However, this alone caused me to be instantly banned. After reaching out to support, they basically told that me I could not use my present phone number for verification and that they couldn't tell me why, and couldn't help me further with that.
I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?
I have contacted Discord support through their ticket system twice, I have contacted Discord on Twitter (DM); but to no avail
We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?
I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.
But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.
Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"
Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.
This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.
If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.
I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.
If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.
Nice example you gave, because this literally happened between 2002 and 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List The No Fly List eventually swelled to close to a million people. There was no one entity you could sue, because airlines had their own algorithms for matching, so even if you werent on the list, but the algo fuzzy-matched you, you were effectively on the list. Matching names is notoriously bad. There was an ACLU lawsuit, but it was a much bigger effort than anything being described on this thread.
In summary: lawsuits against Government systems are slow and not necessarily something to aspire to as a better system.
I can't wait for EU to propose something similar to fix these kind of issues, or a minimum level of customer service per every thousand users.
This should be the case even if the tenant isn't paying cash for services.
That will inevitably lead to more government spying at the end of the day. No thanks.
- various private blocklists pop up identifying alleged spammers. These have a false positive rate, but they're useful enough to become popular
- deliverability starts to become an issue; some people can't deliver because they're on a blocklist
- people start to notice that a big, popular service has both good antispam and good deliverability
- after a while, everyone's back on big, popular services which occasionally false-positive ban people.
Its just common sense that a spam bot should be nuked on sight but a legitimate user should get a fair hearing before you ban them. Ideally the social media platforms would do something akin to Wikipedia's arbitration committee (basically the Supreme Court of Wikipedia) but scalable by hiring a suitably diverse pool of "unskilled" people for a $15 an hour or so remote job where they decide if a longtime legitimate user should be banned. I think this system would do a much better job of avoiding false positives. A properly functioning spam bot detector shouldn't be detecting any legitimate longtime users whatsoever.
Banning email addresses without sufficient notice to allow accounts tied to that email to be moved to another email should be illegal. You should also have a legal right to access your digital purchases even if your account is banned. There's nothing wrong with not wanting a customer any longer but you shouldn't be able to cause irreparable harm to your customer on their way out the door and there should be safeguards in place to ensure you don't fire any customers by mistake.
For private, personal use at least, you don’t need this for a service that competes with discord. I’m not allowing random strangers into my chats, having an allowlist basically makes spam a non issue.
Now, that doesn’t fix the problem for public channels, but spam/trolling is always an issue on those anyways, and frankly, I don’t understand how people can use discord for that purpose in the first place.
1. if a person I am interesting in delivery to blocks me by mistake - I have an option to ask him to unblock me by other communication means.
2. if my opponent in a public discussion blocks me, other people can still see my arguments.
Both these benefits are absent in a centralized blocking system, no? And I do not see any drawbacks, are there some?
I don't. Regulation is the key in my opinion. Not fully sure what policies need to be enacted, but at the very least prohibit automated bans except for very trivial cases that don't really need human review.
Your response is "mah regulation".
On Hacker News of all places, I'd expect that people were at least willing to take control of their lives and actions, and not to cry from oppressive authority to another, thinking that we can only choose the lesser of two evils.
Where has that spirit gone, really? Is it a generational thing?
If you object, don't click "I agree" to terms of service that you don't feel comfortable with.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma. You can complain about how people always defect on you, but you're doing the exact same thing.
Meanwhile everyone you know clicks "I agree" and you are now excluded from communicating with them. What did this accomplish?
More like "Brazil". In 1984 at least things wasn't also commercialized, and shit worked.
This isn't free or even possible for a lot of people. I think it would be better for society for this cost to be imposed on the Discords/Metas/Googles of the world, than for it to be imposed on their users.
I don't think it can. The problem is that these companies are trying to solve the problem of highly sophisticated attackers, at scale.
>I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.
You're trying to solve a cultural, legal, and regulatory problem with a technological solution - that's never going to work. That a user can be banned (sometimes, across all the platforms, all at once) is a feature for the regulators and platforms themselves.
