’s not a TOS violation, but I do think it could potentially be a shitty move to post the ASN from which a specific user is connecting to your service, if they’ve not said it’s okay for you to do so. If you’re from a small town with a local ISP, associating that town with your first name could be enough to specifically identify you, with the help of yellow-pages directory sites. Even just knowing someone’s state or country is a data point that can be used to narrow down their identity. For the privacy minded, this could be very unfortunate. I’m not sure why you would be publicly posting the ASN from which a user is connecting anyway? Could you explain the context a bit more here?
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  Where did they state this was users' ASNs? I only read that they posted a list of them, not associated with any users.
  - opheliate 3y ago
    Good point, I think I misinterpreted the conversation in the second screenshot. I think the point is still relevant though: if these are the ASNs connected to a server which you know has 10 active users, for example, then there is still a potential privacy concern.
    - bottiger1 3y ago
      We have 40+ servers, the ASNs did not have any other information tied to it like usernames as I had already mentioned. This is a clear case of gross negligence by Discord. Even if there was a potential privacy concern, that does not warrant an instant ban with no warning especially from a 7 year old account that is in charge of a Discord server for thousands of users and paying Discord $95/month in the form of boosts.
      - jrflowers 3y ago
        > This is a clear case of gross negligence by Discord. I agree. This is clear because you’ve explained the context wherein you were posting those ASNs, and it is obviously not something anybody would have an issue with because
tasuki 3y ago
Ok, haven't we all known that basing your business on someone else's perform can lead to precarious situations? I understand you have whatever situation with Discord and are upset. It's just the same with Facebook, Reddit, etc.
playday 3y ago
If you are relying on a third party social media platform for your business: - make sure you have at least 3 aged accounts that have full administrative privileges. When one gets banned make/buy a new one immediately. - never use a business account for personal reasons - use a third party service for the sms verification, and a unique email for each account. These three rules have kept me out of trouble in spite of repeated bans.
- HumanOstrich 3y ago
  Where do you keep getting banned and why?
  - ChoHag 3y ago
    [dead]
  - playday 3y ago
    Platforms never tell me why I’ve been banned, so I don’t know. But I’ve been banned at some point by every social media platform I’ve used except hacker news and Google.
  - msla 3y ago
    With enough moderators or administrators over a long enough timeframe, banning is semi-random and ultimately inevitable unless the user is Big-Name or the platform dies first. Misunderstandings, technical errors, and administrative misbehavior conspire to make it so.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  The only reason this works is they haven't taken you seriously yet. Sooner or later they will just ban all of them at once. Correlating them really isn't hard.
  - playday 3y ago
    Yeah I don’t even change ip addresses.
foresto 3y ago
I find the trend of businesses using Discord as their primary support/community platform troubling. It not only makes Discord an unaccountable gatekeeper of business communications and data, as demonstrated here, but also unfairly forces customers to either accept Discord's terms and conditions (which are not what they signed up for) or be left behind as second-class citizens. Good luck, bottiger1. I hope you get it resolved.
msla 3y ago
Clickable links https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=...
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
So discord is something I use for voice-chatting and shitposting with friends, typically while also playing video games. Can anyone tell me why they would ever use it for anything remotely serious? Can you tell me why you'd want to stake your livelihood on a walled garden designed for video game voice chat and sharing rickroll videos? Not only that, I can't take seriously a business that uses discord. Like, what are you doing? Are you selling curated rickroll videos? God-tier cat memes? Do you do shitpost editing and enhancing? Like that what the fuck are you doing that your business needs to use discord, an app for vidya gaymen? It just gives me this puerile vibe, like this "hello fellow kids" kind of thing. I'm genuinely curious what this app does for your business that seemingly couldn't be fulfilled by anything else.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Having a discord link probably sets some expectations about what to expect over there: chat, community, maybe voice chat, chilled vibe, temporary. All that from seeing the smiley joystick logo. It also signals cool modern startup. It may be be super convenient if your audience typically has an account already. Yes a tonne of downsides of course.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Discord is a very featureful chat and voice app that is similar to slack in terms of managed-ness but they have completely different roots. Slack is basically just business email but IMing instead of email, if you know what I mean. It's very business. Business happens there. Synergy and collaboration and so on. Discord, meanwhile, grew out of some combination of gaming/tech IRC servers and gaming ventrilo and teamspeak servers. It's a completely different vibe and clientele that just happens to have a very similar feature set to slack. So having a discord for anything that's gaming or programming/techy-adjacent makes a lot of sense and there's a big preexisting community there. I launched an OSRS plugin and we set up a discord channel for it. It was a niche thing, very niche, and we never really took it very far (it was sort of partly just an excuse to try out using managed k8s for the backend server that the plugin was a client for). We did 0 marketing aside from listing in the OSRS plugin marketplace and putting the discord link in the description. Suddenly me and my pal had like 100+ people in our discord and as many users of our site. With 0 marketing and a very simple MVP. And we didn't do any BI or anything but afaict the attach rate of discord joining to using our plugin at least once was very high, well over 50%. People even asked a few questions and said the project was cool. So yeah. While I wouldn't literally run my business on it, as a "fan site" it's very useful and valuable.
GuB-42 3y ago
