Discord is deactivating accounts without phone numbers | Hacker News Reader

Discord is deactivating accounts without phone numbers

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33 pointsalg0rith11 comments

I can't believe I'll be the only one to wave goodbye to discord if and when they demand my phone number. Its their prerogative to demand our phone numbers and ours to delete their software.

Discord really annoys me, because it stole so many of my mumble/murmur friends who ignored it's anti-features and black box nature.

I still prefer the technical capabilities of mumble for voice, but so far the best foss alternative to discord I am aware of is mattermost. Anyone aware of any others similar?

RocketChat maybe? https://rocket.chat/

Or Matrix? https://matrix.org

Hey everyone - Jason (the CEO person) here from Discord. I lurk a lot on HN and wanted to just chime in and share a little context since this thread is about my startup!

The user in this linked thread has likely triggered our anti-abuse system. Unfortunately, Discord is constantly under attack by people trying to spam or do malicious things. Instead of just outright banning everyone who our systems identify as trying to violate our TOS, we sometimes present an option to verify that you’re a human via a phone number. We know it’s not ideal and it’s still a cat and mouse game to mitigate spam, but it has been shown in our system to reduce spam plus help people keep their accounts. Check out this post from one of our engineers if you want waaaay more detail about how and why we use phone number verification: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/dl9y94/the_trut...

In addition, we have a whole transparency report that walks through some of the work we are doing to try and maintain the safety and integrity of Discord for you all https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-transparency-report-jan-...

I also want to just mention that we do not sell user data. People keep bringing this up, reasonably so, because of the lack of trust in tech companies and how US law effectively requires terms of service to be written. You’ll notice we only ask for the rights we need to operate and improve Discord itself. We also voluntarily rolled out GDPR compliance globally, not just in the EU. It’s important to me that we build a business where our incentives are aligned with the people who use our service - not advertisers. That’s why we make money by selling Discord Nitro. (And thanks to everyone who subscribes and supports us!).

And lastly on the topic of Tencent, they have a very small stake in Discord and have absolutely no ability to control what we do or access our data.

Assuming your statement that you don't sell user data is correct, are you willing to state that you do not share it with other companies without money changing hands directly? That's a pretty big gap in your claims.

Well that just wraps it all up with a nice neat little bow on top, doesn't it? Let's put this together for the HN readers:

Chinese company Tencent is a Discord investor.

China requires face scan to get a mobile number starting Dec 1.

Discord begins requiring mobile number to keep account.

A Chinese surveillance camera may soon be using your face to review every discord message you ever made as it is observing you. I'm sure this will apply to the facial recognition customs kiosks as you enter/exit the country. Have you seen them? Scan passport. Door opens. Step into the kill box. Scan face. Approved? Second door opens, you may pass. Not approved? Well... you probably should have stayed home, friend.

If discord asks for your mobile number, keep this in mind.

As far as possible I never give away my phone number, to any online service. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn also makes it hard for you to sign up without one I recall.

The 2FA argument is week imho. It's all disguised datamining is my guess - similar to how Google properly uses captchas to simultaneously improve their ML algorithms (ever stopped to think about what those captchas contains? Crosswalks, cars, parking signs, crosswalk lights etc.).

If you're an American citizen you can use Abine's Blur subscription to mask your phone number (and more), unfortunately it doesn't work outside of US yet.

I am the same, and the most recent place I had to give a phone number or gtfo was twitter. I've been monitoring the spam call rate to see if there has been any change, which I expected, but nothing statistically significant yet... (keyword: yet)

2FA through sms can be risky as well, as it travels in plain-text over the air

I can't get wait until we get past this point in society where a phone number = a person. WhatsApp, LINE, most banks, now Discord. Most of them don't work with virtual numbers like Skype or Google Voice either.

There is a plausible (to me at least) explanation of what is going on in the discordapp subreddit. Apparently this is related to specific cases and is part of the crackdown on Discord spamming.

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