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Discord has been using ML to determine the gender and age of some of its users
- CM30 2y agoSo, is there a reason they could be doing this? Like from Discord's perspective, what would this actually accomplish business wise? I'm kinda drawing a blank here.
- KZerda 2y agoDemographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners -- being able to say they have approximately x 18-24s is valuable to pitching partnerships, etc.
- qmarchi 2y agoMarket research and marketing. Given their rollout of "quests", it's probably another marketing dimension that someone could tailor their ads for. Ex, maybe don't show the "ad" during the day because they're likely at work if they're >24, or show a "quest" that's targeted towards nostalgia.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners I'm thinking about the workflow here. First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male. Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male. Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior. We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?
- kwhitefoot 2y agoI think the world is being segmented into those who are exposed to targeted advertising and those who never or almost never see any advertising because we use uBlock Origin.
- LoganDark 2y agoOh, you. Thinking uBlock Origin actually blocks advertising. It doesn't block sponsored blog posts, sponsored comments, paid reviews, conflicts of interest, marketing copy on landing pages, etc. Advertising is everywhere. And uBlock can't protect you from anything not in your web browser.
- greenish_shores 2y agoI don't think I use any proprietary web services outside of either my web browser (90%) or command-line CURL (10%).
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI have 3 PC game platforms, Discord's desktop client, 4 cloud services, and probably some company hubs for drivers (Nvidia, Logitech, Razer, etc) that phone home. You can definitely access all these through a browser intermediary, but many don't. Steam sort of needs to stay on your device for DRM purposes anyway.
- olyjohn 2y agoWhat? You mean it doesn't block billboards or radio ads either? It doesn't block my friends when they start talking about their iPhones or being Vegan?
- zugi 2y agoThere's just no avoiding those astroturfed marketing campaigns being pushed by Big Vegan.
- cratermoon 2y agoSelling ads for Red Bull to high school and collage age boys. Selling ads for paroxetine to women aged 40-50.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoAge and gender are super important for marketing but I'm not sure why it's a big deal. Your (inexact) age and your gender aren't private.
- kwhitefoot 2y agoThe fact that your online behaviour outs you as gay to an algorithm might be something that you want to keep private though.
- notaustinpowers 2y agoI think the "big deal" about it comes from the fact that users did not give that information willingly to Discord. If I did not provide you that information, why would I expect you to know it? And in a state that California (where Discord is based), I have the right to know how my data is used/shared, and request it be deleted. But I can't request information to be deleted if I don't know you have it. I can't know how you're using/sharing my data if I don't know you have it.
- ar_lan 2y agoI guess they are saying they don't need to ask you anymore - if you willingly give your actions (servers you browse, things you say, chats you react to, etc.), and they can infer from that, then where's the foul? I think it comes before that - the first pieces of data they are scraping. I don't buy that the problem is that they can and will infer your age/gender/etc. based on that.
- notaustinpowers 2y agoThe foul is that PII per California law the user has the right to know what information is collected, how it's used/shared, and request the data to be deleted. Discord is based in California and will be under subject to these laws. Looking through Discord's ToS and Privacy Policy, gender isn't mentioned once. And age is mentioned once in the Privacy Policy in regards to account creation. This practice circumvents the law by gathering this information without the user's express permission.
- phone8675309 2y agoIn the best case it helps them identify under-18s to keep them away from adult content/creepers.
- shostack 2y agoThis isn't just useful for their own marketing as some may imply. My guess is building out an ad network/platform for 3p advertisers to run ads on it.
- smolder 2y agoDiscord has nearly finished killing IRC, so it must be time to enshittify!
- MisterTea 2y agoUntil Discord makes it impossible to run an IRC server or client I dont see IRC going anywhere.
- tredre3 2y agoYou, Me, and the 12 other IRC users remaining aren't going anywhere. But denying that Discord has effectively killed IRC is just self-delusion in my opinion.
- smolder 2y agoYeah, protocols are unkillable, but the interest in IRC was definitely hurt by Discord. Had they started putting ads in the client from the start, I doubt so many groups would have migrated to it.
