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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

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.
      - legitster 2y ago
        I found this AMA response from the company: > E2E encryption does not equal superior encryption. It does not mean that your messages are safer from being hacked. All it means is that Discord would not have the key used by the two end parties and could not immediately decrypt the messages sent. > People have, and are right this second trying to, used our platform to do very, very illegal things. Like child pornography. Like selling illegal drugs. Like even worse things. It is our legal and moral obligation to do everything reasonable in our power to enforce the law and our Terms of Service. If we were not able to decrypt messages we effectively neuter our ability to do this. > The more clever amongst you may have noticed that I emphasized the word "reasonable" in the previous paragraph. This is because how we enforce our Terms of Service and the law is defined within the ToS and Privacy Policy. We do not go into random people's DMs and start reading messages. We don't even go into public servers and read the chat in there to see if people are violating the law/ToS. There are over 100,000,000 users of Discord and it's obviously not possible to do manually. We could use a program that reads over all your messages to alert us, but we do value privacy and have stated as much publicly many many times. We only act on things that are reported to us with evidence provided as outlined in https://dis.gd/HowToReport https://dis.gd/HowToReport >> It’s all fun and games until the first people go to jail because of something they wrote on Discord > The following sentence is purely my own personal opinion: I believe that if someone writes something in Discord and it leads to them getting arrested for a crime that they are in fact guilty of, then the system is working excellently and should not be changed. > At any rate, I hope that answers your question as to why we haven't added end-to-end encryption. If that's not sufficient for you, I understand and would encourage you to continue to use any of the other platforms you mentioned that do have E2E.

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.
    - legitster 2y ago
      I found this AMA response from the company: > E2E encryption does not equal superior encryption. It does not mean that your messages are safer from being hacked. All it means is that Discord would not have the key used by the two end parties and could not immediately decrypt the messages sent. > People have, and are right this second trying to, used our platform to do very, very illegal things. Like child pornography. Like selling illegal drugs. Like even worse things. It is our legal and moral obligation to do everything reasonable in our power to enforce the law and our Terms of Service. If we were not able to decrypt messages we effectively neuter our ability to do this. > The more clever amongst you may have noticed that I emphasized the word "reasonable" in the previous paragraph. This is because how we enforce our Terms of Service and the law is defined within the ToS and Privacy Policy. We do not go into random people's DMs and start reading messages. We don't even go into public servers and read the chat in there to see if people are violating the law/ToS. There are over 100,000,000 users of Discord and it's obviously not possible to do manually. We could use a program that reads over all your messages to alert us, but we do value privacy and have stated as much publicly many many times. We only act on things that are reported to us with evidence provided as outlined in https://dis.gd/HowToReport https://dis.gd/HowToReport >> It’s all fun and games until the first people go to jail because of something they wrote on Discord > The following sentence is purely my own personal opinion: I believe that if someone writes something in Discord and it leads to them getting arrested for a crime that they are in fact guilty of, then the system is working excellently and should not be changed. > At any rate, I hope that answers your question as to why we haven't added end-to-end encryption. If that's not sufficient for you, I understand and would encourage you to continue to use any of the other platforms you mentioned that do have E2E.