A nominal payment for the purpose of verification could allow someone to "prove" ownership of a number/email/identity.
I really don't get why you absolutely want to bring blockchain into this. You don't need any kind of cryptographic proof, or ledger, or anything to replace Instagram: all you need is a website on your own domain and you can even host it from an old laptop at home: the web is already decentralized.
Except people don't do that. I don't exactly know why, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's herd behavior, maybe that's the power of marketing, the economy of scale or anything but that's it, people just keep using centralized platforms and that's as true in the blockchain world, people just buy NFT on OpenSea or store their tokens in Coinbase's wallet. The natural dynamic drives to centralization.
If you try to address this social problem with “cool” technology, you won't achieve anything, centralization will happen regardless.
Now since we cannot change the humans being living in this society, we can at least change the laws regulating the said society and stop all that bullshit by making these gigacorps accountable for their actions.
Now if you live in the US and you think the regulations cannot change because the politicians are corrupt, then you should fix your political system first, because no blockchain will protect you against your corrupt governments anyway.
Answer: then you have lost access due to circumstances completely within your control. Contrast that with the amount of control you have over losing your account with a social company. IOW, that’s a total bullshit argument.
Host your own mission critical services, and don’t commit too much to (especially free) third party services.
If people would host "abc liked my tweet" and "xyz follows me" on their own server, then everybody would claim that Billie Eilish liked all their tweets and Joe Biden is their best friend.
People go on social media for the social graph.
You can do that via a central authority (and live in fear that everything is taken from you) or you can do it via cryptographic proof. Self hosting is not a solution.
You also cannot host identity.
If your domain gets stolen from you (search for the horror stories on Google or HN search), your identity is gone. Nothing you can do against it, since you are at the mercy of authorities again: The registrars.
Nobody can ban me from email, or from my own website.
As long as people willingly subscribe to services whose terms explicitly allow to ban users for no reason whatsoever, no. I don't see how this will ever stop.
Sure, assuming I had an Instagram, Discord, or Google account, which I currently do not, they could ban me at any moment and not give a reason, but what is the actual risk? I'm aware they do these things, more than zero times, but as a proportion of total users, how many people does this actually happen to? Is the risk similar to the risk of getting eaten by a shark I take every time I swim in the ocean? Or is it similar to the risk I take running across a highway at 5 in the morning? One of those things doesn't really worry me and one of them does, enough that I never do it.
Without any knowledge of the actual rates at which these events happen, what are we supposed to do with these stories? Sure, we see stories several times a week. But these services have billions of users. If it's really a few users a week, my chances of hitting the lottery are greater. If it's thousands of users a week, then it's something worth worrying about.
Note that this is entirely separate from the discussion everyone else seems to always be having of whether privately-owned computers that host and serve user-submitted multimedia files should be able to legally ban people at all.
If all of these services implemented the policies and procedures needed to bring the number of stories like this to zero, there would be thousands upon thousands of stories about how "BiG tEcH rEfUsEs To SoLvE sPaM aNd FrAuD pRoBlEm".
C'mon. Be real. You know it, I know it, I know you know it, and you know that I know that you know it.
What you DON'T see, regarding all of these stories, is that they almost always get resolved.
Resolutions aren't sexy. Rage is.
"Oh nevermind, my account is back" Doesn't get clicks. OMG THIS MEGACORP DELETED MY SOUL, MY IDENTITY, MY PASSION does.
You don't like this. I know. But there's nothing you, or I, or anyone, or an infinite number of laws or lawsuits can do.
We all know nobody is going to, or realistically is capable of, staffing with humans to such a degree that it will solve this problem.
So you're gonna just have to deal with it.
I just want to delete my account at this point, but I can't since I can't log in.
Happy to connect with you or anyone else reading this and trade ideas / give updates, email in bio.
Just simple JSON messages signed with public-key cryptography (Schnorr) relayed over Websockets. Send your events to many relays so if one chooses to evict you it's not an issue.
Just don't rely on a third party to keep your private key. Not your key, not your identity.
No, the hatred is for the next sentence, which is "Buy my cryptocurrency".
