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Discord Adds a Twitch-like Auto-Moderating Feature (engadget.com) 74

Posted by EditorDavid from the timing-out dept.
On Thursday, Discord introduced AutoMod, "a feature that can automatically detect and block harmful messages before they're posted," reports Engadget: Accessible through Discord's "Server Settings" menu, the tool allows admins and moderators to create a list of words and phrases they want Discord to look for, along with a set of repercussions for those who use them... Discord has put together three starting lists that cover "certain categories of not-nice words or phrases." Moderators can add up to three additional custom filter lists to suit the needs of their users. At launch, AutoMod is only available to Community servers.
"Moderating your growing community should feel rewarding and fulfilling, not add constant stress from dealing with bad actors or unruly members," Discord said in a blog post Thursday.

To introduce the feature, Discord created a cartoon where chicken superheroes thank AutoMod for patrolling their egg server.

Edgadget notes that Discord also has created "a dedicated admin community server run by Discord staff. Here, the company says moderators can gather to chat and learn from one another. Discord also plans to run educational events and share news through the space." Gizmodo adds that Discord also announced this summer's expansion of premium memberships, "a feature that allows a community's creators and owners to put their server behind a paid subscription."
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Discord Adds a Twitch-like Auto-Moderating Feature More

Discord Adds a Twitch-like Auto-Moderating Feature

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  • Does anyone else not like the way this is generally going. Is IRC still a thing these days ? Are there any other ways than Discord to chat in real time ?

    • Re:Discord is so icky (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @07:19PM (#62634562)

      It's not IRC: it's IRC run by Big Data, siphoning off and monetizing anything and everything that's being said by the chatters who, apparently, are blissfully unaware of the corporate surveillance going on.

      How anybody wilfully logs into a Discord server and yammers away, IÍ'll never know. It gives me the creeps each time I have to personally.

      • Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 )

        the chatters who, apparently, are blissfully unaware of the corporate surveillance going on.

        Why would they be ignorant?

        Obviously anything said on a remote system is going to be monitored by that company.

        Did you not think that maybe 99.9% of people simply do not care?

        I am on a number of discord servers and there is absolutely nothing I say on there I care about being monitored.

        How anybody wilfully logs into a Discord server and yammers away, IÃ'll never know.

        Because most people just talk with friends a

        • So you don't care that your IP is logged, everything you say is recorded and correlated with every photo or picture you upload, at what times of the day, who you interact with, when and how, to build as detailed a profile of you as possible and sell it off to a data broker?

          There's a difference between chatting in a bar and knowing you're in a public place and everything you say can be heard by anybody, and knowing there's a creep with a dictaphone and a notebook hiding behind the curtain and taking detailed

          • Apparently, yes. He already said he doesn't care.
          • Go join the Neo-Luddism movement if you want privacy. We are well past the point of no return when it comes to surveillance by technology.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by taustin ( 171655 )

              The internet is a public place. Do not do anything on the internet that you would not do in a public park, or even on television. Expecting privacy in a public place is, at best, foolish.

          • I'm in IT, and no, I don't really care.
            I'm creeped out by my own mobile phone 100 times more than being creeped out by a Discord server.

            • So true story.. I was in a bar last week and somehow the topic of reverse mortgages and cash advances of long term payouts came up. I personally asked if JG Wentworth was still around because I havent seen their commercials in years. Not two hour later, Im sitting on the couch watching Paramount+ with the Ads when what should appear? The JG Wentworth opera commercial. Years, maybe a decade since I personally saw it. Its now aired 6 times for me since that comment.

              • A family friend came to visit us a couple years ago. She brought some gifts, among which was one of them thingies where you put an aromatic cone in, light it up, the cone makes some smoke which is heavier than the air and drops down through openings in the item.
                Neither me, nor my wife ever searched the web for those, but I was talking about it briefly when it was gifted to us. My wife wasn't.
                Couple hours down the road... aromatic smoke cones ads galore on my phone in the Facebook feed. My wife's phone didn'

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by e3m4n ( 947977 )
                  my only issue with Discord is that there are people on there masquerading as kids to convince other kids that suicide is the solution. Some fuckwad gets off convincing kids to kill themselves. IMO its just some disgusting cesspool of participants.

                  • You are confusing Discord as a platform with certain Discord channels which are bad.
                    It's like me saying USA is shit because Bronx is shit, or something in that vein.

          • And who actually is "uploading pictures" to discord?
            The only pictures anyone is uploading are computer game screen shots with hints where to click or what to do in game.

            How you come to the silly idea that Discord is "recording everything" is beyond me anyway.

