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Comment by throwaway190102 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway190102

What are you basing this assumption on?

Third-party Discord clients violate the TOS. The company considers them to be self-bots, which also violate the TOS.

That's terrible. I find the interface absolutely awful.

To add on to this, the only available api is the same for bots as it is for users, the only difference is that bots have less api access and are labeled as such.

It's against the terms to use the user api (although it will work until you get caught), I'm not sure if they explicitly ban 3rd party clients (they very well may) but this effectively does the same thing.

That means the discord users would be in violation. The creator of the client doesn't have to abide by those terms as they are not consuming the discord service. Merely providing a tool to do so.

They are necessarily violating the tos to work on the tool - how else are they testing it?

3rd party clients are fully legal in most countries regardless of what their TOS might say, they are not above laws.

When did anybody bring the question of law into it? Law has nothing to do with whether or not Discord will prevent you from using their services for breaching the terms of use of what is, after all, their own service.

This thread is talking about breaking the TOS, not actions from discord (unless you replied to the wrong comment), TOS violations are moot here since Discord is not above laws.

I am replying to the correct person, but your comment just now doesn't refute what I'm saying. I don't say that Discord is above the law, but that doesn't meant they don't have the ability to deny access to whomever they please when someone contravenes their TOS.

Yes, TOS are not legal documents. We all know that. That doesn't make Discord beholden to granting everybody the same access to their service. I don't know why people feel the need to bring the law into it; it was never relevant to start with, so making a point of it is unhelpful.

You would need to prove that. And for all we know, he borrowed the account from a friend who didn't know he was using it to test the API.

To block them from their platform and press charges if they do not? The block doesn't even need to be casually connected to the API usage - if they say go away, and they choose not to, that's CFAA territory.

Also see my comment in a different thread. Not an identical scenario, but Blizzard won a court case they filed against company whose sole purpose was to make software to violate their EULA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....

And? What are selfbots?

They are bots that use the bot API but connect as a regular user rather than as a bot user. This gives them access to features they should not have, according to the terms of use of the API.

I see. Discords fault then. Why allow this? But I probably know the answer. They have an Electron interface and no real way of detecting this.

Both users and bots use the same API. All that's different is that Bots have 'Bot' in their auth headers. That and some endpoints are limited to just Bot accounts.

Bot on normal account detection is based on outlier usage statistics from regular accounts, like too many requests or something.

All Ripcord requests (to discord) actually have Ripcord in their User Agent header, discord can immediately detect it's usage, they have not banned anyone for using the software specifically, only for the same reason they have been banning Selfbots (Users ending up spamming the API)

racists are mad they're getting deplatformed and convinced it means the platforms will die

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