I'd say Kafka. On the bright side, so far no one has woken up and googled himself and seen page after pages of cockroach pictures, not yet at least.
Courts of no worth. Not constructive, only letting a very bullshit trial pass barely once after 80 years of lobotomies doubling their bet every time they lose, martingale, yeah, and had to have the planets align too, and never once falsely confess to anything, that's like day...uh...day...uh...well there I'm lost. Lost track of time.
Like that is shit. Supreme Court knows which country it's in, like why do they need to get sucked up to to that extent to be willing to answer a brain surgeon? Can he even code? Richest specialty of the richest career, to be rich be a doctor once you're a doctor be a brain surgeon, best of the best. Not the best, but come on. No malpractice suits from patients, as far as the patients can tell? Perfection every time!
Like if it did happen, how would you find out? Being told by a factual blog? Search engine? Words? Report? Truth? Text? Dude idealist on a crusade! Moth to a flame!
No like you know I can do the better thing and make a search engine, just in order to show off a blog, just in order to parade pictures of cockroaches. I'm remembering one now, [flash 17:21 Sep 19 2022], Giant Cockroach from Urza's Legacy in mtg, 3{B} 4/2 no abilities. Vanilla. I remembered the name, looked it up, that's googling myself, there's the pictures.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=giant+cockroach+mtg&t=osx&iax=imag...
Boom, there it is. Flashed on it today at that time, the memory was erased, it came back with the specific flashback sensation, I wrote the time down, that's all there is. What's next? Dude any other literature? Chinese torture, something, hardcore shit. Like why not write an entire novel that only takes place inside a torture chamber, a torture chamber retaliation? Dream of the red chamber, dream of the torture chamber ever touched by sunlight, dude don't bore me with hope. Hope will fuck with me as it will, but don't distract from the pain. Like only in the obliuette, [flash 17:25 Sep 19 2022 obliuette], like why zoom out? What else is worth talking about? At least the torture happens in person, not through a camera. The last form of human contact.
These theoretical cyberpunk-like crypto-networks only work in practice if you're uploaded to the matrix. Otherwise they fail the XKCD/538 Wrench Test.
I'm disabled from severe depression resistant to first line treatments, bedridden a lot of the time, and I rely on the platform for most of my social interaction and resources for my hobbies, as far as I can pursue them of course. Discord is invaluable and is basically a monopoly in my cultural bubble.
On Jan 13, they disabled a 7 year old early supporter account with an active Nitro subscription with the reason "Your account posted content that sexualized individuals under the age of 18, or was involved in servers dedicated to such unacceptable content". I've never done this. I learned a lot of people were getting disabled for being in a server that they haven't touched in years and it went rogue or was raided and that stuff was posted there, so I figured I was a victim of a carpet bombing and it was a one-off.
But they continued to disable every new account (12 so far, I lost count). Most of the accounts were disabled in the last two weeks. They left me alone for 6 months until Sep 1 when my 4th account was disabled without the usual explanation email. I made an appeal and not only was it ignored, it was marked solved within 4 hours.
In fact they have not communicated with me at all. They have ignored all of my tickets, have not sent emails for each account that was disabled after the first. Except one time I got an email but the reason was left blank.
A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.
In the last two weeks it was always the same Discord staff assigning themselves to my appeals, "Violet". This includes the one that was marked solved without communication. And they're supposedly experiencing increased ticket volumes.
I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. Only thing I can hope for is Discord to basically die and everyone moves elsewhere, or they leave me alone.
I will be eager to hear about others' results. (No effect, + or -, for me, on a smaller dose. Do, always, start with a smaller dose, in case it works badly for you; and check warnings on drug interactions carefully.) Maybe ask your Dr.
Curious what the mechanism for identifying the VPS account was. Phone number? Some sort of client signature? I don't use discord.
There should have been no other link to me, no fingerprint. This was an environment that has never touched Discord.