It is probably a bad idea do rely entirely on any one of the "big tech" companies, including the big names like Amazon and Google. There are many stories of companies being kicked out for random reasons, and with no one who can resolve your problem on the other end. I would treat them as a risk. You can work with them, but you have to consider that they can fail you randomly, and have some kind of backup plan or insurance. It is ironic since one of the big selling point of, say, cloud providers is that unlike using your own computers that can catch fire, they can guarantee data integrity and availability. But it is kind of a moot point if they can ban your account randomly because you triggered their bots.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  RIP AWS
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Had 24h production outage (could temporarily rebuild in a test account luckily) due to this so it is a real thing.
maxbond 3y ago
May I ask what the context of your message was? Presumably one of the people on that server reported you, and in the messages you posted, people seem taken aback (eg "did you just..."). I'm curious what the context was and why they took the impression it was unusual? What were these ASNs in relation to?
- bottiger1 3y ago
  It was to show that we had a lot of users in Asia, yet none of them were using our servers in Asia. I find it kind of crazy that people here are doing all these mental gymnastics to justify Discord's behavior. ISPs are not considered personal information. There is no reasonable way to de-anonymize it when there are thousands to millions of customers per ISP.
- badwolf 3y ago
  This piece seems to be missing for some unknown reason. What is the purpose of posting ASN and ISP physical addresses?
  - bottiger1 3y ago
    ISP physical addresses were not posted, only the ASN was. Look at the original post. 22773 ASN-CXA-ALL-CCI-22773-RDC, US 5432 PROXIMUS-ISP-AS, BE 577 BACOM, CA This is the layout of what was posted. These are not even addresses.
smcg 3y ago
I would never conduct business on Discord. It's for gaming not business.
Cloudef 3y ago
Thought this would be common sense
CapstanRoller 3y ago
>They threatened to delete my server I really hate how Discord intentionally co-opted the word "server" in order to imply that one can somehow own or control a Discord account. Discord Inc owns and controls all the servers. There's no such thing as "your Discord server", there are only accounts on Discord's SaaS platform, which they can restrict/censor/ban/nuke at any time for any reason. It is not possible for individuals to self-host Discord.
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  Yes, I hate it too. It's a similar situation with Instagram, where people talk about "visit my Instagram page" and it gets indirectly conflated with the word "website"; it's even worse if it's an e-commerce business, e.g. "visit my Instagram store". Then the Instagram account gets killed because it's not intended to be used as an eBay, and these naïve business owners didn't know any better. We are in these times where kids don't grasp the concept of "C:\" drive. They just save all files and don't know what a directory hierarchy is. They conceive Instagram as a web builder, much like Wix.
- telios 3y ago
  For reference, the terminology they use for their API is "guilds." But since most other services in the space used the term "servers" (e.g. TeamSpeak and Mumble, where they were actual distinct servers), I can see why the UI doesn't say guilds.
  - account42 3y ago
    Yes, I too can see why a dishonest corporation would knowingly use incorrect labels to mislead you about how their product compares to the competition. That doesn't excuse that behavior though, quite the opposite.
bennyschmidt 3y ago
"It's like Slack... but with Reddit mods!" I miss the Ventrilo days
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
WalterBright 3y ago
It's not just Discord. Don't ever base your business on the whims of another business under which you have no recourse whatsoever.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  What would an instance or instances of businesses you do have recourse over? I'd argue that for many businesses, your advice is effectively impossible to follow, no matter how well-intentioned it is.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    You ensure that there are multiple businesses who provide you with the same product. So one of them ending business relations with you, doesn't mean the end of your business. For instance, The Pirate Bay, while being highly illegal, hasn't been shutdown in two decades because cutting them from one webhost or domain seller just means they switch to a different one. I am pretty sure there are hundreds of torrent sharing "services" that started as discord/slack servers and were quickly banned with no recourse.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Diversification is one option I'd considered. It's still difficult to achieve for numerous services, particularly location-based utilities (electrical, water, gas, sewerage, data/comms). For hosting services it's somewhat more tractable, though you're looking at multi-tenancy hosting with distinct providers. For a small organisation, that's going to be a challenge. (It's a challenge for many sizeable organisations.) Self-hosting is of course another option, and for critical infrastructure probably a worthwhile consideration, though that leaves other risks (e.g., self-owned datacentre outage, personnel risks), and again is challenging for the overwhelming majority of businesses. Even large business sectors often have very few independent systems / solutions / software providers. Banking, healthcare, and numerous other sectors often have only a small handful, and often a single core supplier of critical systems. Often affecting large organisations as well as small ones. It's almost as if attacking the recourse rather than the diversification angle might be necessary.
PUSH_AX 3y ago
What do you recommend if say you do want real-time chat with your users?
jwe 3y ago
I recently saw an interesting service online and wanted to try it. After I saw that the only support option they offered was discord I gave up immediately and searched for something else.
thendrill 3y ago
So much people here sound like boomers and are failing to see the niech that discord is filling... The closest thing we have to an actual "metaverse" is discord.....
jbverschoor 3y ago
Bans are like digital jail. It makes no sense to put everyone in jail for life for crossing a red light. There should be a reasonable maximum on it
molticrystal 3y ago
