[HN Gopher] PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr acc...
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PSA: Don't base your business around Discord.7yr account banned for
posting ASNs
There's been a trend of startups basing their entire business on
Discord like Midjourney AI, and Discord themselves pushing for
people to do so with their subscriptions system. Well just a few
days ago I found out that my account of 7 years was just banned
without a warning for a very obvious error on their part. Just
hours before my account was banned I posted a list of ASNs
(basically ISPs) connected to a non-discord server I had that
looked like this: 22773 ASN-CXA-ALL-CCI-22773-RDC, US 5432
PROXIMUS-ISP-AS, BE 577 BACOM, CA To someone who doesn't know
what ASNs are, they would probably assume they are addresses. This
is not personal information, and there's no way to tie this
information to any individual. I opened a ticket and the only
reply I get is that the ban will not be reversed and that the
account will be deleted in 14 days. I've tried posting on Twitter
and they have selectively ignored me while replying to everyone
else. Any submission I make on the subreddit gets instantly
deleted. Screenshots for proof.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAA_7mR?format=png&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XZ4zaEAErD3J?format=png&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F49XtAiaEAMmDdK?format=png&name=900x900
This also isn't the first issue we've had with Discord. They
threatened to delete my server a few years ago because 1 person
said they were underage amongst thousands of lines of chat and we
did not see it and ban them. They refused to tell us who it was so
I had to spend hours looking through chat to find the offending
user. Think twice before you decide to base your business around
Discord.
Author : bottiger1
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-09-02 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
| asu_thomas wrote:
| [flagged]
| swyx wrote:
| i mean, Midjourney would beg to differ, I think they've done
| plenty well basing their business on discord.
| julienreszka wrote:
| it's a huge business risk
| rat9988 wrote:
| Midjourney has been successful and then what?
| bottiger1 wrote:
| Ok and what if randomly one day they get banned? They lose 90%
| of their customers that don't want to move off Discord?
| jrockway wrote:
| I doubt that Discord is the driver behind their success. They
| could have used IRC and people would go out of their way to
| engage with them because what they're doing was so
| interesting at the time. If they get banned from Discord, the
| vast majority of the community will move to wherever they go.
|
| This is a different situation than something like app stores
| where if Apple bans you, that's the end of your company.
| Users simply cannot get your app from somewhere else, at
| least not without giving an Android vendor $1000. Nobody will
| do that.
| bottiger1 wrote:
| That might have been true before, but there are viable
| competitors popping up.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm not sure if Verified & Partnered servers are treated
| different, but unless you have explicit contract with Discord
| their moderation can be rather flaky.
|
| That should be understood reality if you use any third-party
| platform.
|
| Also it is open to question was it this activity. Or something
| else. Or just being present or member of some server where
| something against ToS happened.
| bottiger1 wrote:
| I am quite confident that it was this activity. It is the only
| thing that fit this description:
|
| "Your account maliciously shared or participated in the sharing
| of the personal or private information of another user."
|
| It was also the only message of mine that was deleted in the
| past week.
| galenmarchetti wrote:
| Is it a common practice for Discord to enter in contractual
| obligations with businesses that use Discord as a central
| support or distribution channel? I've never heard of this
| before and given what happened to OP it seems like this should
| be (a) common knowledge that you can do this and (b) a default
| option for businesses to consider, if Discord is indeed a big
| channel for your business.
|
| We use Discord as a primary support and community channel and
| it never crossed our minds to make a contract with them, but
| now I'm thinking about it..
| jtchang wrote:
| Does Discord charge or have some type of contractual agreement
| with you? It does seem odd -- they must have some checking on
| addresses and personal information and what you posted just
| happens to match that regex.
| galenmarchetti wrote:
| Does there exist a Discord business plan / any way to even get
| such a contractual agreement in place? We use Discord as a
| support channel for our developer tool and I've never heard of
| an option to get enterprise support...but if such a thing does
| exist and Discord offers it, I'd probably take it given OPs
| story
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I've always been wary of adopting Discord, at all.
