Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

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There's a special phenomenon that happens as startups grow large. They begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product, their users and how it's used. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics. A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri...

As startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product. These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company.

Which is why we end up with decisions like OnlyFans hitting $1B / yr in revenue (with extreme profitability) off of porn and then deciding to ban porn, https://www.ft.com/content/5468f11b-cb98-4f72-8fb2-63b9623b7...

Or, Digg deciding to kill its "bury" button and doing a radical "redesign" that made Reddit worth billions.

Unity's decision to update its pricing. Sonos' app "redesign" etc etc.

Corporate vampires will cheerfully slaughter your golden goose. Or, in the best case, severely cripple it.

I think this decision is more defensive than "losing touch with their customers." The winds are shifting in other countries that are cracking down on social media use for children. Discord does not want to get caught in the shit storm of legal issues if they fail to comply. This is a proactive measure.

> this decision is more defensive

That is prioritizing internal politics over the realities of their product. The Discord userbase is young. And it serves a variety of use cases / the same account can be used to access open source communities, coordinate video game time with friends, interact professionally, and have a supercharged group chat for close IRL friends.

In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/

Any decision that isn't along the Apple's hard privacy stance lines, "we'll protect user privacy" is prioritizing the discomfort of that decision over the user base / use case.

It's not 'internal politics,' what are you talking about. It's the politics in our real world. UK gov is requiring ID verification for adult sites. France gov is calling a social media ban for teenagers.

We're talking about elected European governments here. It's not like Discord shareholders just woke up this morning and decided to make themselves poor.

Switching to another centralized service won't do shit as long as voters keep falling for 'protect the kids.'

This is the real issue, and it's why just cancelling your discord subs and moving to stoat or etc isn't a solid long-term strategy. If KOSA passes in the us basically every platform will have to do something like this.

That's a big if. And yes, if push comes to shove I guess I'll become a forum pirate. I won't tie my real ID up in anymore private servers than absolutely necessary (which as of now is governmental entities and banks, a highly regulated sector).

I don't think it's that big of an if anymore - there's worldwide pressure and interest groups to get some kind of age check on all these companies, at least. Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

There's always been pressure. People have been fighting for decades on this. The only thing that's changed is how they've tried to disenfranchise dissent.

There still is push back, so I won't say this is a losing battle. I'll keep fighting regardless.

>Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

They know where to reach me. Whether they care enough to go outside their gardens to talk is another matter.

Multi-billion dollar corporations have never had any problems lobbying for their interests before.

Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links, scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for "ground truth" is the real interest here?

They were already collecting everyone's messages and social links, and would still be doing it without this. But I'm not sure if the age verification / ID collection is really as useful for advertising compared to just being able to read all of your chats, right?

I think this is about "losing touch with their customers" and the need to IPO and make money from the customers.

The thing is, most of discords users are in countries which haven't yet passed laws that ban children from using apps like discord. If they were privacy focused they could do this only where the law requires it, like Australia.

Yeah, this really seems like it's our politicians screwing us. The older I get the more harmful politicians seem to be.

If you're in a democracy, that's the call to pay attention and vote in helpful representatives.

Youre joking, right? Nobody i have ever voted for has won anything

There are no helpful representatives is the problem. It doesn't matter who you vote for, because they're all just varying degrees of bad.

There isn't a single politician I could vote for that could improve this situation. Even if there was, they would just get swept away by the ocean of people who actually believe in this "think of the children" narrative.

If that's the case, you need to grow the representatives you want. Many of the people voted into mayor or governor didn't pop up out of the ether. They were working in local boards or as comptrollers or even business owners.

That's why local elections are so important, despite the dreadfully low turnout.

A mayor or governor can't change these things though. That's part of the problem since I'm in the EU. It's irrelevant what representatives in my country want because they're too small of a minority. But even among those representatives there's nobody that actually cares about issues like this.

>That's why local elections are so important, despite the dreadfully low turnout.

Local elections here are about parties, not candidates. You can give your vote to Jim, but it's counted as a vote for Jim's party instead. The party picks whomever was their #1 candidate for the locality.

In pretty much all cases, the companies in question had peaked were experiencing declining growth and attempting to do a hail-Mary... and failed miserably.

Compare Digg and slash. One completely died, the other has stuck with its formula and hasn't disappeared, but has just faded into irrelevance.

that's true, guilds moved to discord because it was easier to use than teamspeak

I don’t think this is a phenomenon. At the best places I’ve worked, I’ve seen success correlated with actual user value. You do find climbers at certain places but I tend to think it’s a large reason they fail.

Also, I don’t think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A pretty effective one.

Do you have reading on it being a stunt? That seems like a huge gamble. You’re basically inviting competitors and pissing off your supply (content creators.)

If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.

I don’t know for sure but it’s been implied that it was an intentional action to garner public outrage at the banks who wanted to stop processing their transactions.

I think this is actually a different growth problem, which is that they became so large that several countries are designing new regulations that specifically target them. I think discord is trying to spin this into a regulation-as-moat opportunity instead of dying by a thousand papercuts.

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