While not foolproof, a good metric is being wary of any platform that wants your phone number(google, facebook, discord, twitter, etc), these tend to be the ones that seem like places you can build a foundation on, but really they are ephemeral and you can unilaterally lose access to years to decades at any time. Get the data exports if available regularly if you are using them. Try to roll out your own internal commutation services in house if possible, it might be a hassle, but now you are likely seeing just how valuable it is to have true control over your own accounts.
KomoD 3y ago
Someone probably reported you, try appealing and explain, if you're actually able to reach a human, I've been on Discord for 8+ years without any issues.
- clnq 3y ago
  "It works on my machine"
clnq 3y ago
I worked for a company that used Discord as the main internal coms tool. Aside the privacy and infosec concerns, staff would get suspended and quarantined often. And not for messages, but for things like using multiple accounts for business needs out of one machine/IP (like over VPN). I think that even to this day, verifying multiple accounts with one phone number raises red flags for Discord. It's just built as an end-user product, not fit for business needs. We would always be anxious around meeting externals or release dates for our sw because Discord could knock staff offline at any moment. Don't use it for anything serious. Not as it is in 2023. Things could change in the future.
spajus 3y ago
My discord server was flagged as "offensive" and removed from public listings without giving a clear reason why. It took me weeks to accidentally discover the cause, which was the name of a channel: #bugs-minor. Renaming it to #bugs removed the flagged status.
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  Sweet mercy.
- account42 3y ago
  That is so ridiculous - even if that would not be a false positive from a overly simplistic word match, removing it from public listing and doing nothing else is so far from the wrong action.
tikkun 3y ago
To entrepreneurs: Please build good alternatives to Discord. Like many other commenters, I'd rather not use it. But, to fully switch, I need alternatives that are as easy to use as discord for non-technical users and accomplish the same benefits. Yes there are many alternatives but none that I'd prefer to switch to when considering the things I'd miss.
rowanG077 3y ago
I really don't think discord is special here. This happens with Google. This happens with Valve. This happens with Microsoft. I could go on... Since the US doesn't seem to care about the life breaking powers these companies sometimes wield your only option is to never, and I repeat, never rely on this companies without an easy to use escape hatch.
Endy 3y ago
Discord is a private company, you can't host the software yourself, and the company behind it is questionable at best. I would suggest if you're doing anything internal, Slack is the closest, but whenever possible, IRC or something self-hosted is better. There's a lot of risk involved in using a Discord - at best it should be a public-facing PR tool which is strictly and constantly moderated.
ohashi 3y ago
I see a lot of folks blindly yelling about how discord is bad and you should use 'something else.' And why 'something else' is different/trusted/whatever. But this experience isn't unique to discord. It happens with a lot of common tools. We've run into issues with google suspending/filtering things because we were talking about something that got flagged somewhere (guessing malware). I work a lot with domains and operated registrars, so having lists of domains was common. But sometimes domains were flagged (think expiring domains) and google messes with them. We had spreadsheets deleted/restricted (on paid accounts). Realized emails were being filtered, without any warning/notification that mentioned specific domains. Yeah, that was a fun one to realize when they ask why you haven't responded for days and you watched the email send, again, and again. And you debugged it down to the domain triggering blackholing without issues. Either you end up having to have some degree of trust or roll your own everything. But these issues pop up with service providers not infrequently if you're working with data.
adi8080 3y ago
Very true, I've a text-to-code product and I see so many users trying to generate code using random channels, having already assumed that we'd have a discord bot!
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Lmao, Discord is for gaming. It's essentially the "now" version of Mumble and Teamspeak. Why anyone would use it instead of something business orientated like Slack or Microsoft Teams is a bit odd. I could understand for a start-up/small project, but people should migrate to something professional once they start making some cash. I suppose it's almost like app developers basing their entire businesses on the whims and unfair practices of App stores...
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> Think twice before you decide to base your business around ... s/Discord/most any platform that if they get snitty, you die./
reciprocity 3y ago
I think it's a bunch of bullshit that Discord employees also control the Discord subreddit. This wasn't always the case until the previous moderators thought it was a good idea for some reason to have employees moderate the subreddit [0]. Your case is yet another example of why that was a bad decision. Employees get to filter out anything at their discretion. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9pbpc4/people_who_are_employed_at_discord_should_not_be/ https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9pbpc4/people_w...
Puradolia 3y ago
As a young adult who grew up with Discord throughout teens, discord has been so detrimental to my health. If it wasn't my group of comp peers in uni and hometown friends' choice of app, let alone the many fan projects with a home base on discord, I'd fuck off. I've considered setting up my own matrix server for friends, but well I've noticed ppl are unwilling to adopt new tech like matrix, and pc would drain dorm energy limit. All social media is bad in some way, but I feel that while I had bad experiences on all major platforms, Discord is by far the worst. There's so many servers run by people who are unfit to run them, whether due to power or greed complex, mental illness, or immature/irresponsible. May just be my experience (I was a real mess and a cunt during my teens), but even when things weren't my fault, it felt so toxic and horrible. And not to mention Discord's practices and stuff as a company. For instance, getting rid of the reporting system for bad actors, at one point an employee giving a bad actor backdoor to accounts, allowing them to access freely. More than that, but that's all I care to mention.

