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I think you've conflated legal and ethical obligations here; you seem to be using that to draw to an unfair conclusion.
From my perspective, the post warns against using Discord due to them (reportedly) banning the OP for innocent activity. I believe the warning is fair, as it dissuades other people from using the platform to host important content, which would be at risk of the same treatment.
While Discord clearly do not have any legal obligations to serve the user in question, this is already known. Stating it here doesn't contribute to a meaningful discussion -- no chat applications I know of are legally required to serve their users (unless, of course, they have entered into a binding contract with said users, perhaps through B2B services, etc.)
Nevertheless, the post does give off Stripe support vibes. I don't believe Discord staff monitor Hacker News, so I don't think this would result in any meaningful result for OP.
I think what I meant to say was more something along the lines of “does anyone really build a business around Discord?”
We’ve been seeing time and time again, especially in recent times (Twitter, Reddit, Apollo) that building something on top of another platform can often end in tears.
This being said, I do believe that if you’re building an integration, you might end up in a different spot than random end-users. Although the way Discord handled API changes and the whole bot scope debacle doesn’t inspire confidence.
And I say this as someone who maintains a Discord bot.
Reflecting on this all, I don’t believe this user got banned out of a random regex match. I think this user’s messages got reported for doxxing, and the moderator who reviewed it concurred.
You can confirm the contents of the message from the people talking about it here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=...
And yes this is also a campaign to get my account unbanned and also a PSA that you should be thinking about alternatives to Discord like Slack. The moderation and support system displayed here is atrocious.
I use Discord with a variety of clients, and there’s _a lot_ of technical logs, including lists of locations, and in some cases even addresses. I’ve never had an issue. I also run a small community of a few thousand users, and haven’t seen anything like this… unless someone was reported.
In any case, commiserations, and I hope you weren’t the only owner/admin of some servers.
There are a few competitors that are really jealous of our success.
So I'm guessing you posted ASNs of (in your words, basically ISPs) of some players on your server, indicating generally where they live. Was it connected to specific people? I can see why Discord would consider that private info.
And it was also not "malicious" as described by their email to me.
What we're also missing is the context. Did you share the ASNs for the purposes of, say, debugging a network connection? For statistical purposes? Or was the message more "look at the people connecting to my server, j/k these are just ASNs"? The tone you use matters too: by sharing ASNs, you could easily be hinting that you have people's real IPs, and that could be taken the wrong way.
I don't doubt that Discord overreacted here, but I certainly think there's a high chance that your message could have been misinterpreted as a threat to privacy.
If I say *Comcast* are you going to be able to track me down? No. There are millions of Comcast subscribers. Even if it was an ISP of 1 customer, that still isn't personal information. If the ISP happens to leak the customer information from social engineering, that's on the ISP, not me.
All ASNs are considered to be public information. You are required by internet registry rules to be listed in a public database for everyone to see. As far as I can tell, most people would agree that listing stats like this is not considered personal information.
I did not joke about it in any way. I showed people a list to demonstrate that we had a lot of users from Asia yet they did not use our servers in Asia. Even if I did joke about it, it still doesn't make this personal information.
> You are required by internet registry rules to be listed in a public database for everyone to see.
No. The list of all ASNs are.
I think you need to take "information connected to people" more seriously and if this is the way it has to happen, that's not the worst outcome for you.
If everyone agreed with you, this post would have been deleted off hacker news as well.
If you follow the logic of "information connected to people" however indirect, nobody would be allowed to post any visitor statistics and that is clearly absurd.
You seem to have made your mind up that your situation isn’t a problem, but haven’t given us enough context to evaluate that ourselves.
I agree with my sibling comments, your evasiveness isn't helping us make up our own opinions on this matter.
Could you tell us a bit more about that context? What "players" were these ASNs in reference to? Why did people in your server seem taken aback when you posted them? What was the discussion about when you made this comment? Why post ASNs at all? You said it was to prove people in Asia weren't using your Asian servers, what does that mean exactly?
To be clear, I've heard of lots of bad moderation calls from Discord, and I'd be nervous about building on them too. My mind remains open. But I agree with the sibling comment's characterization that you seem evasive - and that raise a red flag for me.
If he's lying, then such a campaign would be doomed to fail since Discord can see what we cannot. So what would be the point?