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I think privacy is a dumb argument in this context, and "privacy" as a worthwhile tech concept is at risk of being cargo-culted to death. A Discord is a public

I think privacy is a dumb argument in this context, and "privacy" as a worthwhile tech concept is at risk of being cargo-culted to death. A Discord is a public space. For most users, hanging out in Discord is akin to hanging out in your local bar. No once cares too much that anyone at the bar can see everyone and overhear all of their conversations. If anything, I am there to be in a public place. The tables are nice and the drinks are cold. And if the owner sees we are unhappy and having a bad time, and uses that information to improve the bar, so be it. Even if Discord guaranteed absolute privacy, they can't guarantee that some other users is not just scraping the conversation and reposting it somewhere. The danger of "privacy" is when people are being mislead about how alone they are. But just falling back onto a "more private = more gooder" is not an actual argument about risk associated with using Discord. You can try to convince your friends to go to a worse bar with worse service strictly on the basis that it's more private. And maybe that's a good argument for your friends or your context! But you can't actually assume all of your friends are only going to care about that. It's not as convincing an argument as some people think it is to run into a Discord server where hundreds of users and moderators are having very public conversations, yelling "none of this is private!", and expecting them to care.

bishbosh 2y ago
With how ubiquitous discord has become for online spaces, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope for some degree of privacy, particularly in DMs or small close nit servers. I think the point being made, with all the abrasion of a sander, was that even in the most controlled case of DMs or two person servers, all information is still available to third party admins, which wouldn't be the case with something like self hosted Matrix server. I agree with you that this is hardly the most convincing point to 'the friend group', but with every electron of the online experience being mined for potential revenue, there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.
- legitster 2y ago
  DMs on Discord are end-to-end encrypted. [edit: wrong] So the only privacy concerns are on the public servers. > there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning. I think something that gets lost in online conversation is the amount of data that gets "siphoned" for QoS purposes. So even for paid services like Netflix or Discord that don't really have an ad or data business, they are collecting their data specifically to drive investment in uptime, reliability, UI, services, etc. So the quality of the product is almost always going to be better than any privacy-first alternative. But part of the reason I like Discord is they have a sustainable monetization model. They make money on something! That is not ads!
  - bishbosh 2y ago
    Googling it, everything I am seeing says that no part of discord is end-to-end encrypted. Do you have a source for that, I thought they were pretty adamantly against it? I don't know that I agree with your point about data being necessary for QoS. Many of the issues I have with Discord go ignored, and I've found that more than ignorance, resources are the issue with features and reliability of open source projects. Further I Googled around a bit to see if I could find if Discord was profitable yet, and didn't see anything suggesting it was. There were some revenue break downs, but obviously that's far from profit. I know there were lay-offs not too long ago, but I would be curious if you have evidence that their making profit. Though it seems they've taken a number of rounds of investments [0], so if the sale of nitro and other premium services don't cover it. I would not be shocked to learn about an expansion of the "Quest" system that to be more ad like. I remember this specifically being mentioned by the CEO on the Decoder podcast. My largest grips with Discord is how the community has adopted it as a replacement for forums, and that they have very little interest in linux support, but the former is not really their fault, and the ladder is just the reality of a lot of software. Even beyond those gripes though, I don't know that I agree it is a paragon that won't enshitify like any other for-profit software. [0] https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats
    - legitster 2y ago
      Apologies, I misread something. They are not E2E encrypting, but they are not opposed to it: https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-discord https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-d...
      - bishbosh 2y ago
        I think the important thing to note here is that this is about Audio and Video, which the likely don't store anyway for costs reasons. What I was talking about was text in DMs, which would be much more simple to implement, but they choose not to.
        2y ago

bishbosh 2y ago

With how ubiquitous discord has become for online spaces, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope for some degree of privacy, particularly in DMs or small close nit servers. I think the point being made, with all the abrasion of a sander, was that even in the most controlled case of DMs or two person servers, all information is still available to third party admins, which wouldn't be the case with something like self hosted Matrix server. I agree with you that this is hardly the most convincing point to 'the friend group', but with every electron of the online experience being mined for potential revenue, there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning.

legitster 2y ago
DMs on Discord are end-to-end encrypted. [edit: wrong] So the only privacy concerns are on the public servers. > there is something to be said for technologies that work a barrier to data siphoning. I think something that gets lost in online conversation is the amount of data that gets "siphoned" for QoS purposes. So even for paid services like Netflix or Discord that don't really have an ad or data business, they are collecting their data specifically to drive investment in uptime, reliability, UI, services, etc. So the quality of the product is almost always going to be better than any privacy-first alternative. But part of the reason I like Discord is they have a sustainable monetization model. They make money on something! That is not ads!
- bishbosh 2y ago
  Googling it, everything I am seeing says that no part of discord is end-to-end encrypted. Do you have a source for that, I thought they were pretty adamantly against it? I don't know that I agree with your point about data being necessary for QoS. Many of the issues I have with Discord go ignored, and I've found that more than ignorance, resources are the issue with features and reliability of open source projects. Further I Googled around a bit to see if I could find if Discord was profitable yet, and didn't see anything suggesting it was. There were some revenue break downs, but obviously that's far from profit. I know there were lay-offs not too long ago, but I would be curious if you have evidence that their making profit. Though it seems they've taken a number of rounds of investments [0], so if the sale of nitro and other premium services don't cover it. I would not be shocked to learn about an expansion of the "Quest" system that to be more ad like. I remember this specifically being mentioned by the CEO on the Decoder podcast. My largest grips with Discord is how the community has adopted it as a replacement for forums, and that they have very little interest in linux support, but the former is not really their fault, and the ladder is just the reality of a lot of software. Even beyond those gripes though, I don't know that I agree it is a paragon that won't enshitify like any other for-profit software. [0] https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats
  - legitster 2y ago
    Apologies, I misread something. They are not E2E encrypting, but they are not opposed to it: https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-discord https://discord.com/blog/encryption-for-voice-and-video-on-d...
    - bishbosh 2y ago
      I think the important thing to note here is that this is about Audio and Video, which the likely don't store anyway for costs reasons. What I was talking about was text in DMs, which would be much more simple to implement, but they choose not to.
      - 2y ago