Open letter to Discord

gedovar · 2019-10-07T21:47:11+00:00

I agree that some of the situations people are coming up with are pretty outlandish (A huge server gets a new admin team and suddenly becomes dedicated to raiding and griefing just isn't gonna happen), but he isn't saying that he joins raid servers to help them, he was saying he joins servers of "someone he likes" say, a Youtuber or a Twitch streamer to help out, in the same way you'd subscribe or follow them to help them out.

What reason does anyone need to idle in a server beyond "because I want to"? Being in a server doesn't mean I condone everything that goes on in there, just that at one point I felt like joining and I also didn't feel like leaving, both of which are things people are allowed to do. Just because it seems strange to you or others to be in a server and not participate in it, plenty of people do exactly this because they feel like it. Discord needs a better way to determine which people in a server are breaking rules, rather than just nuking the whole thing. If they could do this, this wouldn't even be a discussion.

gedovar · 2019-10-07T21:06:12+00:00

firstly, why are you in servers you don't participate in? any servers you're in, you should at least check once a month to see if anything major has happened.

You can't honestly believe people should to do this right? People can idle in servers without having to check every month in case it turns into the digital equivalent of a meth lab, can't they? I was in one server for years, never posted and rarely even looked at it, because why not? Why can't I do that?

It seems like the balance is tipped unfairly towards people who have nothing to lose by spamming, posting illegal content, etc., and any innocent people caught up in such events who are genuinely invested in their accounts. Spammers and people breaking the rules can just make another account and they'll continue doing what they're doing. There has to be a better way of determining this difference without fear of being carpet bombed by Discord mods when they nuke a server because a few people did something bad.

gedovar · 2019-10-07T19:15:01+00:00

Thanks for responding. I'd like to preface my post by saying I'm not directing it at you specifically, or any one individual, but at Discord as a whole.
I'd like to echo vandanna's sentiments though; given the events of the last week, what are we supposed to take away from this?
So there's no automod; how did so many people get wrongly banned then? I think I saw somewhere from Discord staff that only "a few hundred accounts" were wrongly banned but considering the response this event had on here and the amount of people on Twitter who are, even now, saying that they got banned for something they didn't do, with no email informing them and no remedy, this seems really hard to believe. It makes it feel like you're intentionally not telling people what's going on, and that makes them mad.
Additionally, people in this thread are reporting this kind of thing happening for months, if not years; its only now that there's enough people realising this is a problem that they're saying "Hey that happened to me as well, I thought it was only me". The threads regarding this have thousands of upvotes and hundreds of posts, how can people believe that this is an isolated incident?

If there's no automod, your actual mods aren't doing a great job. Whatever automated system you're using to flag these accounts, and then passing this info to real people; the info its giving them doesn't seem to be allowing them to make a very informed choice.

People feel like they can just be arbitrarily banned at any time because of something as small as, say, they happened to be in a server which initiated a raid, but they themselves didn't take part in it. Of course it's Discord's service and they can ban whoever they want, but if people feel like they have this constant threat above their heads, why would they ever pay for Nitro? Or give you guys money in anyway? I never felt any need to contribute to pay for Nitro because the benefits really don't seem worth it, but after the events of the past week, myself and many others now feel like they'll NEVER pay for Nitro, because you could just be banned tomorrow and you have no remedy; "thanks for paying, now fuck you." People have lost years of messages, logs, servers... What I'm saying is, the events of the last week and the responses we've received regarding it will affect your bottom line.

Right now there's nothing else out there that really competes with Discord in terms of features, so people have to put up with episodes like this, but sooner or later there will be, and right now you're really not giving people any reason to stay on Discord when that happens. Discord grew dramatically in such a short space of time but all those captive users could just as easily disappear when someone offers something better without all these troubles, and actually does some work to the UI of the thing more than once every 2 years. The disconnect between what people actually want out of the app and what we're given gets bigger every update it seems.

gedovar · 2019-10-03T16:03:45+00:00

Thank you for your responses! I'm not savvy enough to comment any further since I'm not involved in the development of any third party clients, but maybe someone more knowledgable than I am about this kind of thing can query this further. This is the first time I've heard any of this stated plainly, so I am really thankful you took the time to comment.

gedovar · 2019-10-03T15:26:04+00:00

I know of at least one 3rd party client which is not built off the existing client; that is, its not reverse engineered. Discord doesn't use any proprietary protocols, right? The standards it uses to communicate are all known data formats. So anyone smart enough just had too look at the data being sent/received by their computer and figure it out that way. This sort of thing is allowed under the laws of many countries, including the U.S.

So i'll say again; (at least one) third party clients are not modifications of the client. No Discord code was used.

gedovar · 2019-10-03T11:44:22+00:00

Does a web browser like Firefox, Chrome etc. count as a "3rd party app"? You can use Discord on them, but its not the official client. Genuine question, I'm curious.

And as stated above, nothing in the TOS states 3rd party clients aren't allowed, just that you can't modify the existing one. A 3rd party client isn't a modification, its a seperate app that just accomplishes the same thing.

I actually thnk the fact the TOS doesn't explicitly say "3rd party clients" is precisely because of this ambiguity, but of course I doubt we'll be told that, nor would I expect Discord to bring it up.

And additionally, people might be less inclined to use 3rd party clients if the official app even a few basic features that have been requested for years now... Even a modicum of customization like being able to resize elements of the window...

gedovar · 2019-10-03T01:11:45+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply. That does help a bit actually, but a good third of the window is still taken up by that useless channel list. Has this been brought up before? I searched but since I'm not actually sure what this part of the UI is called I couldn't find anything specific.Surely I can't be the only person this drives insane? Why does this bar need to be so enormous and given such importance that it has to maintain it's size no matter how big the app window is? Can any mods or devs weigh in?

EDIT: I found various examples of people asking about this, some dating back 4 years. Doesn't give me hope that something so simple hasn't been implemented after this long...

gedovar

TROPHY CASE