
As Discord nears 100M users, safety concerns are heard - colbyh
https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/7/16739644/discord-100-million-users-safety
======
amk_
IMO its origins in the gaming community, and all the moderation features that
grew out of it, make Discord a much better fit for open source communities
than Slack. For example:

\- Individuals can block and report other users

\- There are tiered mod levels

\- Per-community pseudonyms, but a single account makes it easier to track bad
actors

Markdown support, including syntax highlighting, is actually better in Discord
than Slack already, too.

If you haven't checked out an OSS community on Discord yet here are a few:

\- [https://www.reactiflux.com/](https://www.reactiflux.com/)

\- [https://chat.vuejs.org](https://chat.vuejs.org)

\- [https://discord.gg/reasonml](https://discord.gg/reasonml)

~~~
ancarda
>\- Individuals can block and report other users

As far as I know, Slack won’t implement that because it’s a team chat app and
if team members need to block people, there’s larger problems:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481](https://mobile.twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481)

~~~
pluma
In other words, Slack merely _tolerates_ public Slack chats, it doesn't want
to encourage them.

As we speak, I have five slack communities open in my messenger. All but one
of them are open to the public.

I'd wager there are more public Slack communities than there are private (i.e.
"team chat") ones. But much like Twitter, Slack has a fundamentally different
vision for their platform than their users apparently have.

To me this was first made clear when Reactiflux (a massive community around
React, Flux and related web technologies and topics) had to switch from Slack
to Discord because they had hit a hard limit of members and Slack said they
wouldn't increase it because their software and infra wasn't build to handle
these scenarios.

Nevertheless open source projects and community builders keep flocking to
Slack and Slack doesn't seem to have any intention to clear up this
misalignment. They're benefiting from the free advertisement small public
communities create but don't want to spend any extra energy providing their
services to them as they grow.

~~~
taion
We didn’t hit a hard limit. Slack explicitly disabled new user signups for us
because they thought we were getting too big.

~~~
pluma
Ah, I didn't know that. Only reinforces my point about Slack not being a good
choice for community platforms though.

------
gravypod
One thing discord fails at accomplishing is voice activation in their web
browser client. If anyone from the company is reading I will gladly write you
a python/scipy program that will do the correct real-time DSP for voice
activation if you implement it into your platform.

It's a window, an fft, a filter around a primary frequency range, an
integration, and an N second timer since the last time the audio crosses the
threshold.

Discord's current implementation drops in the _middle_ for words! It's crazy.

~~~
Vishnevskiy
Is this only in our web client or also in our desktop client?

~~~
chriskanan
It definitely drops the last word for the cell phone app. I often talk using
the desktop client to someone using the cell phone app, and every last word of
a sentence she says seems dropped

~~~
Vishnevskiy
Android, iOS? Do they use automatic detection or did they adjust the
thresholds.

------
mikkelam
I my startup company our dev team is pread across paris, copenhagen, dubai and
beirut. We with struggled using slack and skype for communication but have
recently went for discord, it really boosts the morale and connects the
offices in such a cool way. Always being able to talk in a voice channel is
just amazing, and everything works incredibly smooth.

You can even video chat if you make a group call outside of your channel
though

Would recommend for other small companies in same boat

~~~
joshmn
Similarly, some time ago I ran a team of 9 through Ventrilo (TeamSpeak
alternative) after we struggled with Skype and IRC. It worked great, but we
missed text for historical reasons; to supplement text we whipped up another
IRC channel.

Discord really hit it off with gamers giving them the chat application they
want (such as Steam, Battle.NET; formally Xfire) with the VOIP they used in
conjunction. It's really an amazing product (who says Electron doesn't work?!)
— I'm hoping they can stay around for a long time.

~~~
Tobba_
I wouldn't really say their client _works_ in that sense considering how
notorious it is for flunking out in completely random ways (i.e missing push-
to-talk release events, suddenly deciding your speakers or mic don't exist,
not lighting up people who are speaking, the UI randomly blanking out, etc).
It's probably the worst of the bunch in terms of bugs other than maybe Skype.
Not that anyone picks their chat/VoIP client based off that either way; we all
happily used the 2011-era Steam client, and that was a legendary kind of
awful.

Also, I can't be the only one who can single out Electron/CEF apps just from
how bad the input delay is. It gives me the feeling of it being made of cheap
plastic.