- Mindwipe 2y agoUnder the UK Online Safety Act pretty much every website going forward is required to figure out the age of every user - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/introduction-to-the-childrens-code/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re... This is almost certainly a starting part of implementing that, designed to reduce the amount of users they have to ask for harder age checks for.
- duxup 2y agoMaybe finding out if you've got under aged users in order to prevent them from using the service or accessing resources they should not? The obvious answer is marketing but I think there "could" be a real use case for: "We want to know if we've got under aged users accessing what they shouldn't and they're not honest about their age so we have to figure it out somehow."
- dotnet00 2y agoI recall hearing that they added some sort of advertising into the streaming built into discord. Maybe they're intending to gradually expand that and make them more targeted. https://www.cnet.com/tech/discord-is-adding-ads-but-with-a-gamer-twist-what-we-know-so-far/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/discord-is-adding-ads-but-with-a-g...
- xeromal 2y agoA non-marketing answer is determining whether users are under age for regulatory purposes. Discord was and still is a gaming chat platform so the draw of young children can be dangerous. Could be used to trigger a verification workflow in the event certain municipalities start requiring it.
- tick_tock_tick 2y agoDoes the EU require it to track for underage users?
- PurpleRamen 2y agoNot tracking, but EU and their countries have strong laws to protect children. And the Digital Service Act did raise the bar in all of EU. So figuring out users they are supposed to protect, might be beneficial to prevent high penalties. And DSA was finalized in October 2022, so the date matches.
- bananenpubs 2y ago> So, is there a reason they could be doing this? Ummm... like, business?
- rchaud 2y agoAds. These apps have no other way to monetize.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- owulveryck 2y agoI think that in Europe, that will soon be prohibited without declaration and explicit consent.
- Mindwipe 2y agoUnder the DMA's requirements to protect children I think it will be basically mandatory to do this. In the UK it already is under the Online Safety Bill.
- duxup 2y agoIf you suspected you had underage users using your service illicitly. Could you not use such methods to find them? I wonder at what point analytics, queries, or ML to determine age gets in the way of actually keeping them from getting into things they shouldn't... Under age users aren't going to just tell you their age honestly, so you'd have to use some method to derive their age.
- littlestymaar 2y ago> If you suspected you had underage users using your service illicitly. Could you not use such methods to find them? You could use something like that and it would be counted as “legitimate interest” under GDPR, but: - you wouldn't need (and then would be forbidden) to do segmentation between more categories than “too young”/“old enough”. This is not what they are doing here. - you'd still need to tell the users that you're doing it, and provide a way for the users to modify that data upon request > Under age users aren't going to just tell you their age honestly, so you'd have to use some method to derive their age. You don't have a legitimate interest of knowing their age, only for knowing if they are underage or not.
- handity 2y agoIf that's true, it's pretty ridiculous. I wish legislation would get at the core issue, which is not processing, but that collection happens at all. Normalizing surveillance, but asking companies to please not do anything with that data for minors, is such a far cry from what we deserve.
- 0xC0ncord 2y agoI wonder if Discord may end up using this in some capacity to determine whether someone may be under the age of 13, which is the minimum age you need to be in order to have an account according to their terms of service.
- polishdude20 2y agoAt some point they'll just resort to calling the metric "person type" and the gender and age will be baked into it. They'll then use that "person type" metric to determine what you want to see, hear and consume.
- andy99 2y agoThat's existed forever, it's customer segmentation. It's the underlying reason people want this info, age etc is just a proxy. From an advertising perspective nobody cares how old you actually are, they want to know if you're likely to respond to an ad.
- rchaud 2y agoCustomer segmentation is based on user-submitted info like name, zip code and product SKU. This is using typed communications by anonymous users to make a guess about those attributes.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>nobody cares how old you actually are, they want to know if you're likely to respond to an ad. sadly, people will pay a lot to know the age of someone precisely because they just wanna sell you stuff. Which is the problem in and of itself. I'm glad governments are slowly starting to stamp down on this
- jerf 2y agoDiscord says I'm a 21ecaf26-4e27-477d-a6c0-45c2c69a7645 but I identify as a 076db833-35be-4fa8-856e-fe2fa4128cee.