        • it's not just about privacy. These private companies can control and restrict what you say, and how you say it, and also what you see. That's what this story is about.
          • And? Discord is an American company, and a private one at that with Section 230 protections. They have zero obligations to provide you with a platform at your request; it's their private property. They are free to control and restrict what people can do in their private properties.

        • I just don't think many technical people realize just how little the average person actually cares about privacy, at all.

          They don't understand which is why they dont care. Most computer users go out of their way on learning on how not to use things.

      • It's not IRC: it's IRC run by Big Data, siphoning off and monetizing anything and everything that's being said by the chatters who, apparently, are blissfully unaware of the corporate surveillance going on.
        How anybody wilfully logs into a Discord server and yammers away, IÃ'll never know. It gives me the creeps each time I have to personally.

        I avoid Discord as much as possible because it's just crap, but if you don't think there were logging IRC servers, you aren't thinking.

        • I ran an IRC server on efNet. It was too strung together to successfully log much of anything. The discIO would have been excessive and netsplits were already problematic from people running DDoS attacks to cause them in order to take over channel admin rights as the system merged back together.

          • Obviously you're only going to get a subset of traffic by logging on one server.

            But besides that, lots of people did their own irclogs, so it's safest to assume that everything ever said on irc was snooped by someone, even if that's not true. There's less chance of surprise that way.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        IRC isn't as popular as Discord for a couple of reasons.

        1. IRC doesn't have emoji or allow posting images.
        2. IRC costs money to run and nobody wants to pay for it.

        • Are we talking about the same IRC from the 90s? It typically ran on an Intel PR440 mobo running dual PentiumPro with some F/W SCSI Raid array. UseNet was more of a PITA because of the call-ins when posts were missing. We were glad when the use count on our news server was too low to justify keeping it going. The only complainers were sketchy likely pedo types.

      • My Discord nick is derived from my world of warcraft warlock name.
        The only things I type in Discord is "Hello, how are you doing?" to my little brothers, and world of warcraft or eve online game related stuff.

        If that gives you the creeps, I'm sorry. I have no clue about a good psychologist close to your place where you could undertake therapy.

        Hint: no one in the Dicord network knows who am I - can't be so hard to grasp.

      • Because you don't get end users. (Score:4)

        by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Monday June 20, 2022 @09:41AM (#62635774)
        This is an argument that's a bit of a microcosm of the much more general disconnect between end users and developers/power users (see also OS wars). The vast majority of end users don't care about privacy, data analytics, advertisements, free software vs proprietary, open standards, UI customization, etc. They care about accomplishing a task with as little thinking as possible.

        Let's say you want to create a space for your friends to chat in. In IRC, you need a server to connect to. Uh oh, how do you get those? Well, some clients have a list built in you can pick from, or you could look online, or you could set one up yourself... your typical end user has already tuned out by this point, they don't care about this stuff, they just want to be in a room talking to their friends. In Discord, you start up Discord, you click the create server button, you name the server and optionally configure a few easily-ignored options, and then you click the button to invite your friends. Total time, maybe a minute or two, total thinking required, basically none. THIS is why users like Discord.

        Discord has a lot of features that end users value bundled into one fairly convenient program. Most people don't care that they're being tracked (if they even believe they are), they don't care that it's built on Electron which is inefficient with system resources and full of security holes, they don't care that Discord's a proprietary ecosystem whereas IRC is an open standard. None of that matters to your average person who just wants to chat with their friends. Discord's designed to let people communicate with each other in groups effectively, and that's why it's won out in the consumer space for that use case.

        For the record, I have used IRC for many years and continue to use it this day. I don't like that a proprietary superset of IRC run by a data sales company won out in this space. But they understood what their audience wanted out of a group communications program and designed it in a way to serve their audience's needs best. Discord winning isn't some kind of weird magical anomaly, it was just natural. The fact that a lot of people here don't understand its success speaks to the gulf between what users care about and what developers think users should care about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )
      This makes it easier to ban anyone who calls a liar a liar. Next we'll wonder why misinformation suddenly got a lot worse.

    • Is IRC still a thing these days ?

      It used to be back when a person had one computer that was always on. Nowadays, with people having multiple mobile, desktop, and laptop computers, people expect to start a conversation on one device and continue it on another. There's no standard mechanism supported by IRC networks to let a client retrieve logs of conversation that occurred while the user was either on another device or entirely offline. (A bouncer can do this. Most major networks that I'm aware of don't run a bouncer for their users.)

      • There were no accounts. You joined with whatever username you wanted so long as it was not already in use. So no real way to relay to multiple devices or provide offline history of direct messaging.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Right? And who added the banned items! Right?

