I feel like it is inevitable with this kind of attitude and Discord's other approaches that they are headed for a fairly ugly showdown.
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.
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.
I learned to not use my name online the hard way. I'm 15 now and I had poor opsec when people started getting mad at me on games or whatever else, and I use online personas on almost everything.
Oh absolutely. When I was growing up, people looked back 20-30 years at the hornet's nest of predators at "nudist camps" and other such things that masqueraded under the umbrella of "peace love and mung beans".
Now we look back at the world of AIM and ICQ and IRC as being just as bad.
This will change nothing. Since 2020 and their efforts to get more than gamers on Discord it has been a cesspool of minging, predators and other nefarious activities. I've gotten like 4 or 5 Discord accounts banned for trolling, raiding, false reports or other harmless crap like that and they have no systems in place to prevent people from just making another account other than phone verification, and I have used the same phone number to verify 8 accounts before. The things going on already are newsworthy, but in my opinion TikTok/Instagram algorithms encouraging teenage girls to starve themselves is probably as serious if not more.
It's not the worst approach to it, but there's a specific change they'll end up making to their proposed UI. Currently, the time limit is applied at the moment that Discord issues the warning:
> 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 used to be WoW GM (many, many years ago now) and 3 hour suspensions effectively worked like this, if you were offline it would only start the timer when you next logged back in. I can’t recall for sure, but I think 24 and 72 hour suspensions were different and started the count down at the time applied.
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.
It's stupid and egregious to ban someone for "breaking TOS" or "sharing harmful information" and not telling them exactly what they did and where they did it, no matter what you see them as.
Only from the perspective of the person getting banned. From the perspective of the person paying the bills, you're paying someone to spend time explaining why you kicked them out, and then you're paying them to discuss the reasoning, and then you're paying them to discuss the reason with hundreds of users that don't think there's anything wrong with calling someone [some word].
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.
Off topic but I can't resist: happens to a lot of people accused of sexual harassment at work. They get permabanned from work, and don't know what they said or did, nor when, where, or to whom.
Let's look through your post history. How many comments before we can come up with a reason to ban you that would be widely accepted in most contexts? 3.
> 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!
That's the whole point. Permabanning on the first offense ignores the reality that these large-scale moderation systems (automated or human) tend to lack nuance and context-awareness, leading to false positives. A system of escalating warnings adds slack to protect good-faith users from those sorts of moderation failures.
So if someone shares CP on discord you think they should be given a warning and not permabanned? The justice system isn't going to give them any slack so why should a private entity? Where do you draw the line? I asked in my initial comment, "What's egregious to you". No one will answer that...
> So if someone shares CP on discord you think they should be given a warning and not permabanned?
"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.
You say "CP" like it's a clearly evil category, but there's people out there that insist that fanfic about characters in a kid's show kissing is in that category. So, no, I don't really trust moderators to permaban that.
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"
They were banned for doxxing 13 year olds in call of duty lobby and calling them the N word... I'm sure everyone feels so much better now. That's what you need? Really...
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.
> “We believe people, especially teens, have the ability to change when given the opportunity, so we want to offer those opportunities,” says Badalich
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.
I think I understand what you're getting at, but of course if you permaban anyone for any reason they'll have no choice but to leave or make a new account.
I had written a sentence along the lines of "the timeout should increase teenage retention and engagement" but felt it was so obvious based on my previous two sentences. I think now a good summary would have been along the lines of "This can provide a teaching moment to teenagers and improve their experience." Even though this feels like an obvious inference based on the rest of the post, it does provide a nice summary and drives the point I was attempting to make.
That some bullshit digital chat channel company should give itself the right to morally judge when and how people should or shouldn't change is itself an idiotic idea to take seriously. I really do hope more people reject this nonsense over time and actively work to punish companies that assume themselves arbiters of correct behavior. Sure, community standards and moderation are necessary, but MANY digital companies today take that basic concept and stretch it into all kinds of puritanical parochialism. It's almost ironic how much we regress to village shaming standards as we move forward into a global communications future.
It also seems really, really smart about long-term planning for their target growth audience (e.g. teenagers and college students) in a way that I haven't seen from any other social platform. If a platform wants to be the center of social life for people that age and keep them long-term, it absolutely needs to be able to handle the statistical nigh-guarantee that most teenagers will break any reasonable TOS at one point or another.
Discord permanently banned every single user who was present in TheDonald community Discord server after January 6. Every single person. Even if they had never said a word, even if they joined several years earlier and muted the server and hadn't opened it since.
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.
Discord only a year ago appeared to be banning people completely randomly to try and boost its new users numbers as it showed interest in IPO. Its taken a while for all the complaints about this to finally reach the point of wanting some transparency, given how atrocious their support is (mostly just a bot) I can't imagine much changes.
> In the coming weeks, Discord is rolling out a sensitive content filter that will be enabled by default and blur sexually explicit content in DMs and in servers
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.
If this feature is anything like their existing detection, it'll be near useless, buggy and just get in the way. For a while discord would detect things like close up pictures of hands as nsfw and would block sending them in a group dm channel even though none of us had the filter setting on.
I don't think I will ever understand how the freedom of separate IRC servers got replaced by a single platform that mistakenly calls each community a "server" when it's clearly all on the same server and moderated by the same company.
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.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 80.1 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
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.
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.