- treflop 2y agoPeople already do this on their own and advertisers already use it. The Venn diagram of people who subscribe to 'The Economist' minimally overlaps with subscribers to the 'Razorcake' zine and very few companies would want to have an ad in both.
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- whalesalad 2y agodoes anyone know the name of the monospaced font being used in this screenshot
- I_o_IllI__o_I 2y ago[dead]
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoLater replies say it's Miracode; https://github.com/IdreesInc/Miracode https://github.com/IdreesInc/Miracode
- kunley 2y ago...but why?
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoMoneys.
- Animats 2y agoCan you read your own Discord stats, or do you have to be an advertiser to get this info?
- jackson1442 2y agoyou can get this data from a compliance export
- spencerchubb 2y agoI would be more surprised if a social app wasn't doing this
- duxup 2y agoI would assume the same. Even if just to address issues with under age users.
- ajsnigrutin 2y agoIf someone asks, i'm 16/f/cali!
- mcbuilder 2y agoyour inbox must be an interesting place
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI actually was that at one point, but I would tell people 53/eunuch/Afghanistan. It did a pretty good job of culling the people I didn't want to talk to and keeping the people I did want to talk to.
- slothtrop 2y agodidyoujustassumemygender.png The data analytics work, that's why companies use them.
- tacocataco 2y agoThe beginning of enshitification of discord (while 100% expected) for some reason hits harder then any other service I've used throughout all these years. It has entirely replaced social media for me. It just felt more organic to me then anything else. So... since I've heard about the ads coming to discord, I have looked into alternatives. They do exist, in varying quality, and there are programs for some of them that make a "bridge" from a discord server to your new platform. It's possible to have your cake and eat it to. Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love. I have high hopes for matrix because of the idea of it. Perhaps my lackluster experience was because I didn't choose the best client available. I'm still trying new things here. https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/ Revolt is the more complete product as of today. https://revolt.chat/ https://revolt.chat/ Spacebar I have yet to try but it's on my radar. https://github.com/spacebarchat https://github.com/spacebarchat I just wanted to see if anyone else had other recommendations for me to try. I really would appreciate help here. Hopefully something open source and self hosted so I can stop migrating and sink some roots in somewhere. Oh crap, is it IRC?
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoI'm just happy they resisted the buyout by Microsoft. > Matrix looks really close, but it needs ALOT of love. Matrix is just a protocol. Clients competing with Discord would be things like Element. https://element.io/ https://element.io/ It's no Discord (which itself is no WLM, by the way -- rip to oldschool fat clients which had even less of a business model and whose features you can't have at all or have to pay for now), but I sorely hope it or something open source gets there one day.
- karaterobot 2y agoI've been hosting a Mattermost server as an invite-only chat board for about six years. Slack is the direct comp. Mattermost is not immune to being enshittified either, but at least I get some warning: I can read the patch notes before updating the server, and when I see they've turned fully evil, I just won't upgrade the server, and we can start looking for an escape route before the clients break. Since I own the server, I have some confidence I'm the only person who can possibly read the user data too. That is to say, I know that I won't do it, whereas I believe Discord and Slack would.
- ianbutler 2y agoDiscord is also using Ml to determine the topic of conversation in a voice channel and share it to potential listeners to decide if they want to join the conversation or not. Frankly I find that unacceptable since the expectation is if no one is in the channel but the person you’re talking with you wouldn’t expect randoms to be pseudo listening in. Edit: Not certain why I've been downvoted, I can easily provide proof in the form of screenshots
- ambichook 2y agoi know the feature you mean and... it only sends it to people who are in that server. i dislike it because a ML model is looking at my text and trying to regurgitate it, but theres no expectation that the people who get those notifications were never able to see. people lurk all the time, and discord messages arent ephemeral
- ianbutler 2y agoYeah that’s true, but if they’re not there. They're not there. The content of the conversation isn’t meant for them.
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoUpvoted, I'd like to see screenshots.
- ianbutler 2y agohttps://ibb.co/W05Qk50 https://ibb.co/W05Qk50
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoThanks. Do you know if it works the same in desktop app + web browser?
