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Comment by tsukikage | Hacker News Reader

What's the problem with moderation? Not only can you do all the same kinds of kicking/banning you could on IRC manually, there's a pretty clean API that lets you write bots to do it, and plenty of third party bots able to automate common tasks if you don't feel like writing one yourself.

All the other points stand, and the platform is indeed full of spam and scam - because many "servers" are run and inhabited by kids who don't investigate any of the moderation options and/or actively participate in the spamming themselves - but it certainly doesn't mean it can't be done.

(IRC was full of spam and scam as well as soon as you stepped away from the better kept communities; and also things like DOS wars and hostile channel takeovers during network splits, which Discord seems so far largely free of)

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Go into any crypto related community and wait a day until the spam bots start bombarding your with DMs. Sometime stupid, sometimes downright well done scam. Sometimes things you are expect to answer. No visual difference there if you don't know all the verification bots by name & Id. In my point of view it's a dangerous platform because of the lack of general moderation.

It shouldn't be the server owners problem to repeat the same lines warning against the same things again and again because they lack actual control.

"Allow direct messages from server members" is a setting you can control. You can toggle it per server, and also set the default for new servers you join. This is more control than the IRC protocol offers - you can globally ignore all private messages there, or permit them. (You can also block individual users, of course, which you could also do with IRC). Private message spam is also a thing on IRC (though there it tends to be the "lonely women in your area" sort rather than crypto).

This really feels like a social problem, not a technical one; and not one specific to Discord, though it sounds like you have encountered some particularly bad communities there.

> Go into any crypto related community

Lie down with dogs, and get fleas.

> What's the problem with moderation?

The OP mentioned a bunch of problems spawning from the platform's lack of moderation, among which there's spam and scams.

OP didn't mention discord at all. Do you mean my post's parent? They said "because nobody but discord can actually moderate", which is counter to my experience; therefore my post asking for clarification. I'm keen to understand what the moderation tasks are that discord can accomplish that the users who are discord server admins cannot; perhaps I will learn something new, or perhaps I may be able share something I know.

Certainly, as I mentioned, I do see problems with scams and spamming in some communities due to the admins of those communities choosing not to moderate, or not knowing/caring that it is possible, but those problems do not seem specific to discord - IRC also had them, as do other platforms. Hence my confusion.

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