~~~
jonreem
Just have to chime in with my own anecdote that I find discord to be mostly
bug free and an excellent, easy to use piece of software.

~~~
Tobba_
I can definitely agree with it being easy to use at least. I'd figure that's
the main reason it's as popular as it is (together with the feature set, of
course).

Being able to click a link and simply join a channel without all the fudging
it can take when using TeamSpeak or even IRC is great, not to mention how easy
it makes setting up your own "server".

------
NelsonMinar
Discord's come a long way on this stuff. About a year ago they started getting
used by hate groups for organizing and I was worried the platform would get
taken over by bad people. I don't know that they've solved all the social
problems but at least they're making an honest effort.

~~~
casione
It's used by all kinds of groups. Developers, gamers, but also left and right
groups, etc.

I don't understand what the problem is if someone who supports something I
don't like (be it alt-right, liberal, whatever) uses the platform, as long as
he doesn't bother me personally :/

(My account was just banned by sctb for this ;P)

~~~
NelsonMinar
American Nazis were using it to organize the Charlottesville demonstration.
That's not a form of legal liability nor brand identification you want.
[https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-
help-c...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/26/discord-chats-may-help-
charlottesville-lawsuits/)

Also the bad people never stay confined to their private hate club. See the
linked article here about "raids" on other channels or literally the entire
history of Internet social media.

~~~
hellbanner
So it's every communication service's responsibility to keep only the people
they like using their service?

~~~
astrodust
There's a difference between "communication service", as in "carrier", and
"social platform" as in "community".

When you run a carrier you're expected to be neutral. What people do with your
service is not your responsibility. If the service is being used illegally
then law enforcement can intervene.

When you run a community you have an obligation to pick and choose who
participates. You can strive to be inclusive, but when you start to include
those that seek to exclude you'll find your community being hijacked and
perverted into someting that reflects the wants and needs of a tiny,
dedicated, often highly motivated minority.

It's the responsibility of anyone running a community to police and weed out
bad actors. I they don't the good citizens will leave and your community will
be worthless. That's probably a bad thing if you've got shareholders to answer
to.

~~~
chmln
Yeah but discord is no hackernews. If they start arbitrarily moderating views
that don't align with flavor-of-the-month ideology or even nsfw content a lot
of people will be pissed too.

What people talk about in Discord's independent chatrooms is their own
business. I don't believe that most people advocating for strict ideological
moderation on large platforms like facebook or discord understand the
implications and dangers of allowing private companies such power.

Today they're booting off "neo-nazis", tomorrow they'll be booting off you.

~~~
rxhernandez
"Today the teacher kicked my kid out of class for being loud and obnoxious,
tomorrow they'll be kicking your kid out of the class too."

Please do us all a favor and look into what a slippery slope is.

~~~
nyolfen
truly there is no historical precedent for the abuse of power along
ideological lines

~~~
rxhernandez
Truly, modeling everything in life as montonically increasing functions
because of exceptional historic precedences is a smart thing to do.

"There's a historical precedence for people drinking water and dying because
of it, so I'm not going to drink water anymore."

The reasons you here about them is because they are so exceptional. People got
banned from forums for being irreverent dicks before and no one batted an eye.
Now because they got legitimized by gullible people, everyone screams about
their lack of freedom on private platforms.

~~~
nyolfen
>People got banned from forums for being irreverent dicks before and no one
batted an eye.

you're poorly versed in internet culture and history. many internet
subcultures have axiomatically rejected moderation because, surprise, giving
power to anonymous and unaccountable peers frequently results in abuses.
you're confusing your own lack of concern and love of arbitrary authority with
the opinions of others.

~~~
astrodust
Managing a community is often a careful balance between handing over too much
power to moderators who can abuse their powers and limiting moderators to the
point where they're ineffective and the user base can't be controlled.

I've seen this dynamic play out first on tiny communities like MUDs where
you'd have, at most, a thousand people. Later the pattern repeated over and
over at larger and larger scales, where more recently you see entire platforms
like Reddit suffering from the same issues. Each order of magnitude increase
in user base makes the threats grow far more exponentially in scale.

Soon the whole internet will become rotten, culturally speaking.

------
brightball
It's cool seeing an Elixir company have such explosive growth.