502 points by bottiger1 3y ago

jtchang 3y ago

Does Discord charge or have some type of contractual agreement with you? It does seem odd -- they must have some checking on addresses and personal information and what you posted just happens to match that regex.

galenmarchetti 3y ago
Does there exist a Discord business plan / any way to even get such a contractual agreement in place? We use Discord as a support channel for our developer tool and I've never heard of an option to get enterprise support...but if such a thing does exist and Discord offers it, I'd probably take it given OPs story
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  For dev support, why choose Discord over Gitter, or even IRC? Slack and Teams also allow free guest access for this scenario too. That said, group-chat-based support seems like the wrong solution in the first place - simply because Discord is a silo and they don’t make it easy to get your own data back out of it (this page is an infuriating read: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-Requesting-a-Copy-of-your-Data https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004027692-R... ). Also, the fact that Discord themselves are using ZenDesk for their own support (instead of, y’know… using Discord) is another reason to not use Discord like this. Orgs using Discord today are giving me the same vibes as those SaaS that thought they could do everything with only Redis and NodeJS (with no RDBMS in sight) - yes, it works and might even work very well in some cases, right up until it doesn’t and there’s no plan B.
Macha 3y ago
Given the reaction by the other users to that comment, it's possible one or more of them reported it as misunderstanding them to be addresses, and the discord content moderation team also adopted a shoot first attitude.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Your average CS agent slogging through helpdesk tickets (particularly for a company whose core users are gamers and normies) might not even know what an ASN is. So if you're faced with something that looks to you like a bunch of addresses, and your employer has a strict no-doxxing policy... I can see why they're not budging on this one.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Sure, you can see the incentives for the CS agent to act that way, but I don't think that negates the point of this post - if you're relying on it for business, you should probably consider a provider that has not set up their CS staff's incentives this way.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Which is totally fair, especially in this context. In general (not you specifically) people don't always have a ton of sympathy for CS agents, so I just like to offer reminders that what they do is tough. Particularly if you're fielding requests or moderating content in contexts you're not familiar with, or in a language that you didn't grow up speaking. And really, to your point—Discord is a general-purpose platform, not a technical platform or business platform, and its CS agents probably aren't equipped to deal with complex technical or business problems. It's kind of on OP for trying to use it that way.
      - account42 3y ago
        > Which is totally fair, especially in this context. In general (not you specifically) people don't always have a ton of sympathy for CS agents, so I just like to offer reminders that what they do is tough. Particularly if you're fielding requests or moderating content in contexts you're not familiar with, or in a language that you didn't grow up speaking. CS agents are literally there so the rest of the company can avoid dealing with customers. If that means worse results for the customer then ire at the support agent makes sense. Don't take a job making the world worse if you don't like beeing blamed for that. Is the company forcing to make peoples life worse rather than better? Quit. Not always that easy, I know, but that's hardly the customer's fault either.

predictabl3 3y ago

Did you not see people warning against this previously? These warnings are like "make backups", "use a password manager". Afaict, people are either going to, and have, or they're going to be lazy and assume it won't hurt them until it does.

slau 3y ago

[flagged]

bottiger1 3y ago
It was deleted by the discord support. I presume it was deleted when I got banned. I don't have a screenshot of what it was before because there is no way to log all activity on discord, nor did I expect to get banned. You can confirm the contents of the message from the people talking about it here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=... And yes this is also a campaign to get my account unbanned and also a PSA that you should be thinking about alternatives to Discord like Slack. The moderation and support system displayed here is atrocious.
- slau 3y ago
  Is there any chance someone reported you (the message, more specifically) for doxxing? I use Discord with a variety of clients, and there’s _a lot_ of technical logs, including lists of locations, and in some cases even addresses. I’ve never had an issue. I also run a small community of a few thousand users, and haven’t seen anything like this… unless someone was reported. In any case, commiserations, and I hope you weren’t the only owner/admin of some servers.
  - bottiger1 3y ago
    Yes it is very possible. I have also posted asns in private channels before and nothing ever happened. It was only after I posted it in a public channel that I got banned. There are a few competitors that are really jealous of our success.
    - Earwig 3y ago
      From googling your username, it sounds like you are connected to Skial, the TF2 server? So I'm guessing you posted ASNs of (in your words, basically ISPs) of some players on your server, indicating generally where they live. Was it connected to specific people? I can see why Discord would consider that private info.

asu_thomas 3y ago

[flagged]

swyx 3y ago

i mean, Midjourney would beg to differ, I think they've done plenty well basing their business on discord.

rat9988 3y ago
Midjourney has been successful and then what?
julienreszka 3y ago
it's a huge business risk
bottiger1 3y ago
Ok and what if randomly one day they get banned? They lose 90% of their customers that don't want to move off Discord?
- jrockway 3y ago
  I doubt that Discord is the driver behind their success. They could have used IRC and people would go out of their way to engage with them because what they're doing was so interesting at the time. If they get banned from Discord, the vast majority of the community will move to wherever they go. This is a different situation than something like app stores where if Apple bans you, that's the end of your company. Users simply cannot get your app from somewhere else, at least not without giving an Android vendor $1000. Nobody will do that.
  - bottiger1 3y ago
    That might have been true before, but there are viable competitors popping up.
  - playday 3y ago
    I wish they used irc instead of discord, the UX options available are much better. As it is I can barely use mid journey.

Ekaros 3y ago

I'm not sure if Verified & Partnered servers are treated different, but unless you have explicit contract with Discord their moderation can be rather flaky. That should be understood reality if you use any third-party platform. Also it is open to question was it this activity. Or something else. Or just being present or member of some server where something against ToS happened.

bottiger1 3y ago
I am quite confident that it was this activity. It is the only thing that fit this description: "Your account maliciously shared or participated in the sharing of the personal or private information of another user." It was also the only message of mine that was deleted in the past week.
galenmarchetti 3y ago
Is it a common practice for Discord to enter in contractual obligations with businesses that use Discord as a central support or distribution channel? I've never heard of this before and given what happened to OP it seems like this should be (a) common knowledge that you can do this and (b) a default option for businesses to consider, if Discord is indeed a big channel for your business. We use Discord as a primary support and community channel and it never crossed our minds to make a contract with them, but now I'm thinking about it..
Macha 3y ago
Partnered servers are definitely not. There was a kneejerk moderation action taking in the past to ban the primary FFXIV server after a user posted some illegal content there, reported their own illegal content, and deleted the message afterwards so mods couldn't locate it. Considering where Discord came from, it was a surprising move to not even ask the operators of the server or share any information until they were facing user pitchforks.

