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Comment by technick | Hacker News Reader

Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone retarded and a mod doesn't step in, that is considered hateful. Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Then saying that only retards buy the shit hedgefunds are peddling would also be considered discriminatory. I'm tired of this fucking bullshit and ready to go thru as many proxy accounts as needed to get my point across. Discord needs to go out of business or grow some balls. Everything in this world could be construed into being hateful or discriminatory if you stretch enough.

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Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.

They made $120 million in revenue last year from selling Nitro custom user ids, emoji packs, etc.

100 million MAUs can't be cheap to maintain. You're probably getting downvoted because revenue != profit.

They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle.

I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts.

It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.

Revenue != profits

> ad-friendly discourse

Discord has zero ads, FYI.

They still want to keep their reputation good (in the eyes of potential advertisers) if/when they want to add it in the future.

They show (or showed) continuous ads for Krisp.

Showing the trademark of a technology they are using in the product, for the purposes of identification of said technology does not count as advertising. According to your reasoning, they would have to say "we use some other company's noise reduction". And no, the chat view (or the voice chat view) does not show the Krisp logo continuously.

They showed the trademark very prominently and that must be because they had a deal. We give you noise reduction, you give us visibility. That is an advertising contract.

This doesn't follow, Mumble (open source voip) do exactly the same thing with the Speax codec in their settings

This is what everyone on discord gets for using an app like this. We all warned you years ago when you moved to it.

Mailing lists for slow stuff and IRC for throw away realtime chats.

There is ##wallstreetbets on freenode but has only around 30 connected users.

Some people care about UX.

Some people care about freedom.

Then find/write a mail client with good UX.

If you have too much ADHD there's delta chat.

> This is what everyone on discord gets

A ban for a channel that for after repeated warnings still is full of insults, threats and abusive language? Bravo!

I don't agree with the way you get your point across but I support your right to get your point across this way.

I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?

“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce

I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides.

If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.

I mean, you do have a point.

Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.

But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.

And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?

> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?

Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.

I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle.

In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.

All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.

I support that kind of speech. Not the teacher example, but if it happens in some voluntary gathering, I really can't see why not. Like I said, people sometimes get emotional and you can't expect from everyone to stay calm no matter what. It's better to vent frustrations with words than doing something stupid and irresponsible.

> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?

I feel like there's a disconnect. Movies may not depict it so, but curses and profanity have always been a part of language. So the "shift" is happening in the opposite direction the way I see it.

> “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce

That's a comedian being funny and cool. The right to say "fuck the government" isn't important. I'd rather keep the de facto right criticize the government substantively, which may de jure exist, but is drowned in the de facto drivel.

Profanity matters. It motivates people. Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk. You tell them “FUCK WALL STREET” and you got a crowd ready to take down the traders. Publishing a position paper on the potential negative impacts of naked short selling while taking into account the views and interests of all stake holders ... cool. But you’re not motivating people with that.

By the way, FUCK Wall Street.

> Profanity ... motivates people

Yeah, that's the problem. Too many people swayed by cheap laughs and the thrill of anger. Thus the failed insurrection earlier this year. It's hard to predict what'll be fun this week.

> Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk.

I guess we should package up the science into more concise bits. How about 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?

lol you're saying that people stormed the capitol because of profanity?

This reminds me of a time shortly after 9/11 when an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming "People like you caused 9/11" just because he stole a jack in the box mascot head car antenna topper.

No, that's not what I said. "Cheap laughs and the thrill of anger" is a superset. More succinctly, "bread and circus." There's nothing new about it.

> lol ... an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming

On the second thought, this makes me sad. I hope someday I'll be an old man living among friends, instead of watching my neighborhood devolve. It's all perspective, of course. I've been the hipster, now I'm the gentrifier. Still, one can feel the pain of that old man.

Slowly, but surely, more and more words are being chipped away from the definition of free speech.

Putting the free speech thing aside, the problem here is that it can and it is being used as a pretext to silence the dissidents and the opposition.

