Discord is going to give out warnings instead of permanent bans
theverge.com
theverge.com
Lack of transparency when it comes to moderation is a bad thing. If a user is getting punished for breaking rules, they should be shown exact the message that led to the action, so that users can't claim they got banned for no reason or for some vague reason about community standards.
Also, I've never been a fan of immediately going nuclear and banning people for their first rule violation unless it's especially egregious. A simple "Hey, we don't do that here" and a short period of time-out can be a lot more effective for changing behavior.
Not only that, you're doing that to satisfy the curiosity of someone you've decided you don't want anywhere near your site. I'd be on board with your line of argument if it involved a payment of $X to cover out-of-pocket expenses and the hassle of dealing with BS.
However in this instance they (Discord) would have no reason to care about what you want, so saying that you want something is really no argument.
> I worked with a well know hacker
Holy shit, we've got a confessed security risk on our hands! Ban immediately, before bastardoperator hacks us all!
"Think of the children" is consistently used as an escape hatch to avoid actually doing due diligence in enforcement and moderation. You aren't protecting anyone by lazily granting root to content moderation / surveillance / whatever system is under discussion. You're just making those systems worse.
Say I post a picture of my young child running around in a diaper to a family/close friends discord channel.
It gets flagged as CP because algorithms lack nuance.
Should I be permabanned for this?
Are we just not allowed to share photos of children online at all unless they are clothed head to toe? Maybe that's our current cultural norm, but that seems like an excessive measure for a society where most people aren't child predators.
That said, yeah, actual CP should still be a permaban. We all agree on that. But treating it as a cut-and-dried example illustrates exactly what hnaccount141 was saying when they said "these large-scale moderation systems (automated or human) tend to lack nuance and context-awareness, leading to false positives"
Dropping a racial slur? Nah, I'd let that be a 1-hour timeout that begins the next time you try to send a message.
As someone else said, teenagers like to test boundaries and be edgy. Show them where the boundaries are and let them have a chance to correct their behavior.
Quote from the article. Teenagers are well known for testing boundaries. If you ban them for doing their natural behavior they will either leave and never come back, or just create a new account.
Companies have every right to dictate what behavior they allow on their platform, full stop.
Discord is as transparent as mud. Now that it's difficult to sign up to Discord without a phone number, my money is on the only reason they're doing this being user retention.
If you look on Disboard and such, it is trivial to find sexually explicit Discords aimed at minors, and even more troubling, ones that are sexually explicit, allow minors, and adults ("age range: 14-28").
There's going to be a newsworthy incident, soon, I'm sure of it.
(1) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/discord-child-safe...
What's interesting to me is that in twenty years we've gone from "use the internet with parental supervision, don't use your real name, and don't talk to strangers online" to making platforms pick up the slack of parents and law enforcement to prevent predators talking to kids.
Now I'm not saying that platforms like Discord shouldn't be doing a better job policing things, but it's also shocking to me how much the expectations of these platforms has changed in twenty years. AIM was way worse than Discord is today. Predators used to hang out on Runescape and Neopets. I feel like we're taking too much onus off of parents to monitor their kids online access.
Now we look back at the world of AIM and ICQ and IRC as being just as bad.
> You can't send messages for 1 hour.
This will end up needing to incorporate a timer, so that users don't just say something offensive and then go take a nap and let the ban expire unnoticed. What they have now is easily dodged and disregarded ("I didn't see the notification!" objections). Something like this:
> You can't send messages until 1 hour after acknowledging this message.
So that when they next open Discord, the timer begins once then (and not prior), while removing all deniability for having 'overlooked' the notification.
I personally got a warning threat from discord for (I assume) joining some server, but I joined a lot of servers I never said anything and I wasn't even sure what happened on the server to warrant such a warning since it was shut down and I couldn't even see anything.
I wonder how this feature will work in servers. Channels can be tagged as "NSFW", and require you to opt into visiting them. Surely they won't blur content in these channels by default? Surely if you're posting sexually explicit content outside of these channels you should delete them instead of blur them.