lldb 3y ago

If what you say is true, take them to arbitration. They usually have to pay the arbitrator’s fees and you can typically do it over email/video call.

justinclift 3y ago
Is that a Discord specific arbitration that's available, or something else?
- ivanmontillam 3y ago
  Arbitration court. A court where businesses can resolve minor disputes before going to higher instances.

version_five 3y ago

I'm super risk averse so I would never build a business around a single point of failure like that - but I know that there is money to be made taking this risk (at least VC money, presumably real money). Look at everybody building off OpenAI, look at AWS, Shopify, etc. I'll never base my business around a platform, but I'll miss out on many opportunities, even if it's a big risk. All that to say the warning won't stop people.

sneak 3y ago
The Apple App Store is a similar single point of failure and both Uber and Instagram would not have become what they are today if they had not built their businesses on the back of the concept that Apple will not arbitrarily ban them. When they launched, their web apps didn't exist (and you couldn't access gps or photos from web apps anyway, so their services were impossible except for via the App Store). Then again, so did Tumblr.
- maxbond 3y ago
  Cynically, if you run the gamut become hugely successful, the rules stop applying so strictly to you (eg banning Uber unilaterally would be a great way for Apple to create Android users, especially if you think about Uber drivers on iPhone) but become a moat to new challengers.
quickthrower2 3y ago
AWS staples like EC2, S3, RDS are safe as long as you control the domain outside of it and have backups outside.

emrah 3y ago

Platform risk is very real

ivanmontillam 3y ago

I've always been wary of adopting Discord, at all. Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel like I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either by the platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they don't quite understand sound business principles like Platform Risk. If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a business owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you don't control? You might assume a Platform Risk, and be fully aware of it (and in the meantime, capture the capital to have your own platform or contract services from another platform less volatile), or you might not be aware of it at all, or if you're aware, you just play dumb and say "it won't be a problem, that happens to others, not to me". I just get discouraged, I never end up joining these Discord communities and I don't buy the product/service the company is selling, I feel it distasteful. In these SaaS days where providers can get away with not having a proper Support department or they are too big for you to go ahead and sue them face-to-face... why'd you put your neck on the line this way? It feels so needless.

gruez 3y ago
>Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel like I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either by the platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they don't quite understand sound business principles like Platform Risk. >If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a business owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you don't control? [...] Why is discord any different than other platforms like office365 or AWS? Do you feel the same about companies using those platforms as well?
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  AWS and Microsoft are very, very different from Discord. Discord originated in gaming and caters to a largely non-paid user base, that background alone is enough to be skeptical. As terrible as AWS and Microsoft are as companies, at least they have an established reputation in B2B software. It’s an apples to apple-flavored candy comparison.
  - 3y ago

travisporter 3y ago

Discord won't let you use a VOIP number so I can't even get on it

mcpackieh 3y ago
It's bizarre how inconsistent they are with this. I signed up with a shady anonymous email, only use it through a VPN and have given them no phone number, but they're still happy to let me use this account. I'm half convinced these companies inconsistently apply these sort of policies to sow doubt and get the users gaslighting each other about what the actual policies and rules are.
- Macha 3y ago
  I think there's definitely some level of "account reputation" based risk management going on there. My account is similar, but it also dates back to near the origin of the service.
- deadbunny 3y ago
  "Servers" can set only phone verified users to be able to join. Depending on your usage of Discord you may have never joined a server that has thet turned on.
  - account42 3y ago
    Even outside such "servers", discord may or may not demand a phone number based on some kind of trust score. Get reported a lot -> better have a phone. Happen to get an IP previously used by someone who got reported a lot -> better have a phone. Use an uncommon browser version -> likely going to need a phone number. Have a slow connection during signup -> gib phone number "to show you are not a bot". Like any such scheme, it barely slows down determined actors since many (especially mobile) ISPs hand out new IP addresses like candy. But I bet it looks good on reports about how many evil users they stopped and lets not think too much about legit users like gp getting caught up in this - those are a small enough fraction that Discord can ignore them without consequence.
- 3y ago

gabereiser 3y ago

Do. Not. Launch. On Discord. They are getting worse and worse towards their users. The “platform” was never designed for this, it’s painfully obvious. There’s no knowledge base, no support system, no sense of organization, no professionalism, just bots doing “stuff” as a product. Is FastAPI that hard? Is building a customer portal that difficult? I guess I’m showing my age but I use discord for gaming and chatting with friends, not to balance my checkbook or pay my bills or assist my coding or design architectural diagrams. Occasionally it will help me make a pretty image that would otherwise take me weeks… Or help be brainstorm a sketch of a creature. However, the UX of discord is problematic towards anything other than a gaming community.

