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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever.

Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.

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>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server

Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.

> Except you could've, and still can.

For many scenes, the community is an integral part of the ecosystem. Unless OP is the only person who can develop anti-cheat software, s/he's beholden to the community even if s/he's among the leader(s).

> People need to learn how to adapt.

They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out.

This is exactly it. I’m in a few forums that insist on no discord and unless you go out of your way to provide a chat alternative there will just be unofficial discords.

Discord is a cancer.

Sadly.

The good news is that you'll have additional fragmentation with facebook groups and reddit, all overlapping your community so that no two groups are exactly the same!

If you want to post an update to the community for $thing, you must remember the Discord, Facebook group and reddit sub!

"Hey guys, we already have a reddit sub, do we really need a facebook group?"

"Well, if you don't mind I'll go create an unofficial $thing fb group!"

(Bonus points if you subscribe to all and get to see the same content being posted to every venue, with somewhat the same people reacting to it. It boggles the mind)

You are making it worse yourself by posting your updates on those walled gardens.

Yes. But I mean, these are not communities I created myself. Whatever the platform (phpbb, reddit, fb, etc) I always witness a sizeable portion of the community split away to something else (Discord, etc). It's maddening.

It always ends up being a doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.

If you don't post on those groups or create them, they get created anyway, and now they exist and you have no direct influence on them; and that can easily result in a community misunderstanding and split.

And if you do create them, you've encouraged walled gardening and there will STILL be stuff not duplicated.

Splits can always happen, and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough, and it is also a good thing that these splits are even easier if you're not using platforms.

Doesn't mean you have to support the people that chose to go elsewhere and tolerate those that are advertising platforms.

> and are probably a good thing once the community gets big enough

Splits are happening in small-ish communities too. People don't know why, but they have to have Discord, facebook, reddit, etc. And if you join all of them -- which you often do in case they are similar but not exactly the same ("Why are you asking this? The answer was posted to the facebook group! Oh, but we are in Reddit, never mind, here's a link to fb") -- you'll see some of the same people in all of them. The one caveat is that the "owner" of the community (say, the game devs if this is about a game) are likely to be more active in only one of the platforms; Murphy's Law dictates it likely won't be in the one you prefer.

Which really raises the question, if (almost) the same bunch of people is posting in Discord/fb/reddit/whatever, do we really need all those platforms? What purpose do they serve?

But indeed it's doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. You have no control. You can be sure someone will create that goddamn Discord.

Yeah, the best you can do (as the "leader" or dev or whatever) is pick ONE and stick with it religiously. And "reddit" is probably the best of the worst available, at least it can be linked from elsewhere.

But for large groups of the world (who are not 'gamers' or 'computer literate' or whatever) Facebook wins because everyone has Facebook.

No, again, the best is no platforms at all, so probably phpbb forums (or maybe as other have suggested, newsgroups ?)

> probably phpbb forums

I loved phpbb forums! I felt in control. Sadly, every community I was part of has moved on from there. One private community (I'm talking fewer than 15 members) I belong to moved to Discord.

It went like this:

"Hey, let's have a Discord"

(me) "But I don't wanna."

"Yesss... it's optional, the forum won't cease to exist and you can opt-out of Discord".

Current situation: the phpbb forum is all but dead. All of the activity happens in Discord. For no good reason, except that people who are online and chatting 24/7 like it. I don't. The forum has died for me.

Rinse and repeat for many other communities I used to enjoy (sometimes it's not Discord but facebook groups, with their absolutely aweful usability which is miles worse than phpbb, but you get the idea).

But, yet again, did you stand your ground and did NOT keep using Discord / (ugh) Facebook ? The forum is only dead if there's nobody posting (or I guess, only 1 person, but it can still be used as a blog of sorts at that point).

I've noticed that one small sized community still has an active forum at the same time as a Discord, I suspect because one/two of the users have absolutely refused to use Discord (it might help here that they are 60+ years old ?).