So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition.

And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.

The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).

> So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders?

It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people.

> If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms.

I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there.

> More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech.

Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive.

> The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes.

Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.

I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to.

School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions.

Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.

> This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit

This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.

Sure, but I also support the mods’ right to ban them for getting their point across this way. Deplatforming is itself guaranteed by freedom of speech.

They banned everyone, not just a few users.

Imagine if HN’s host killed all of HN because someone used the “r word” and it wasn’t removed.

Yes, that's freedom of speech. You can criticize the decision, but it's their decision to make.

In this very thread you can find discussion on what makes a public forum a public forum.

> Yes, that's freedom of speech.

War is Peace.

Freedom is Slavery.

Ignorance is Strength.

Censorship is Freedom of Speech.

"I demand that you refrain from exercising your full range of free speech so that I feel more comfortable exercising mine."

"Si vis pacem, para bellum."

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

"What you don't know can't hurt you."

You're only making the case that it does fit.

I don't really know what you're getting at here.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/quotes/

They go on the list because the conclusions are transparently absurd, despite the ability to rationalize your way there through doublethink.

But you are both right. Ever had a good free debate about anything when the other side of the debate held their ears and screamed their opinion full blast?

The best and most free debates I ever had happened in environments where I knew that I was allowed to be wrong without them holding it against me.

As a European I always thought free speech was very much an American thing. In the past years I realised that debates are lead much more freely here than in the US, because your debates constantly go onto a red vs blue track. That means speakers have to reflect that constantly and signal to everybody else where they stand and which team they like.

The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.

> The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.

This, I agree with. But the point I'm trying to make is that this cuts both ways. Alice has every right to make her point however she wants. Bob also has every right to not lend her his resources to amplify that. Charlie has a right to criticize Bob for denying resources, etc etc.

I note that the shoe never seems to be on the other foot — e.g., the crowd that gets angry about Discord banning hate speech is curiously quiet about the chilling effect white nationalist rallies have on people of color.

I agree with what you say. If you look atthe parent comments, they both go to extremes to make a point. A big problem when it comes to discussion, is coming in with an attitude that your view is “right” and soapboxing it to the world. In any discussion their should be room for shades of grey and the respect to listen to different and (in your eyes) descending views.

How you communicate is just as important as what you wish to communicate.

Exactly. Especially when we talk about freedoms and rights it is important to recognize the collision space between the different freedoms/rights of individuals.

If one exercises their freedom of speech in certain ways one might impede the freedom of speech of others (e.g. who are objectively less free). This is one of the big differences between Europe and the US: in the US the freedom of speech of the individual (regardless of the collisions with others) is traditionally valued more, than a collective, utlitarian definition of freedom of speech which is more present in Europe.

Utilitarian freedom of speech would mean that we try to optimized for a society where everybody can speak freely even if this means cutting of some individuals that go to extremes.

Individual freedom of speech means you let everybody say what they wanna say, even if it means that the discourse of the society as a whole gets harder, muffled or destroyed.

I don't say any one of those things is better, but both have their pros and cons and we certainly need to be aware of the downsides and complexities involved when we ask ourselves what society we want to live in.

xkcd 1357 was a disaster for the online discourse.

Their place, their rules. I see the continuing belief you can do anything on somebody’s else turf. Wallstreet bets could pretty much move to 4chan if they value their 4chan behavior this greatly.

I don't think it's this simple. That interpretation of freedom of speech seems a bit literal. The point is that people should have the ability to voice their opinions, and have their voice heard if anyone wants to hear it. Since today that's done primarily through social media sites, blogs, and videos, preventing people from using those mediums is limiting their freedom of speech.

And of course I'm not saying there aren't limits to freedom of speech. There are legitimate limits. But a social media company deciding they don't want you on their platform anymore without any due process seems wrong.

I just don't buy the overly literal "this is private property and I get to decide what you're allowed to say here", when that private property is our primary medium for communication.