~~~
sergiotapia
Elixir is part of their great performance! Their engineering blog is really
interesting and full of neat information scaling Elixir (which is really hard
to find since Elixir scales for a VERY long time).

~~~
Tobba_
Have we really regressed to the point where simply relaying data with
reasonable performance is considered impressive? Figuring out _where_ to relay
everything and keeping it all in sync is obviously hard, but that's a
distributed systems problem, not (strictly) a performance problem.

We've been able to handle millions of concurrent HTTP(!) connections on a
single machine for _years_ ; it feels like a pretty solved problem. Although,
a lot of that involved userspace TCP stacks and really high-end networking
hardware, so if you want to stay within saner territories you can scale that
number back a bit.

~~~
illumin8
Actually, I have to call this out as false - you can't handle millions of HTTP
connections on a single machine, because there are only 65,535 available TCP
ports. I think you meant that you can handle millions of HTTP connections on a
few dozen machines...

Please try again, and stop spouting obviously false facts.

~~~
Dylan16807
Ports are not used up by connections. One port can support 65K simultaneous
connections from a single IP. If a thousand machines connect, each with their
own IP, one port can handle 65 million connections. If you decide to accept
HTTP requests on all ports, then _each port of your 65K ports_ supports
millions of connections or more. Suddenly you're talking about a total of
billions or trillions of connections all going to one machine. And that's
still only using a thousand machines to connect. Open up to the entire
internet and you can push that to quintillions of theoretically possible
simultaneous connections.

------
dbg31415
I started using Discord to game. Then pushed it out to some of my clients.
It's great. Webhooks make it so I can replace Slack. Voice chat makes it so I
can replace Slack / Skype. The ease of use, the voice channels... it's all so
simple. Push to talk, who doesn't love that? Discord has been strong out the
gate, much faster at getting features polished than any competitor I've seen.

------
desireco42
Discord is awesome! Very easy to use, easy to connect with other player in the
clan and organize events and raids. Also easy to sneak in other clan rooms and
negotiate switch and maybe even snoop a little.

I really like it a lot and I was always wondering why it is not used more in
business setting or for coordination in teams, because it could totally do
that and it is ligher solution then slack or god forbid hipchat.

~~~
eberkund
Yeah honestly I don't see why it couldn't replace Slack, it is a very similar
product but I feel like by marketing it primarily to gamers they are
positioning themselves in a far less profitable market than Slack is.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Yeah honestly I don 't see why it couldn't replace Slack_

I see several reasons.

1\. It's impossible to not be in a public channel. Yes, you can mute it, but
you can't ever leave it. In a large company with thousands of channels, this
creates cognitive overhead.

2\. You can create private channels, but this requires the ability to assign
permissions. This has two problems - one, if you have a lot of teams that need
to have private rooms you're going to spend a lot of time juggling
permissions, and two, if you need a quick ad-hoc room that you don't want
littering the general list, you need to be able to assign permissions.

~~~
hellbanner
You can hide muted channels.. then you don't see them

~~~
pavel_lishin
How?

~~~
vitaflo
Under the options for the server, select "Hide muted channels".

------
z3t4
> "It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak"

Why is this still not a solved problem ? Why is there no free open source
Skype alternatives !?

~~~
gsich
There is. Matrix, Mumble, IRC, jitsi ...

~~~
Dylan16807
Being a Skype alternative requires persistent chat, audio, and video.

~~~
SauciestGNU
Matrix allows for all of these, by the way.

~~~
zaarn
I haven't checked back in a while but last I saw, Matrix looked a lot like
glorified IRC with extra stuff tacked on.

And I would also require that people could join over links with similar
capabilities like Discord (require Account Age, registered with Telephone
numbers, automatic joining into specific room, room visibility and access
based on roles, prevent embedding of media based on roles, proxying of any
previews in the chat via the server... etc)

~~~
gsich
I have a hard time using services that require your telephone number for no
reason.

------
rodionos
Discord Bot/Webhook API is really great[1].

You can use it to push alerts and charts from monitoring[2]. It's
straightforward.

In Slack, a comparable integration requires a bit more footwork with file
uploads being a separate part of the API.

