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.
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.
>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?
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.
If something like this happened at AWS they'd nuke the services that were running and probably reach out to the account owner (if the automated service didn't do so as part of the nuke). The account owner's databases or Terraform scripts wouldn't be deleted by a set of EC2 instances being taken down.
AWS has its own problems but they do try and stay out of content moderation where possible through their "Shared Responsibility Model" (which also means they don't do things like backups for you).
The difference is that Microsoft and AWS don't take on an active role in moderating what happens between the company and its users.
But yes, in a way they are similar and I do feel uneasy each time we take on a dependency on some AWS-specific feature where we could easily have build the component to be independent.
No one else seems to care though. Even worse, the CEO wants us to dig deep into AWS, because that somehow will make the customers trust us more.
Even comparing Discord to Slack: Slack has export capabilities.
It is different. Really
Discord seems run by people with a vague understanding of security, attack vectors, let alone security best practices.
(or maybe they are heavily biased towards the gaming audience - but regardless)
Because their businesses/jobs are so tightly tied to AWS etc, they just tell themselves everything is fine. (What else can they do? Quit and be a full time open source developer?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the record this is exactly where Slack came from as well.
From Wikipedia:
> Slack originated as an internal communication tool used within Stewart Butterfield's company, Tiny Speck, during their work on the development of Glitch, an online game. These communication tools were initially built around the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and included scripts designed to automate and organize file exchanges among their development team.
> In August 2013, Slack was launched to the public and continued to maintain compatibility with IRC, reflecting its origin. Additionally, it was also compatible with XMPP messaging protocols.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)
You seem very dismissive of it, but what about businesses running on other chat platforms like Whatsapp, WeChat, QQ, etc?
Sure, it CAN be fulfilled by anything else, but is that where your customers are?
RIP, volunteer project's Revolt server, 2022 - 2022.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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..
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=...