that_guy_iain 3y ago
> However, the UX of discord is problematic towards anything other than a gaming community. Discord was built with a core target market and really they've nailed it. But I really have to wonder what a business is doing when they have their support chat or whatever on discord. I have no idea why someone thinks a chat platform that talks about school clubs, gaming groups, and art communities is the place to conduct business. To me, it's a bit of a red flag when a company chooses a tool that is clearly not designed for business and doesn't even try to pretend like it is when there are tons that are.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  I think it says a lot about the 'designed for business' apps that discord is doing well in competing with them despite not being designed for business. If Slack and Teams had any sense they would be taking notes from discord (Matrix is, which is good, but they are still lacking in implementation quality and the network effects are pretty killer)
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    For me, it's more of a sign that the company isn't mature enough to use the correct tools and they've just used the chat system they use to chat with their buddies because it's easier.

temp0826 3y ago

[flagged]

opheliate 3y ago

I agree it’s not a TOS violation, but I do think it could potentially be a shitty move to post the ASN from which a specific user is connecting to your service, if they’ve not said it’s okay for you to do so. If you’re from a small town with a local ISP, associating that town with your first name could be enough to specifically identify you, with the help of yellow-pages directory sites. Even just knowing someone’s state or country is a data point that can be used to narrow down their identity. For the privacy minded, this could be very unfortunate. I’m not sure why you would be publicly posting the ASN from which a user is connecting anyway? Could you explain the context a bit more here?

CameronNemo 3y ago
Where did they state this was users' ASNs? I only read that they posted a list of them, not associated with any users.
- opheliate 3y ago
  Good point, I think I misinterpreted the conversation in the second screenshot. I think the point is still relevant though: if these are the ASNs connected to a server which you know has 10 active users, for example, then there is still a potential privacy concern.
  - bottiger1 3y ago
    We have 40+ servers, the ASNs did not have any other information tied to it like usernames as I had already mentioned. This is a clear case of gross negligence by Discord. Even if there was a potential privacy concern, that does not warrant an instant ban with no warning especially from a 7 year old account that is in charge of a Discord server for thousands of users and paying Discord $95/month in the form of boosts.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      > This is a clear case of gross negligence by Discord. I agree. This is clear because you’ve explained the context wherein you were posting those ASNs, and it is obviously not something anybody would have an issue with because

tasuki 3y ago

Ok, haven't we all known that basing your business on someone else's perform can lead to precarious situations? I understand you have whatever situation with Discord and are upset. It's just the same with Facebook, Reddit, etc.

playday 3y ago

If you are relying on a third party social media platform for your business: - make sure you have at least 3 aged accounts that have full administrative privileges. When one gets banned make/buy a new one immediately. - never use a business account for personal reasons - use a third party service for the sms verification, and a unique email for each account. These three rules have kept me out of trouble in spite of repeated bans.

HumanOstrich 3y ago
Where do you keep getting banned and why?
- ChoHag 3y ago
  [dead]
- playday 3y ago
  Platforms never tell me why I’ve been banned, so I don’t know. But I’ve been banned at some point by every social media platform I’ve used except hacker news and Google.
- msla 3y ago
  With enough moderators or administrators over a long enough timeframe, banning is semi-random and ultimately inevitable unless the user is Big-Name or the platform dies first. Misunderstandings, technical errors, and administrative misbehavior conspire to make it so.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
The only reason this works is they haven't taken you seriously yet. Sooner or later they will just ban all of them at once. Correlating them really isn't hard.
- playday 3y ago
  Yeah I don’t even change ip addresses.

foresto 3y ago

I find the trend of businesses using Discord as their primary support/community platform troubling. It not only makes Discord an unaccountable gatekeeper of business communications and data, as demonstrated here, but also unfairly forces customers to either accept Discord's terms and conditions (which are not what they signed up for) or be left behind as second-class citizens. Good luck, bottiger1. I hope you get it resolved.

msla 3y ago

Clickable links https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=...

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

So discord is something I use for voice-chatting and shitposting with friends, typically while also playing video games. Can anyone tell me why they would ever use it for anything remotely serious? Can you tell me why you'd want to stake your livelihood on a walled garden designed for video game voice chat and sharing rickroll videos? Not only that, I can't take seriously a business that uses discord. Like, what are you doing? Are you selling curated rickroll videos? God-tier cat memes? Do you do shitpost editing and enhancing? Like that what the fuck are you doing that your business needs to use discord, an app for vidya gaymen? It just gives me this puerile vibe, like this "hello fellow kids" kind of thing. I'm genuinely curious what this app does for your business that seemingly couldn't be fulfilled by anything else.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Having a discord link probably sets some expectations about what to expect over there: chat, community, maybe voice chat, chilled vibe, temporary. All that from seeing the smiley joystick logo. It also signals cool modern startup. It may be be super convenient if your audience typically has an account already. Yes a tonne of downsides of course.
atomicnumber3 3y ago
Discord is a very featureful chat and voice app that is similar to slack in terms of managed-ness but they have completely different roots. Slack is basically just business email but IMing instead of email, if you know what I mean. It's very business. Business happens there. Synergy and collaboration and so on. Discord, meanwhile, grew out of some combination of gaming/tech IRC servers and gaming ventrilo and teamspeak servers. It's a completely different vibe and clientele that just happens to have a very similar feature set to slack. So having a discord for anything that's gaming or programming/techy-adjacent makes a lot of sense and there's a big preexisting community there. I launched an OSRS plugin and we set up a discord channel for it. It was a niche thing, very niche, and we never really took it very far (it was sort of partly just an excuse to try out using managed k8s for the backend server that the plugin was a client for). We did 0 marketing aside from listing in the OSRS plugin marketplace and putting the discord link in the description. Suddenly me and my pal had like 100+ people in our discord and as many users of our site. With 0 marketing and a very simple MVP. And we didn't do any BI or anything but afaict the attach rate of discord joining to using our plugin at least once was very high, well over 50%. People even asked a few questions and said the project was cool. So yeah. While I wouldn't literally run my business on it, as a "fan site" it's very useful and valuable.

