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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

You are partially correct. Community and network effects are strong, but Discord has technical features no FOSS equivalent currently has:

* One-click audio-video screensharing

* One-click video conference and chatting

* Emojis and inline images

* Decent UI

Bonus: Discord gives people the super quick option to have a hosted private server.

Discord can do all this because you are the product. Sure, there is nitro, but Discord is spyware that looks at every process on your computer and I'm sure they are using/selling that data.

So I believe that a client/server architecture that can do self-hosting and meet those technical requirements, could possibly bolt-on "single identity" ala Discord.

Does Matrix support instant screenshare/video chat rooms?

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In Matrix (element.io here), you can click on one button in any room and start a video chat, and then after one more click screen share. The rooms aren't dedicated to voice/video but it definitely is very easy to do that.

It is implemented using Jitsi at a protocol level but the end-user doesn't usually notice that.

> Discord is spyware that looks at every process on your computer and I'm sure they are using/selling that data

Is there solid evidence that supports this, or are you saying it based on intuition?

Not evidence that they are selling or even collecting this data, but discord _must_ look at the process and/or window table periodically to know when you are playing a video game so it can give you the one click stream button.

What do you think free apps do to make money? Especially one which is hosting real-time communications?

There's a reason they shove the app down your throat even though the website works perfectly...

They sell premium subscriptions

Personally, suspicion. The other two comments combined cover it: Discord does look at all your processes to see if you're playing games, and having not read the EULA but knowing how "free" apps that cost money to operate work, I assume they are doing some kind of analytics and selling that data.

It's just an electron app. Rather than just flinging mud, it'd be relatively easy for anyone to actually find evidence of this.

That there are several articles about people reverse engineering the client and protocol and nobody else has brought this up, I feel pretty comfortable calling this unfounded unless you can provide some indication otherwise.

> relatively easy

You would have to show all network activity from the app never includes this type of information or anything derived from it, because as soon as anything goes server-side it can be used for anything. Is this actually easy?

That's what you'd have to show (prove the negative) to disprove what unethical_ban is saying (that it is spying on you).

All any of the people claiming that discord is spying on you need to do is capture one packet going out that does have that sort of information, or find one piece of code in the client that supports doing so. That is the part that I think would be relatively easy given that it's primarily just a gob of javascript in a chromeless browser.

> find one piece of code in the client that supports doing so

But that's the point. There is a "server" running on your machine that is snooping on your processes (therefore the one-click integrations). The "client" you interact with never sees this info, instead just what the "server" exposes to it, so I claim you'd need to reverse engineer the "server" or wireshark your network and read probably-encrypted communications...

Discord definitely checks your process list, that's well-known and obvious (by default it shows everyone which game you're currently playing, if any).

Given that that information does go to the server, there's no way to know what it's used for.

Are you sure it's checking your process list, or is it using something like e.g. the Steam API to ask about the currently running game?

It definitely checks the process list. On Linux it lets me add "systemd" as a game to display on my status

Yes because non-Steam games are displayed too.

> Given that that information does go to the server

That "given" there is doing a lot of work. I've never seen any reference stating that it's sending the entire process list anywhere.

The current third party protocol implementations all expose setting the game/activity you're playing directly, sure making it look like everything is done client-side.

I have at this point lost count of the number of times I or someone else I know on Discord has described getting Youtube recs or ads directly referencing shit they'd just talked about.

I started getting blasted with YT recs for weeks for a channel I had never heard of, never watched, had no real common connections with ... until someone referenced them in a conversation on Discord.

Now, you can shit on that as anecdotal or "intuition" or whatever, but come on. This is HN. No one here is ignorant about the level of data sharing that goes on in the adtech space, and everyone claims they don't until Gmail's selling you ads based on your emails.

It's not like someone's just argued that the president is a space alien. We're talking about suggesting a for-profit internet company is doing something that literally damn near all the for-profit internet companies do and have done now for decades. The bigger question is to how anyone could be so credulous as to assume they are not.

This is the same thing people accuse Facebook of and nobody has convincingly proved Facebook does it. I despise Facebook as much as the next HNer but I am loath to make it seem more capable than it is. Likewise with Discord, I sincerely doubt they can handle combing through voice + text data to build profiles of users, and I'll keep that stance until someone convincingly proves that they do.

Natural Language Processing is literally a major wing of AI development and data science, but even that isn't really necessary. Matching text on ad-based keywords has been going on since fucking About.com.

I'm not shitting on it, I'm just asking what level of information we have about which data Discord is actually collecting/storing and what they're doing with it.

Unrelated to "looks at every process", but Discord stores messages unencrypted & refuses to delete messages.

With "refusal to delete messages" being a clear violation of GDPR, I think it's fair to assume fishy things are going on.

Matrix doesn't (yet), but Jitsi does, even without accounts for joined users. All you need to start a Jitsi chat with any number of people is a URL.

_Integration_ with Jitsi is a separate matter, however. Hosting it can be a pain too.

This is not the same as channels in Discord/Mumble/Teamspeak.

Discord is not spyware, it does not sell user data, and it doesn't collect all the programs you use on your computer. If you have the setting to show what game you are playing it periodically checks your processes and looks for a match locally before setting that match as your status.

You missed the most important technical feature: shared chat history.

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