I agree with that in the same way that I agree with strong anti-monopolistic laws, and with the expanded understanding of de-facto monopoly where (for example) Apple/iOS is one despite billions of Android devices.

But I do not think Discord is at that level yet, while Facebook, Twitter and YouTube most definitely are.

All you can reasonably ask a normal company is that they do not act to harm society in their pursuit of profit. And they may argue that they believe the dynamic of WSB is harmful to society. I think that position in this case and for WSB is defensible, and I am yet undecided personally if I actually agree with it or not. (I do believe that WSB may grow to become clearly harmful, but I'm not sure they're there yet)

Not sure. Back in the day it was very common to buy space in a local newspaper and print messages there. The newspaper could (and would!) deny publication of auch messages arbitraily.

Living in Germany with laws that ban you from displaying Nazi insignia or spouting certain phrases in public, I don't really believe in the whole "if we ban a certain thing there is a slippery slope and suddenly everyhing is banned". German society more or less collectively decided that tolerance for the intolerant is stupid and did something about it.

This might seem a little extrem from an US perspective, but just like that the prudeness of US society seems extreme to us Europeans. You talk about freedom of speech and censor every female nipple there is? Really?

What we will and won't tolerate in public forums is a mirror of our respective societies and values. And there is always something we will have to ban or at least frown uppon. E.g. even in the US child molesters won't be very able to talk about how their believes are okay etc.

And because all out free speech is destructive we have to strike a balance somewhere inbetween disincentivising people who use free speech to get rid of it and not turning into thought police.

Seen from a German perspective the US is so polarized that the polarization alone disencourages most people from leading a free and meaningful discourse.

My point was that private companies shouldn't be unilaterally deciding what is or isn't allowed.

I do not. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.

Uh, since we’re talking about intolerance... you should be careful how you wield Popper, you might even realize you’ve become your own enemy

Since we are linking to wikipedia articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

I read in a circular delivered by the express that sometimes words express different meanings then the mean read of the word.

Heh, two weeks ago people on HN were citing the the paradox of tolerance to promote anti-free-speech.

Hate speech has been wilfully misconstrued to mean speech you hate.

Censorship always serves those with the power to censor.

discord is filled with 'snowflakes' (apologies if that seems insulting)

I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument.

if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.

I really think it's just the majority of Discord users being from everything but IRC.

Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.

Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling.

[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..

Discord is an app for kids to talk about playing video games. That's like being upset that you got banned for cussing someone out on Club Penguin.

The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.

should have read the fine print at the back of the box :) /quit

Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content.

In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.

I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).

> In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.

This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.

I didn't have discord level issues. I didn't know about the long term history legal issues. But in my case there was none of that, only users enforcing their own rules, or having trouble dealing with disagreeing viewpoints. Setting rules is fine on paper but oddly people used to have less rules and less desire to enforce anything back in the days.

On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.

discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.

Discord lets you tag channels as NSFW. There are clearly design features intended specifically for adults.

I had the same issues with PhDs you know. Immaturity is not a property of teens only.

Yup, I was permabanned from rockpapershotgun for arguing against rootkit multiplayer anti-cheat software and asking that punkbuster, VAC and their equivalents should be regularly reviewed and scrutinized. I didn't use a single swear word. No one reviews anticheat.

It’s as different as how jokes flying by in a locker room would have never been told in a restaurant.

I think for better or worse old days IRC was more of a locker room, while most Discords are wide audience places, more of the restaurants kind.

You still have a galaxy of locker room types of community, I see no real need to try to carve that out of every service.

Any on-line venue is a place where mods and admins make the rules. You know them before going in. Their place, their rules. It’s the same when going into any bar. Some bars may allow rowdy behavior, others have strict measures.

In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.

The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.

The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.

The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.

To reuse your bar analogy. I came in and said 'dont you think the tea is not warm enough' owner said 'uhh nooo' I said 'really, I never drank tea that cold, i think it's a lot better warmer' when suddenly the chair was removed from behind and I was thrown out.

Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.

If that truly is the case, then I should stand corrected. Thing is, I just looked at the responses on WSB, and “immature” would probably describe the comments really well. I didn’t see any arguments or actual coherent speech, to what is probably a lot of in-crowd signals / meme-ing.

What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)

The problem for you is that you can make the exactly same argument without the words that people object to and it will upset no one and lie unmoderated.

You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.

I'm not convinced. I think that gives discord and others an easy excuse to censor people or communities they don't want on their platform, but I just don't buy that their real objection was rudeness.

This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.

> You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.

They aren't. I'm in like three different Discords and retard is just another common word.

Why aren't they policed/banned over using retard?

We are calling ourselfs retards in /r/wallstreetbets that alone would be instaban anywhere.

Considering that Discord has a lot of gaming communities with underaged people, I can see the need for heavy moderation wrt language that tend to be used for cyberbullying. Whether or not just deleting the server is a good idea I disagree.

Problem is there are no competitors worth mentioning.

There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it.

And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.

I'm not a user of screencast, but I don't remember aim having that. Am i wrong ?

I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it.

There's not much left from that specific era.

Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums.

Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP.

As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.

Disclaimer: Excuse me if my statements are possibly utterly wrong due to me not having ever used Discord.

Wikipedia says:

> Discord is an American VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities.

Don't we have a metric fton of instant messengers which support VoIP and some file transfer?

What's so special about Discord?

To me as an outsider it merely seems like the kids have decided TeamSpeak isn't cool anymore and now Discord is cool.

Perhaps in a few weeks they will flock to the next voice chat which they decide is now cool. What's the big deal?

The value of a network is exponential in the number of users/connections, not in the technical features available. See Voat vs Parler or old Digg vs old Reddit.

I think The issue with teamspeak and Ventrilo were...cost. Kids couldn't afford hosting a server.

Additionally, it was stupid easy to evade bans on those platforms and troll for hours if Admins weren't on.

Settings up new "servers" is trivially easy and can be done without payment. You can join any number of servers with same account and retain separation (i.e. other users can not see a list of servers you are on). You can change your nickname on server-by-server basis. "Everyone" is already on Discord and by everyone here I mean every gaming community and many tech communities.

For TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble (which were the big 3 in my youth at least) you have to have different clients, you have to pay for servers, and the chat support is very rudimentary and bad. Channels aren't as easy to create and admin. Lastly they don't support inlined links/images or emojis. Which makes them just as user friendly as IRC.

Discord took what was good about Slack's UI and added on top good VoIP. It might not be perfect but it quite literally covers most what anyone could want and it scales really well. To beat it you must have 100% feature coverage + another killed feature. First part probably isn't that hard, but the second is. There needs to be a reason to install yet another communication program on your PC/tablet/phone because all of the communities wont just uproot and leave to a new platform over night.

How will they be able to pay the bills with this approach?

Datamining the users and then selling the data. Also probably have some governments paying them to spy on certain users.

How does Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc finance themselves? Selling data and also having subscriptions. If you pay $5/mo you get higher quality video streaming and you can use custom emojis cross the servers you visit.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_dictionarium

I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I hope this means people go back to IRC instead of using centralised services run by retards.

The discord was terribly moderated long ago. Apparently nothing changed but maybe a few more rules and auto mutes.

I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say.

If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages.

Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.

I agree. 100%

It’s very easy to make this point without using slurs yourself.

I’d really like to underhand this: Why should you be allowed to be an asshole anywhere you want? And why should everyone else support that idea?

The WSB community calls each other a bunch of names as a form of... I don’t know, acceptance? It’s not meant to hurt. It’s a David versus Goliath mentality, the little guy, the underdog. That’s why they call each other these names.

I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.

yes, soon all the pejoratives that I can use to describe a person believing in language policing will be banned...

The phrase 'language policing' will be offensive. Thoughtcrime!

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