[1]:
[https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook](https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/webhook)

[2]: [https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-
engine/noti...](https://github.com/axibase/atsd/blob/master/rule-
engine/notifications/discord.md)

------
brendyn
It's interesting seeing a post about censorship in China on the front page
with many concerned HN posters, while under it is a post about Discord gaining
many users where none of the comments point out the most important thing:

Discord is proprietary software, meaning users have no practical capability,
or legal right, to study, modify, or share the code, and it is a centralized
service. Thus Discord can be used for censorship and surveillance at a moments
notice, and the only power people have is to not use it. Such large software
systems take a lot of time and effort to create. Network effects and motivated
complacency make it unrealistic to simply wait until something bad happens
before switching to a freedom respecting software.

Discord should be rejected outright simply for being proprietary, but software
that is used for communications and forming communities have even stronger
reasons not to be locked down and controlled by any one entity.

~~~
AlphaSite
The front end is well document, so you can trivially implement a client.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
Which doesn't matter if your are banned from the network. Changing clients or
implementing alternate clients won't fix that.

------
jaxondu
Am I the only one who finds Discord iOS unusable due to the small font which
is not changeable? Also the font color is of low contrast whether you in its
light or dark theme.

------
Tomis02
I wonder how much Discord had to pay for this ad.

------
thomas_howland
It appears by "safety concerns" the author means "right wingers might be able
to chat on the platform". I'm not sure Discord wants to put themselves in the
position of weaponizing their platform to suppress particular kinds of private
political speech.

~~~
hsod
Where are you getting "right wing" from? I saw this:

> “Raiding and spamming is explicitly against our Terms of Service and
> Community Guidelines,”

~~~
axlprose
Perhaps from this tidbit where the politics were explicitly mentioned in the
article:

> _Resmini’s statement comes just a few months after Discord took action
> against a number of nefarious ALT-RIGHT servers. One of the largest servers,
> Centipede Central, became heavily monitored by Discord administrators and in
> the past few months, underwent its own implosion._

And more importantly:

> _“The team has confirmed that they are aware of Centipede Central and will
> take action IF they find CC is in violation of their terms of service and
> /or community guidelines”_

In other words, it sounds like the politics of that group alone was probably
enough to justify keeping them under close surveillance. It wasn't necessarily
just responding to "raiding and spamming" once it happened.

~~~
tdb7893
The problem is that large portions of the alt-right ideology goes outside of
politics into racism, misogyny, and harassment and it makes sense to keep a
community with those traits under close surveillance. My view on the alt right
is that there is a line between reasonable political views and spreading
prejudice against certain demographics and the alt right really walks that
line (I haven't been on this discord but a good example is the r/the_donald
subreddit).

~~~
xupybd
The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just
trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

The actual alt-right political movement is just a very small group. I don't
think many outside of that small group actually hold the racist and
misogynistic views that are expressed on these forums. It's often just
backlash at the rapid change in culture. People want to break the new rules of
discourse.

The bigger problem is genuine right wing views then get lumped in with the
alt-right. Speakers like Ben Shapiro get called alt-right when their views are
not racist or misogynistic. Before long people view many right wing views as
hate speech. The more they do that the more people react by saying actually
hateful things as a backlash. And so the divide grows.

~~~
ryanlol
>The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just
trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

After watching and participating in this for years, I don't think this is true
anymore.

The people who found it funny to piss off people by pretending to be Nazis
ended up attracting actual Nazis and were eventually replaced by them.

It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half
the country actually agrees with you.

~~~
viridian
>It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half
the country actually agrees with you.

Half the country are white supremacists? I think you should walk outside and
interact with some actual human beings.

~~~
ryanlol
I haven’t been in the US for many years but would certainly expect to arrive
at a different opinion when talking to actual people, however that is not the
opinion that the elections reflect.

Either half the population are white supremacists or they’re simply too stupid
to not vote for white supremacists, which isn’t any better than actually being
one. It’s not like all the people who supported Hitler literally wanted to
kill millions of jews, still they supported it.

~~~
xupybd
I think you’d have a hard time proving Trump is a white supremacists. I’m also
sure most of his supporters are not either. This is the problem we keep
demonising the other side. Instead we should endeavour to understand them. You
don’t convince people to agree with your ideas by calling them evil.

