4mo ago

Discord says piracy subpoena would violate users’ First Amendment rights

www.theverge.com Discord says piracy subpoena would violate users’ First Amendment rights

Discord says it shouldn’t have to comply with the order.

Discord defends itself against efforts to stop piracy on its platform by saying no to more invasive data collection. Even though Discord isn’t exactly known for privacy, this is a great move for its users. What are your thoughts?

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94 comments

Discord sucks and nobody should use it.
- The only thing that really sucks about it is that knowledge that was openly searchable is now locked away behind logins.
  
  no, you're also effectively locked out of any participation unless you provide an email address and phone number, which they won't even tell you about in advance but use dark patterns and gaslighting that they noticed "suspicious activity" to step by step first ask you for an email and then once that is validated they prompt you for a phone number. the only thing they don't do yet is ask for ID.
  
  Validation level is set by server owners, you are unlikely to need to verify a phone number except in the biggest (and therefore spammiest) servers
  
  it doesn't seem to be server specific because once prompted there is no way to use the account again, even if you decided to just not use a server that may have these settings set.
  
  Odd, I've never had that experience. Maybe you're using a VPN or something that makes your IP look more suspicious.
  
  Yeah, I've never needed to add a phone number.
  
  I keep trying to take out my phone number because I don't want strangers seeing that shit, but... then "suspicious activity" gets detyected seconds later...
- While this is true, Discord has a massive user base, so it’s somewhat a privacy win for the common person
- its still the old chicken&egg problem: if you dont have communities you dont have users, and if you dont have users you dont have communities
  thats why everyone sticks to discord
  
  Well, you are on Lemmy aren't you
  
  And he's the only one.
  
  We are all Estebiu alts.
  
  Well yeah, cuz there are quite a lot of communities and users already
  
  Social inertia and an extra helping of users hate having to learn things.
  
  Matrix is promising, but I think it still could use a bit more polish. That said, I run a discord community, and soon one of these days I'm going to make a Matrix version of it and encourage users to try it out. Though very few probably will.
- I say we return to IRC
  
  Discord is a fantastic IRC replacement.
  The issue is that people try to use it to replace forums, wikis, personal websites, issue trackers, git, and the kitchen sink, and it does none of these.
  
  Exactly. It's like IRC w/ audio (and probably video now?) chat, and you can post gifs and whatnot. It should be used for discussion, and it's perfectly okay for that. I would prefer something a bit more privacy focused (again, IRC is decent here, just needs some cryptography), but it's okay.
  But yeah, not a fan of it being a resource for anything beyond meeting like-minded people to have discussions with.
- What's a good alternative that allows easy instant message, voice and video calls, and makes it easy to group my friends by game?
  
  I have been using revolt, going to setup my own server once I get better lol, last 3 times have been a cluster fuck to get it working. I got mattermost working the first try but it's a slack replacement not discord.
  
  I get that they have different target user base, but honestly, what’s the difference?
  
  Roles and permissions. Slack and mattermost is just allowed and disallowed to each channel.
  
  Steam group chat? It's structured in the same way.
  
  You can create channels for people to join with Steam?
  
  Yeah, if you open the friends window on the bottom it should have a group chats bar with a button to create a server and then it works like discord where you can add additional text and voice channels
  
  Steam has voice channels? 🤯
  
  Idk if its changed, but you cant edit or delete messaged un steam. That was a huge turn off for me
  
  Matrix?
  I only put ? Because I don't know what you mean of grouping your friends by game.
  Like a server/channel where everyone in it is both your friend and a player of that game or a contact group that manage so you can see who is that.
  
  There really isn't one, that's why Discord is so widely used.
  
  Your phone.
  
  Not really no. SMS is nowhere near as versatile as a service like Discord in terms of being able to meet new people or have conversations that don't overload unrelated but potentially interested people with notifications.
  
  Discord is on my phone 😭
- There is no alternative that can do the same
  
  Good.
  Discord sucks at such a fundamental level that the lack of any competing apps for this particularly awful niche actually restores some of my faith in humanity.
  
  Okay you're just trolling.
  
  Have you seen Discord's UI?
  
  This is my genuine opinion and I don't appreciate the condescension.
  You don't have to like it, but trying to dismiss it as mere trolling is, at best, intellectually dishonest.
  
  pretty certain their just confused why someone would say there's not a niche for a chat client. chat clients always have, and always will exist.
  
  There are lots of chat clients.
  Fortunately, only Discord is also trying to be a for-profit walled garden, a support forum, an in-game voice chat app, a community hub, a media channel, a political soapbox, a video game store, a livestreaming service, a bot playground, and now, apparently, a pirate fileshare.
- Life has gotten better since I dropped it. Moved a dozen or so people over to Signal and have been running with that ever since.
  I do miss the ability to easily stream games, though.

94 comments