CloudFlare is blocking traffic to Discord
discord.com
discord.com
In the meantime you can go to discord.com and use the web application or the mobile version. They both are not affected.
@dang can we block comments on this or delete or something?
I'm part of Gen Z, so I guess you can count me in? Haha
the block is real tho. I can't login through my desktop client. Using the browser app works though. Maybe they disabled the Cloudflare CDN on their website as an emergency fix but couldn't easily do it for the desktop (i assume electron?) app?
This concentration of power in the hands of a few companies, like Cloudflare, Google, and Meta, is precisely why anti-trust laws were established. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of political will to enforce these laws effectively. As a result, the future landscape of the internet is likely to differ radically from what we are familiar with, and not for the better.
Just because a company is offering services enough that a plurality of users accept, doesn't warrant government interception or action.
You are incorrect.
Natural monopolies occur and get displaced by innovation all the time without any regulatory involvement.
Capitalism is dangerously flawed without carefully considered regulation.
You're also making assumptions about the motive behind my statements of fact to convince yourself or others that I'm wrong without disputing the relevant details of my comment.
There are vanishingly few instances of a natural monopoly occurring out of thin air and remaining a monopoly. In fact, there's a strong argument that regulatory capture is the cause of the more egregious examples of long-standing monopolies, which would not have continued to exist were it not for the burdens of entry creating through coordination with the monopolistic entities.
In our current political environment, it's hard to argue anything we face is actual capitalism as opposed to cronyism.
We live in a world that is driven by a remarkably small number of massive corporations.
Huge corporations acquire smaller corporations. Huge corporation merge with other huge corporations.
To say this type of behaviour is not at least serving the same negative function as a monopoly is utterly disingenuous.
This type of capitalism is not working well.
We've seen significant shrinkage among the FAANG and their peers in the past few years.
Walmart was considered a massive monopolist threat before Amazon came along and ate their lunch. These are examples that fly in the face of your contention.
What are some examples that support your argument that any of these businesses holds a de facto monopoly?
Again, the root cause of most of the monopolistic effects in our market are due to regulatory capture. Without regulations to set minimums for competitors, they face the threat of newcomers. This is why Walmart and other big organizations support minimum wage increases despite the negative impact on their bottom line. New supermarkets can't even begin to incorporate if they're faced with massive wage and regulatory requirements.
I'm trying to talk generally about the concept of monopolies in a supposed free market economy and the need for regulation.
Fundamentally, we don't necessarily need business to operate at the scale its grown to.
The only reason these businesses have grown so vastly is because it increases profit in the hands of fewer people.
We (as a society) can do better.
Venture capital and business loans could easily fund the next big industry giant provided the barriers to entry aren't astronomical. But corporations are utilizing their lobbying powers to capture the relevant regulatory market in ways that protect their interests.
Your problem is with corporatism and cronyism, whether you realize it or not.
Web browser version works just fine though.
Being lazy, but might try reinstalling discord sometime later.
What is "blocking traffic" in this context?
It seems this is causing a flood of people that aren't really accustomed to constructive discussions like the ones usually held here, as this thread is currently full of:
- "I have the same problem"
- "Someone has a fix please" followed by questionable remedies
- Some kind of Nazi troll (Not making this up, luckily gets flagged pretty quickly)
Take the thread about the upcoming Raspberry Pi 5[1]. It's very active with comments so I think its a good example.
Notice how many comments are more than a paragraph long, they give valuable information from the article combined combined with an opinion of the author, and are sometimes just so very "nerdy" they're simply awesome to read, like someone running inflation calculations about how affordable a modern Raspberry Pi is compared to past times :) [2]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37685580 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688866
Most HN readers know what Cloudflare is, know that Cloudflare occasionally blocks legitimate users for no good reason, and know that if every Discord user is unable to access the desktop app because Cloudflare is blocking their entire userbase then the Discord on-call engineers are almost certainly having a busy day.
If you're interested in learning what Cloudflare is and how to use it, you could read https://developers.cloudflare.com/learning-paths/get-started..., or if you're interested in reading some material that's more critical you can see the previous discussion about it at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=cloudflare.
In other words, this thread shouldn’t really be posted here.