As of now I set up a new account that is less-than-discreet, obviously me if they're paying attention, and another account that is very discreet, on a VPN. I'm testing to see if an Android work profile is leaking anything. If both accounts get disabled, then it's back to the drawing board. If the not-so-discreet account gets disabled, the work profile is working and I'm on the right track. Although it sucks to have to abandon my friends and identity over this nonsense, just to stay hidden and be fearful of seeing that damn login screen again.
Hey, if neither get disabled in the next, say, month, maybe this Violet person was fired or they gave up. I can only assume it's them if they're the ones intercepting my appeals every time.
I'm a budding programmer and I maintain(ed) the DarkPlaces engine. In August 2020, I created a Discord server for it with LadyHavoc's blessing, creating a community that brought together professional developers making commercial games using the engine.
...only for me to not be able to participate unless I can poke someone to make time to set up a bridge. Even then, if I'm banned from Discord, who is to say they won't see me talking through a bridge as ban evasion and wipe the bridge, or even the whole server out?
I certainly have my regrets.
You shared furry porn picturing subjects of a questionable age, didn't you?
For gamers, Discord became a no-brainer after not much time. Click to create a server for some friends, send out some invites, and that's pretty much all you need. Built-in game overlay settings, voice chat, and screen sharing. Text and voice channels.
Compare this to the old TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble era, where you'd need to actually manage the installation, and tell people how to connect.
Discord makes it braindead-easy to get started, and the risks you're talking about affect less than 10% of the userbase, probably. Until a more-open platform provides a better experience, Discord will be here to stay among the masses.
Free dedicated voice chat with rich text chat. It was meant to take on Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Mumble etc. And it successfully did.
>or IRC if you're savvy
Totally different use case, not even comparable
> How do people feel ok taking such a big risk?
Well for most people they don't see the risks involved and those who are aware of the risks don't believe it will ever happen to them. Just look at Google accounts as an example. People use Gmail, get themselves locked out of them, and lose pretty much all their digital lives all the time but people still happily rely on Gmail.
Some quickly Googled stats about Gmail (take these number with a pinch of salt cause I've not looked into whats supporting these numbers - https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/ )
> Gmail remains the most popular email platform with over 1.8 billion users worldwide.
> As of April 2022, Gmail holds 29.5% of the email client market share.
> Gmail accounts for 27% of all email opens.
> 75% of all Gmail users access their email on mobile devices.
> 61% of 18-29-year-olds use Gmail.
It is not that it is difficult to use a client (though the authentication i snot obvious - but then I had to think hard about Discord authentication/servers/invitations as well) but everyone is used to have a web interface and mobile clients to start with.
But there's definitely a lower barrier to entry with Discord right now, maybe forever. But maybe there just needs to be time to push through the network effect of discord. I'm vaguely optimistic, I'm seeing Matrix more and more often these days. Still in nerd circles, of course.
I only communicate on Matrix through a web interface.
> I just checked with my team, and upon review of your account, it appears that our detection system has triggered successfully and we will not be removing the phone verification requirement on your account. You'll be required to register a phone number to your Discord account in order to continue the use of it.
This is *after* I explained that I'm still logged in and can fully use Discord in another browser without registering a phone number.
I tried to also get an answer as to whether I'll be locked out of my account if I log out of my account in Firefox, but they didn't tell me.
That's exactly the same response I got, word-for-word, to my lockout ticket [1]. Initially I thought it was a human replying to my ticket, now I'm not so sure.
I will never give my phone to Discord/Twitter etc - just a matter of principle.
[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600556...
I still get notifications on my phone from the logged in account, but when trying to access it's asking for phone verification, which obviously doesn't work because there is no phone number tied to the account!
>>Have an alt account, or help a friend complete their verification? Your phone has just been registered and is on timeout. Unfortunately we can not lift this, and you will need to wait for the end of the timeout to use the number once more, or use a different number to verify the account.
Why? Discord has no obligation to its users, and it's a volatile platform to conduct any mission-critical or business-related communications. The best thing to do is to stop using it.
At first you get an automated response from some bot which is unhelpfull. After some more diggin and poking around you get to a human but they just told me that they don't know details about flagging and cannot do anything in regards to these processes. So basically useless.