GuB-42 3y ago

It is probably a bad idea do rely entirely on any one of the "big tech" companies, including the big names like Amazon and Google. There are many stories of companies being kicked out for random reasons, and with no one who can resolve your problem on the other end. I would treat them as a risk. You can work with them, but you have to consider that they can fail you randomly, and have some kind of backup plan or insurance. It is ironic since one of the big selling point of, say, cloud providers is that unlike using your own computers that can catch fire, they can guarantee data integrity and availability. But it is kind of a moot point if they can ban your account randomly because you triggered their bots.

paulddraper 3y ago
RIP AWS
quickthrower2 3y ago
Had 24h production outage (could temporarily rebuild in a test account luckily) due to this so it is a real thing.

maxbond 3y ago

May I ask what the context of your message was? Presumably one of the people on that server reported you, and in the messages you posted, people seem taken aback (eg "did you just..."). I'm curious what the context was and why they took the impression it was unusual? What were these ASNs in relation to?

bottiger1 3y ago
It was to show that we had a lot of users in Asia, yet none of them were using our servers in Asia. I find it kind of crazy that people here are doing all these mental gymnastics to justify Discord's behavior. ISPs are not considered personal information. There is no reasonable way to de-anonymize it when there are thousands to millions of customers per ISP.
badwolf 3y ago
This piece seems to be missing for some unknown reason. What is the purpose of posting ASN and ISP physical addresses?
- bottiger1 3y ago
  ISP physical addresses were not posted, only the ASN was. Look at the original post. 22773 ASN-CXA-ALL-CCI-22773-RDC, US 5432 PROXIMUS-ISP-AS, BE 577 BACOM, CA This is the layout of what was posted. These are not even addresses.

smcg 3y ago

I would never conduct business on Discord. It's for gaming not business.

Cloudef 3y ago

Thought this would be common sense

CapstanRoller 3y ago

>They threatened to delete my server I really hate how Discord intentionally co-opted the word "server" in order to imply that one can somehow own or control a Discord account. Discord Inc owns and controls all the servers. There's no such thing as "your Discord server", there are only accounts on Discord's SaaS platform, which they can restrict/censor/ban/nuke at any time for any reason. It is not possible for individuals to self-host Discord.

ivanmontillam 3y ago
Yes, I hate it too. It's a similar situation with Instagram, where people talk about "visit my Instagram page" and it gets indirectly conflated with the word "website"; it's even worse if it's an e-commerce business, e.g. "visit my Instagram store". Then the Instagram account gets killed because it's not intended to be used as an eBay, and these naïve business owners didn't know any better. We are in these times where kids don't grasp the concept of "C:\" drive. They just save all files and don't know what a directory hierarchy is. They conceive Instagram as a web builder, much like Wix.
telios 3y ago
For reference, the terminology they use for their API is "guilds." But since most other services in the space used the term "servers" (e.g. TeamSpeak and Mumble, where they were actual distinct servers), I can see why the UI doesn't say guilds.
- account42 3y ago
  Yes, I too can see why a dishonest corporation would knowingly use incorrect labels to mislead you about how their product compares to the competition. That doesn't excuse that behavior though, quite the opposite.

bennyschmidt 3y ago

"It's like Slack... but with Reddit mods!" I miss the Ventrilo days

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

WalterBright 3y ago

It's not just Discord. Don't ever base your business on the whims of another business under which you have no recourse whatsoever.

dredmorbius 3y ago
What would an instance or instances of businesses you do have recourse over? I'd argue that for many businesses, your advice is effectively impossible to follow, no matter how well-intentioned it is.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  You ensure that there are multiple businesses who provide you with the same product. So one of them ending business relations with you, doesn't mean the end of your business. For instance, The Pirate Bay, while being highly illegal, hasn't been shutdown in two decades because cutting them from one webhost or domain seller just means they switch to a different one. I am pretty sure there are hundreds of torrent sharing "services" that started as discord/slack servers and were quickly banned with no recourse.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Diversification is one option I'd considered. It's still difficult to achieve for numerous services, particularly location-based utilities (electrical, water, gas, sewerage, data/comms). For hosting services it's somewhat more tractable, though you're looking at multi-tenancy hosting with distinct providers. For a small organisation, that's going to be a challenge. (It's a challenge for many sizeable organisations.) Self-hosting is of course another option, and for critical infrastructure probably a worthwhile consideration, though that leaves other risks (e.g., self-owned datacentre outage, personnel risks), and again is challenging for the overwhelming majority of businesses. Even large business sectors often have very few independent systems / solutions / software providers. Banking, healthcare, and numerous other sectors often have only a small handful, and often a single core supplier of critical systems. Often affecting large organisations as well as small ones. It's almost as if attacking the recourse rather than the diversification angle might be necessary.

