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Comment by natrik | Hacker News Reader

"We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community"

Key point for me. Under the guise of 'hate speech' suppression is occurring. Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...

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I think the long history of events like these, particularly the more recent publicised ones, are going to push lots of communities, and by extension the Internet, to decentralisation.

That's good and bad because communities can't be shut down when they shouldn't, and can't be shut down when they should.

I think it's becoming obvious that not being able to shut down bad communities is the lesser evil.

That's a bold statement, you think it's so obvious? Do you think not being able to shut down child pornographic trading communities is a lesser evil than shutting down WSB discord?

CP trading chat rooms should be shut down by arresting people creating and selling content in there, not by giving someone the right to shut down any chat room they want by the click of a button. Because if you can shut down CP trading chat rooms by the click of a button, we all know this button will be used mainly to target good causes as CP represents a tiny proportion of people or even criminal activities.

This tired justification of "child pornography", "terrorism" and "hate speech" has been beat to death to ban just about everything these days.

Why not ban cars ? After all both paedos and terrorists use them to carry out their evil, nefarious deeds. They both also use toothpaste.

I think is perfectly fine being un-able to shutdown sites for "social justice". If it ever escalates to being a major criminal problem, a legal case can be filed and it can go through the courts before the ban-hammer falls.

> a legal case can be filed and it can go through the courts before the ban-hammer falls

Once a community that cannot be shut down is declared illegal, what happens? One of the major points of decentralized communities is that there is no effective "ban hammer" to shut them down.

Then it is declared illegal and simply continues to exist. If this is truly a major crime (loss of life, major financial loss), then governments have many means outside of technology to shut stuff down: old-fashioned detective work, cross-national police work, enforcement of treaty obligations or even para-military action in severe cases.

Right now, a sneeze can ban you on the cloud. And the bans are just a click away - and in many cases not even that.

Child pornography is illegal, IMO rightly so, and people trading in it should be arrested.

I will never cease to be amused by people who invoke CP to defend censorship when a discussion about control of online discourse is ongoing. We are talking about companies shutting down a group organizing against wall street hedge funds on the pretext that they're Nazi white supremacists, we aren't talking about pedos physically abusing children for profit. If you expect that this is a gotcha and that I have no choice but to declare that I think CP should be protected or else I have to support banning WSB from discord you really need to refine your conversational skills.

Yeah this was a low blow from Discord

I get they're probably scared as hell, but they don't even take care of the child porn or child grooming Discords.

It's not even slightly paranoid to say that somebody gave financial incentive to make this happen, but for them to censor with absolute bullshit reasoning behind it... This is just not good.

> I get they're probably scared as hell,

I don't, what should they be scared of?

Big money players. Some may even be holding Discord equity and could give them a headache

A media spotlight isn't helpful when they are considered (rightly or wrongly) to be responsible for a lot of people losing money

It's been said that some Discord investors are also investors with Steve Cohen's Point72. The fund targeted by WSB, Melvin Capital, managed $1bn for Points72

This is a textbook example of a conspiracy theory.

Beyond them possibly being directly or indirectly involved on the (currently) losing end of GameStop stock, they may be worried about SEC paying attention to them. I personally think they're in the clear here, but maybe they aren't so sure.

Are you saying Discord openly permits groups that share child porn? Or discusss how to find it? I could understand the latter if the discord itself has nothing illegal but that’s still pretty shocking.

I know for a fact that it happens. Certainly they would stop it if they knew about it, but they don’t police this stuff like you might think. They rely on their users to self-report for the most part. [1]

“ On April 23, 2020 at 1:55 p.m., the Marysville Police received a tip that child pornography had been uploaded while using a discord online service.”

There are groups like this all over the place. I know who this person is.

“A discord online service” is Discord.

Also kind of interesting in writing here you can see some local papers are just way out of touch with the tech community.

[1] https://www.unioncountydailydigital.com/articles/child-porno...

There is probably no public service on the web that someone _hasn't_ tried to upload illegal content to.

Don't services that accept large amounts of user-generated content scan for illegal stuff against a database of known material? I find it odd that Discord wouldn't do that.

>> Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...

People who claim that should logically be wanting Rosa Parks to have started her own bus company.

That’s a weird analogy that doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually quite offensive to compare the segregation of a whole people to what’s basically a sign on Discords door that said “We don’t allow this type of speech. We have bouncers here.”

Also Rosa Parks wasn’t anonymous, and I assume many on WSB are. I wonder if they would act the same if they weren’t? Or in real life?

It was more a comment on the general "Oh, big tech banned you?" well just create your own payment network, dns service, cdn, hosting, etc etc.

And to extend your analogy, it's like a whole nightclub being permanently closed because one of the 250,000 people in the club (admittedly a big club) said a bad word. It's just a new form of Tone Policing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing)

It’s like a nightclub being closed by the nightclub’s owner, which I think most would agree the nightclub’s owner has the right to do by virtue of being the owner. It’s not closed by police or any outside entity.

The buses were public and segregation was a law. Blacks made up 75% of the bus customers [0]. A competing, nonsegregated, service would have owned the market if it were possible. So it probably wasn't.

The situation here is very different. There is no government monopoly favouring Reddit or Discord.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

> You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad.

The problem with this statement is the shifting use of "you". I might know that a mob acts like a mob, but I'm certainly not going to be surprised if "my" rights are affected if I'm part of the group from which the mob manifested. That doesn't mean the decision to alter my rights is directed at me, personally.

Random speculation about why this was done or who did it, for what reasons, is also a type of mob thinking.

Evidently my comment is also a good mob detector!

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