I really don't understand why it got so popular
edit: typo
Because enough people never contact support for it to not be a major problem, I assume.
And absolutely stop calling for the use of violence (regulations by government) in these situations. Just because Bob says you cannot come over to the weekly neighborhood BBQs in his backyard does not mean it is ethical for you to call up your police friend to threaten Bob and to make sure you can go. It doesn't matter if you're right and he's wrong. It doesn't matter if everyone in the neighborhood continues to chose to go to his BBQs and you can't. It's still Bob's backyard and he isn't inititing violence against you. Don't do it to him.
Not sure about the regulatory part with Bob’s backyard. What about when Bob intentionally persuades everyone to route all their packages and mail through his house, which he routinely opens, reads and studies to determine their preferences and desires and compile psychological profiles of everyone in the neighborhood which he then discloses to various unidentified third parties including law enforcement, debt collectors, abusers and criminals? What about when Bob uses his control to deny people access to their own communications and stuff, on the grounds that they’re actually his now because it’s at his house and he decided for unspecified reasons that they broke one of his vague and unilaterally-defined rules? What if Bob does this at such a scale that he can now assist the government in undermining the constitutional protections against unwarranted searches, or uses his influence and knowledge to purposefully stoke and manipulate anger in ways that he KNOWS he can’t control and will get people killed or at least ruin their lives, but at least makes him more money?
Do Bob’s property rights need to be balanced against other societal needs then?
It's already balanced. All anyone has to do is make a personal choice rather than invoking calls for coersion.
Discord sucks. The only reason that I use it is because of work.
I remember years ago Microsoft thought someone was pirating their software so they started reading their emails looking for evidence. That seemed wrong to me. A landlord wouldn’t be allowed to snoop through your drawers if they thought you were stealing, they’d need to convince the police to get a warrant.
And in this discord case, once a company agrees to create an account for you and start providing service, they shouldn’t be allowed to “evict” you overnight for no good reason. There should be a proper process with protections when ending the relationship.
Its like $5-20 dollars/mo, circumvents phone number based account barriers, circumvents voip and burner number discrimination
each iphone has 2 sim card slots, can give dates and strippers a phone number that doesn't have green bubbles when texted, amplifying my broad population legitimacy by an order of magnitude (its USA obviously it matters), while still keeping them segregated
I pay more for an uber, or a drink, or some stupid SaaS seat. just a social and internet freedom tax.
at this point just make it normal
I hadn't added the phone number to my old account and when I later wanted to do so I was informed it could only be assigned to one.
So I removed the number from the new account, which immediately got banned, and then added it to my old account without a problem.
Something about "new account without phone" discord seems to dislike.
My old account also had some money spent with them, which possibly saved it.
In many cases there are reasonable OSS alternatives (here, Discord itself!) but not everyone wants to be a part-time sysadmin.
Free/Libre Open-Source Software as a Service, anyone?
I don't see what constructive answer you can expect in these threads other than "I work at <company> and I DM'd the CEO for you"; I've seen FAANG companies and Stripe respond that way here on HN, but never Discord.
The best alternative I can think of is "that sucks, rotate phone numbers and try with a new account" which is just as completely useless for OP. If that were an option, they'd already done so.
It is infuriating and I don't see why these services would need my phone number.
On the one hand many people more or less voluntarily use private companies’ free services and are surprised when they are shut out for arbitrary reasons. On the other, regulation is decried as government overreach.
Then there are the inevitable technologist voices calling for yet another technical solution for an issue created by technology and economic liberalism in the first place.
This is a social and legal issue, not a technical one.
If you need an account professionally, you need a mobile phone to be provided for you. This is in your interest and that of the company if they decide they want to use your account beyond your employment for example.
I agree with you, but it does dramatically cut down on spam registration.
You should explain this to your employer and not use a gaming communication platform for work purposes.
Matrix is trivial to self-host.
I understand why they are being made, but it's getting a bit tiring to see these on the front page so frequently.
It's getting a bit tiring to see that these large corporations still can't figure it out on how to treat your user base regarding de-platforming.