PUSH_AX 3y ago

What do you recommend if say you do want real-time chat with your users?

jwe 3y ago

I recently saw an interesting service online and wanted to try it. After I saw that the only support option they offered was discord I gave up immediately and searched for something else.

thendrill 3y ago

So much people here sound like boomers and are failing to see the niech that discord is filling... The closest thing we have to an actual "metaverse" is discord.....

jbverschoor 3y ago

Bans are like digital jail. It makes no sense to put everyone in jail for life for crossing a red light. There should be a reasonable maximum on it

molticrystal 3y ago

While not foolproof, a good metric is being wary of any platform that wants your phone number(google, facebook, discord, twitter, etc), these tend to be the ones that seem like places you can build a foundation on, but really they are ephemeral and you can unilaterally lose access to years to decades at any time. Get the data exports if available regularly if you are using them. Try to roll out your own internal commutation services in house if possible, it might be a hassle, but now you are likely seeing just how valuable it is to have true control over your own accounts.

KomoD 3y ago

Someone probably reported you, try appealing and explain, if you're actually able to reach a human, I've been on Discord for 8+ years without any issues.

clnq 3y ago
"It works on my machine"

clnq 3y ago

I worked for a company that used Discord as the main internal coms tool. Aside the privacy and infosec concerns, staff would get suspended and quarantined often. And not for messages, but for things like using multiple accounts for business needs out of one machine/IP (like over VPN). I think that even to this day, verifying multiple accounts with one phone number raises red flags for Discord. It's just built as an end-user product, not fit for business needs. We would always be anxious around meeting externals or release dates for our sw because Discord could knock staff offline at any moment. Don't use it for anything serious. Not as it is in 2023. Things could change in the future.

spajus 3y ago

My discord server was flagged as "offensive" and removed from public listings without giving a clear reason why. It took me weeks to accidentally discover the cause, which was the name of a channel: #bugs-minor. Renaming it to #bugs removed the flagged status.

michaelcampbell 3y ago
Sweet mercy.
account42 3y ago
That is so ridiculous - even if that would not be a false positive from a overly simplistic word match, removing it from public listing and doing nothing else is so far from the wrong action.

tikkun 3y ago

To entrepreneurs: Please build good alternatives to Discord. Like many other commenters, I'd rather not use it. But, to fully switch, I need alternatives that are as easy to use as discord for non-technical users and accomplish the same benefits. Yes there are many alternatives but none that I'd prefer to switch to when considering the things I'd miss.

rowanG077 3y ago

I really don't think discord is special here. This happens with Google. This happens with Valve. This happens with Microsoft. I could go on... Since the US doesn't seem to care about the life breaking powers these companies sometimes wield your only option is to never, and I repeat, never rely on this companies without an easy to use escape hatch.

Endy 3y ago

Discord is a private company, you can't host the software yourself, and the company behind it is questionable at best. I would suggest if you're doing anything internal, Slack is the closest, but whenever possible, IRC or something self-hosted is better. There's a lot of risk involved in using a Discord - at best it should be a public-facing PR tool which is strictly and constantly moderated.

ohashi 3y ago

I see a lot of folks blindly yelling about how discord is bad and you should use 'something else.' And why 'something else' is different/trusted/whatever. But this experience isn't unique to discord. It happens with a lot of common tools. We've run into issues with google suspending/filtering things because we were talking about something that got flagged somewhere (guessing malware). I work a lot with domains and operated registrars, so having lists of domains was common. But sometimes domains were flagged (think expiring domains) and google messes with them. We had spreadsheets deleted/restricted (on paid accounts). Realized emails were being filtered, without any warning/notification that mentioned specific domains. Yeah, that was a fun one to realize when they ask why you haven't responded for days and you watched the email send, again, and again. And you debugged it down to the domain triggering blackholing without issues. Either you end up having to have some degree of trust or roll your own everything. But these issues pop up with service providers not infrequently if you're working with data.

adi8080 3y ago

Very true, I've a text-to-code product and I see so many users trying to generate code using random channels, having already assumed that we'd have a discord bot!

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Lmao, Discord is for gaming. It's essentially the "now" version of Mumble and Teamspeak. Why anyone would use it instead of something business orientated like Slack or Microsoft Teams is a bit odd. I could understand for a start-up/small project, but people should migrate to something professional once they start making some cash. I suppose it's almost like app developers basing their entire businesses on the whims and unfair practices of App stores...

michaelcampbell 3y ago

> Think twice before you decide to base your business around ... s/Discord/most any platform that if they get snitty, you die./

reciprocity 3y ago

I think it's a bunch of bullshit that Discord employees also control the Discord subreddit. This wasn't always the case until the previous moderators thought it was a good idea for some reason to have employees moderate the subreddit [0]. Your case is yet another example of why that was a bad decision. Employees get to filter out anything at their discretion. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9pbpc4/people_who_are_employed_at_discord_should_not_be/ https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9pbpc4/people_w...

Puradolia 3y ago

As a young adult who grew up with Discord throughout teens, discord has been so detrimental to my health. If it wasn't my group of comp peers in uni and hometown friends' choice of app, let alone the many fan projects with a home base on discord, I'd fuck off. I've considered setting up my own matrix server for friends, but well I've noticed ppl are unwilling to adopt new tech like matrix, and pc would drain dorm energy limit. All social media is bad in some way, but I feel that while I had bad experiences on all major platforms, Discord is by far the worst. There's so many servers run by people who are unfit to run them, whether due to power or greed complex, mental illness, or immature/irresponsible. May just be my experience (I was a real mess and a cunt during my teens), but even when things weren't my fault, it felt so toxic and horrible. And not to mention Discord's practices and stuff as a company. For instance, getting rid of the reporting system for bad actors, at one point an employee giving a bad actor backdoor to accounts, allowing them to access freely. More than that, but that's all I care to mention.