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Comment by time0ut | Hacker News Reader

I hope Discord manages to find a sustainable business model. Feature-wise, it makes Teams and Slack look primitive.

The author's example of the SUaQ discord is a good one. It is pretty incredible to experience first hand. It isn't unique either. There are tons of communities with all sorts of self service workflows powered by third party bots.

You can do some of the same stuff with Slack and (I assume) Teams, but Discord is a lot more powerful. For example, imagine connecting Discord voice chat to AWS Connect via a bot...

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Discord cannot be used anonymously via Tor without providing a telephone number to tie it to your real-world identity, and it does not even pretend to support end to end cryptography, even for DMs.

No matter how shiny and useful it is, it is dangerous as a tool as a result. They are amassing a giant trove of users location histories and plaintext full chat content, including all DMs.

I have stopped using it for these reasons.

I really hope they make some changes to make it safer for end users, or go out of business so that encrypted systems can take their place. Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.

> Privacy isn’t important until, suddenly, it is.

That suddenly might come sooner rather than later, as the Chinese Tencent has invested an undisclosed amount into Discord: https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-...

The same Tencent that owns WeChat, used as a surveillance tool for results such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vspukvqxTSg

Wasn't there post on here just a few days ago about how Discord exactly does that? pretend to support end to end encryption? Someone created their own discord client and found that VOIP packets were being decrypted by discord in between clients

Let's Reverse Engineer Discord: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031218

I wasn't able to reply at the time but this also might be to show that "this person is talking indicator". It would make more sense if the client itself lit up the user's avatar to indicate they're talking, but for some reason the gateway sends a websocket to let you know when they start/stop talking, and if the gateway goes down while in a VC you'll lose talking indicators until it can reconnect.

My understanding of that was that is currently the only way to do WebRTC in a one to many scenario, so not sure I'd say they're pretending.

You can ask for all the data associated with your account, so clearly not.

I did it about a year ago and got a huge trove of messages back as JSON.

I've been using Riot.im/Matrix and been liking it so far. Matrix is FOSS. The UI is a bit confusing but I'm sure I'll get over this soon.

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