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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins and see no more account data than everyone else on the server. This means people can freely join "hostile" servers and servers with untrusted admins, which is important for gaming, considering the toxicity of many communities.

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On the flip side, it makes it difficult to spot dupe accounts or ban evasion attempts. I run a moderate-sized server and I have a suspicion that one of our members has weird conversations with himself across multiple accounts, but I have absolutely no way to verify that since I can't see any IPs or hostnames.

One could argue that we need more insight for administrators because of how "toxic" gaming communities can be.

FYI if you ban a user, it bans all users with that IP address.

Ah that's good to know. Thanks for the correction.

You can enable phone number verification which makes it massively harder to avoid bans. Its way easier to cycle IP addresses than phone numbers.

This is true, but having a phone number requirement lowers accessibility to the server for users who either don't have a phone or aren't comfortable providing their number.

Catering to people who don't own a phone (Richard stallman and kids in Africa) is a lower priority to most mods than stopping waves of trolls and spammers.

Kind of. Admins can see all channels, and can forcibly insert themselves into any voice channel (even if it's full). But you're right in that their domain only extends to the _server_ and not your user account which is not tied to the server and they have no ownership over.

I dunno how much of a difference it makes... most people don't know that the admins of a slack can see everything, including the histories on unpaid slacks.

This is false. You can read about it at https://slack.com/help/articles/360002084807-View-Access-Log... (which excludes free plans) and/or test it for yourself.

Perhaps it changed in the last year or so-- but I happily have complete history dumps from several slacks which never had anything except free plans.

Compliance exports (inc. private channel and/or DM conversations in which the exporter was not participating) have never been a part of free plans, and that hasn't changed in the last year.

Initially they had no export function at all. When they added it, they did so for paid plans only (and with an unpreventable notification to everyone on the workspace that an export was just triggered). They've evolved it since then for higher plans like Enterprise Grid w/o notifications and integration into Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, but it's still never touched free plans.

You can read about the initial announcement at https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri... . I would suspect that what you're positing to be a "complete history dump" from free Slack workspaces are from archive bots, which don't have the ability to eavesdrop on conversations in which they weren't already present.

> A big difference between Discord and almost everything else is that server admins aren't real admins

That’s because discord “servers” aren’t real servers and it’s all a whole big closed-source SaaS.

“Server” is a clearly an intentionally misleading term and dark UX used to lure people into thinking they are have actual ownership and control of their fealty SaaS workspaces.

Sadly, given the success of Discord, it seems this lie has paid off big-time though.

We called them servers because our early adopters were coming from Ventrillo and Teamspeak (eg: Vent server, Teamspeak server, etc) and we wanted to use familiar terminology.

I don't think it's intentionally misleading. Its roots are in gaming in which "server" is often the term used for an instance and no one misconstrues ownership in that context. Some games let you self-host a server, but it's increasingly rare. More commonly, you reserve/join an instance on the developer's servers and you tell your friend(s), "Come join my server". Whether that be a Minecraft Realm or a WoW shard.

Or they could just be adopting the terminology of TeamSpeak and the like.

I think it's more that gamers understand the concept of a "server" and not really anything to do with your evil theory.

Assume good faith.

They were originally called "guilds", and they are still called "guilds" in the Discord API.

This isn't true. They wanted a one-to-one language replacement for ventrilo/teamspeak/mumble.

"Hey hop on my mumble server"

"Hey hop on my vent server"

"Hey hop on my teamspeak server"

"Hey hop on my discord... guild?"

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