- jasonlotito 2y agoThe commentary here shows how ignorant people are with things like mandatory reporting and protecting underage children from online predators. Discord is most assuredly a vector for attack, and someone pretending to be some other age or being under age is very much a real issue that is not uncommon on even smaller social networks. While I'm sure some of this is related to advertising and marketing, the simple fact is, any social network (of which you can lump Discord into) will already be doing things similar to this, even if not for advertising. If not, they are willfully ignorant. This isn't some "pretend" problem either. Anyone suggesting otherwise is ignorant. It's that simple.
- olyjohn 2y agoIf they really gave a shit, then why didn't they just ask for age on sign up? Or require people to enter that information to keep their account open? Why use some hocus pocus shit to try to guess people's ages?
- ambichook 2y agothey do and people lie. regardless, i strongly dislike the idea of an ML model being used to try to guess this. can't wait for one to hallucinate that i'm 10
- jasonlotito 2y agoPeople lie! Once again, ignorance rears it's head. This isn't some hocus pocus shit. This is stuff that actually works. Not doing this at this point is practically being complicit in child trafficking. If you think this is hyperbole, you are ignorant and need to stand back and listen and learn. Hocus pocus? Seriously, this is programming 101. Talk to a programmer, it's not complicated.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 2y agoAnd another privacy violation to be prosecuted under GDPR: go NOYB, go!
- chaoskanzlerin 2y agoy'know, the GDPR has known a Right To Be Forgotten since 2018, and yet in Discord there's no way to delete your messages in bulk (instead they're being pseudonymized upon account deletion)
- littlestymaar 2y agoI'm not sure about this but I think pseudonymization is fine from GDPR perspective, you are effectively forgotten, but not your writings.
- chownie 2y agoI've never put any stock in this point, your writings cannot be made distinct from you. How many messages do you need before you can accrue enough personally identifying information to reveal who that person was? Every time they mention where they live, how old they are, what happens about that? None of that goes away if you only soft delete the user's profile, leaving all the content and context for anyone to rebuild at their leisure.
- celdon25 2y agoPretty sure the original account id is still tied to the message and sent to clients even after deletion. People can easily correlate it if they can prove just one of the messages belonged to you.
- ninininino 2y agoIn this thread, people don't understand the size and scope of the Pig Butchering problem or Sexploitation scam problem or the Underage User problem or the Revenge Reporting problem or how ML can be used for the user's benefit and safety or for anti-crime. But you know, go on and assume any and all technology is used for $$$$ and never to you know, stop grandmas from losing their life savings or kids from being talked to by pedophiles.
- AzzyHN 2y agoSince discord doesn't serve ads, I assume this is just for data collection that then gets sold? Like an analytics company?
- tredre3 2y agoThey're increasingly interested in ads[1] because, somehow, $600M revenue doesn't make them profitable. 1. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/discord-starts-down-the-dangerous-road-of-ads-this-week/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/discord-starts-down-...
- lemonlime0x3C33 2y agoas long as they are accurate I do not mind. I was annoyed that as women who is also an engineer google's ad profile always insisted I was a single man. Despite my many skincare/make up/ and women's clothing/shoe purchases. I guess they weighted reference schematics and data sheet searches more heavily than other things. If you are going to show me targeted ads please make them ads I want to see.
- ed_mercer 2y agoThis is really smart. You can get around privacy laws and still derive useful data without having to ask the user personal information.
- matrix87 2y agomore surprised that they made it this obvious tbh, somebody is probably getting shafted for not obfuscating this
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoProbably down to the developers' literal reading of, and desire to comply with GDPR-like laws. Or, something similar is in various companies' data takeout packages, but nobody's intently looking for it or thinks it's newsworthy. Personally, the only time I've looked through one was from an amazon account because I couldn't find where on the website to read past customer support chats.
- thinkingemote 2y agoDiscord last month announced they would be adding advertising to their app. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903541 This would make sense with regards to this. It's essential data to be able to sell ads to companies. If you are an open source or community project on the platform you should probably set up a Libre alternative...
- kkfx 2y agoWell... Might hit hard a large slice of anagraphically adults witch are still mentally children... Some might even trigger scandals being in significant positions in the social pyramid...