|
| Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel like
| I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either by the
| platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they don't
| quite understand sound business principles like Platform Risk.
|
| If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a business
| owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you don't
| control? You might assume a Platform Risk, and be fully aware of
| it (and in the meantime, capture the capital to have your own
| platform or contract services from another platform less
| volatile), or you might not be aware of it at all, or if you're
| aware, you just play dumb and say "it won't be a problem, that
| happens to others, not to me".
|
| I just get discouraged, I never end up joining these Discord
| communities and I don't buy the product/service the company is
| selling, I feel it distasteful.
|
| In these SaaS days where providers can get away with not having a
| proper Support department or they are too big for you to go ahead
| and sue them face-to-face... why'd you put your neck on the line
| this way? It feels so needless.
| gruez wrote:
| >Every time I see a business inviting me to a Discord, I feel
| like I'm putting myself in a position to be mistreated either
| by the platform or by the company inviting me. I feel like they
| don't quite understand sound business principles like Platform
| Risk.
|
| >If keeping up the business afloat is your mission as a
| business owner, why'd you base your business off a platform you
| don't control? [...]
|
| Why is discord any different than other platforms like
| office365 or AWS? Do you feel the same about companies using
| those platforms as well?
| travisporter wrote:
| Discord won't let you use a VOIP number so I can't even get on it
| lldb wrote:
| If what you say is true, take them to arbitration. They usually
| have to pay the arbitrator's fees and you can typically do it
| over email/video call.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Did you not see people warning against this previously?
|
| These warnings are like "make backups", "use a password manager".
| Afaict, people are either going to, and have, or they're going to
| be lazy and assume it won't hurt them until it does.
| slau wrote:
| Why was the message deleted? Was that screenshot taken after you
| got banned?
|
| We only have your word to trust as to what the contents of the
| message was. This seems like a campaign to get unbanned more like
| a real warning to the HN community.
|
| Edit: what does this even have to do with "don't base your
| business around x"? Private companies can cease doing business
| with you for a variety of reasons. You triggered one of them.
| bottiger1 wrote:
| It was deleted by the discord support. I presume it was deleted
| when I got banned. I don't have a screenshot of what it was
| before because there is no way to log all activity on discord,
| nor did I expect to get banned.
|
| 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.
| slau wrote:
| Is there any chance someone reported you (the message, more
| specifically) for doxxing?
|
| 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.
| bottiger1 wrote:
| Yes it is very possible. I have also posted asns in private
| channels before and nothing ever happened. It was only
| after I posted it in a public channel that I got banned.
|
| There are a few competitors that are really jealous of our
| success.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _This seems like a campaign to get unbanned more like a real
| warning to the HN community._
|
| 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?
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Edit: what does this even have to do with "don't base your
| business around x"? Private companies can cease doing business
| with you for a variety of reasons. You triggered one of them.
|
| 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.
| slau wrote:
| You're right, and eloquent to boot.
|
| 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.
| rat9988 wrote:
| "don't base your business around x" this is a logical
| conclusion when you get no support from the company. The rest
| of your edit isn't logical either. When a business stop doing
| business for you, you deem it unreliable. If x has been banned
| without recourse without doing anything that would be,
| obviously wrong, I would deem it unreliable.
| slau wrote:
| My point was that this did not look like a business. It
| looked like a gaming server.
| bottiger1 wrote:
| It is related to gaming, but we handle large amounts of
| money to keep our servers running, as well as providing
| revenue to Discord in the form of "boosts". It should be
| relevant to people running startups here.
| version_five wrote:
| I'm super risk averse so I would never build a business around a
| single point of failure like that - but I know that there is
| money to be made taking this risk (at least VC money, presumably
| real money). Look at everybody building off OpenAI, look at AWS,
| Shopify, etc. I'll never base my business around a platform, but
| I'll miss out on many opportunities, even if it's a big risk.
|
| All that to say the warning won't stop people.
| emrah wrote:
| Platform risk is very real
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(page generated 2023-09-02 23:01 UTC)