It makes no sense to stand my ground since the whole purpose of the forum was to stay in touch with a small group of people. The majority moved on to Discord. They haven't officially abandoned the forum, they just don't post there. I tried posting, got zero replies (for a couple of years), then abandoned the forum myself.

I've seen this happen more than once. "Resisting" is not an option if you value the group of people more than the software platform. What would be the point of "making my stand" in phpbb? The forum software is not my friend.

> but it can still be used as a blog of sorts at that point

No. Why would I want a blog? I wanted to keep this community of people.

Depends how much you value these people I guess. (And this is also about not using platforms on principle.)

But I can see how this can be tempting for interacting with people that aren't friends yet (so won't spend extra effort to communicate with you via the medium of your choice), but aren't just random acquaintances any more.

(But personally, at this point I don't see why I would want to associate myself with the kind of people that insist on using platforms.)

> Depends how much you value these people I guess

The people come first, the software comes second. Always. I value people over software.

> (But personally, at this point I don't see why I would want to associate myself with the kind of people that insist on using platforms.)

I... don't know how to respond to this. Yours is such a bizarre take to me. People come first, my preferred software (platform or not) comes a very distant second.

As much as I dislike Stallman's non-tech opinions and actions, I think his proprietary social media handling policy is probably the best:

https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html

Assuming you must use proprietary solutions to reach your people, RMS's solution is to use the other platforms to convert to your open platform. Maybe that won't work for everyone, but at least it allows usage of cockroach motel systems to your open one.

This is elaborated as POSSE in some places: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Hmm, I don't know, social media is really good at addicting you, speaking from experience, even owning an account that you don't intend to use is "dangerous", and this seems much worse.

(At least Stallman's advice is targeted at organizations, where the official nature of communications might stop the person doing the job getting in the engagement trap...)

True, but if you're running a website like that where you pull people from, then you should also do some automation work via NodeRed to automate those social media flows.

Its hard to be suckered into a social media site if you never go there. Then again, HN is also a social media site too.

Oh yeah, and can be very addictive and a waste of time too, though thankfully it's very light on the "social" part...

> They will adapt by starting their own Discord and cutting OP out

Exactly. And it's depressing. People of every community think they "need" Discord (or a similar tool) and if you don't create it, they'll create it themselves.

"Hey, what about if AwesomeCommunity had a Discord?"

"I don't see the point, we already have a group here."

"Well, but some people like Discord!"

"Ok"

"Do you mind if we create a fan Discord community then?"

And presto! The community gets Discord and additional fragmentation, whether you like it or not.

Just bridge it to Matrix for archival and for a fallback chat.

Discord is huge with the kids today. I saw my nephew kept checking his phone and like a typical old fart I challenged him and asked what the hell he's checking. Turns out it's discord. He subscribes to channels on discord, some are read-only, just a way of distributing notifications.

The draw is the single sign on. You sign on to one simple service and you have all your friends, all the games you follow, all the groups.

Why does Discord even care if you're discussing/distributing cheats, so long as you obey the law? Who exactly is the Trust & Safety team supposed to serve?

DMCA takedown notices take up employee time, so maybe they formed this team to preemptively shut down anything that looks like it might cause DMCA notices to come in.

Discord has been banning groups for discussing breaking the rules in games completely unrelated to discord.

Many cheats violate copyright licenses and the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/bungie-wins-lawsuit-against-che...

You lost me at GitHub : sure, the public part of it is being crawled, but it's still a platform (and a Microsoft-owned one to boot !), so if you care about the Web or libre software, you should stay the hell out of it, regardless of the sub-feature you use.

This is the same Discord Trust and Safety team that was defending and participating in communities sharing cub content.

Wonderful.

What in the nine hells is "cub content"? Are we talking about drawn pictures of animals or actual bestiality? One of these is illegal, and the other is... what like Fievel Mousekewitz goes wild?

Fievel Mousekowitz Goes Wild is putting it.... mildly.

Drawn pictures, it's not illegal but it is a bit weird.

You mean there's no way to have a bot that logs conversations in discord?

There is. And they are actually quite easy to make. I would suggest this approach to anyone worried about losing information.

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