  • It sucks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @07:23PM (#62634568)

    It's dogshit. It's mandatory for public "servers" and you can't disable it, tune it, or override it. The most you can do is send feedback saying it flagged something you didn't think should've been flagged. It constantly removes messages simply for having what they consider to be no-no words, leaving moderators no discretion as to whether or not those things are allowed. And you can imagine in this day and age what Discord's owners believe are forbidden thoughts. It doesn't take context into account either.

    • Although I do not indulge in social sites, I am quite old and have lived long enough to value what is said to me on my own terms. Language itself reveals the nature and the quality of the speaker and my opinion of myself has solidified long ago to realize that the world is full of fools and swindlers and idiots who are so full of themselves that what they say is valuable in placing themselves in a category of either respect or disdain. My judgement is not so fragile as the suffer in any way from verbal nons
      • Hear hear!!!

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Baconsmoke ( 6186954 )
        Here's what you're not getting. Nobody gives a damn what *you* are willing to put up with. People are sick and damn tired of trolling jerks who suck all the air out of a community whenever they come in, because they demand the right to be an ass to whomever they want, whenever they want. The simple fact is that people are tired of them. I mean sick and tired of them. Somewhere people decided that being a troll and everyone having to suck it up and put up with that nonsense is some kind of weird first amendm
        • I an 96 years old and with the entire world tumbling towards oblivion, the comments of total jackasses are no more disturbing than the cackling of chickens. Humanity is now in the process, by a full complement of threats, of eliminating itself from the evolutionary processes and my own time is about up anyway so why the hell should I give a damn? There is still a very minor chance that the whole world populace must join in tossing out the idiots in control but that likelihood is negligible.

        • Somewhere people decided that being a troll and everyone having to suck it up and put up with that nonsense is some kind of weird first amendment nonsense. It isn't. And they can go be an ass somewhere else and let the other 90% of the people enjoy their communities. How is this not painfully obvious? And how is it not obvious that most of the people who complain about it are the people who want to be the damn trolls?

          Until your message gets flagged for containing the words "ass" and "damn" and the phrase "suck it".

          • The existence of very bad auto moderation systems, or very bad restricted word lists used with same, does not invalidate the concept of auto moderation. Word filters are fine and useful things, if not used stupidly.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Until your message gets flagged for containing the words "ass" and "damn" and the phrase "suck it".

            Slashdot has had a lameness filter for a couple of decades. Sometimes it's a bit dubious. For a while it blocked the n word. Somehow, Slashdot survived and most people here seem to think that it's a good thing as it prevents a lot of low level trolling.

            The slippery slope argument is a fallacy.

            • That Iameness filter triggers on technical shit all the time. Try talking about DNS and use the acronym in caps more than twice in a post. Its aggravating as hell.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                I sometimes write about DNS and don't seem to have a problem putting DNS in all caps more than once. In fact sometimes I write DNS three times.

                • I'm guessing that particular filter kicks in when a comment exceeds a certain length, as a measure against a certain Anonymous Coward posting long, repetitive ads for a proprietary Windows utility titled "APK Hosts File Engine".

    • And you can imagine in this day and age what Discord's owners believe are forbidden thoughts. It doesn't take context into account either.

      You could always start your own chat platform where forbidden thoughts are allowed.

    • I once posted a picture of a 3D printed and painted Arnold Schwarzenegger bust, nothing out of the ordinary, and a Discord bot took an AI-powered loom at his chest and decided I'm trying to post an indecent picture.
      I took it as a flattering thing, must have meant I was good at painting it.

    • I cant have a conversation on slashdot using the acronym DNS more than twice in a post without triggering a Iameness filter.
    • Thx scammxrs and the spammxrs will find very creative wayz to get past tbaoo words dictionary and contniue to cuase havoc.

      Thx 1egitimate users will c deir messgaes cenosred wthiout any recousre.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @07:24PM (#62634572)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • This is a surprisingly popular "moderation" system that I've seen built into Discord, some sub-Reddits, and even Slashdot, and it's remarkable for how completely pointless it is

      Yes exactly, why expend effort on soemthing with such little effect?

      Slashdot's system has served to block almost nothing ever, countless obscene or rude or trolling things making it through the filter regularly. Stop someone from saying a certain word and they will just figure out code or star a few letters and bam the word is righ

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      What kind of stuff have you tried to post that got flagged by the lameness filter?

      I've been here since the filter was introduced and it's only ever taken issue with a couple of posts, which were trivially modified to pass. Mostly it was when I had copy/pasted an all-caps list from somewhere.

      I've never had it cause a problem with a post I'd regard as "good", i.e. a well made argument or offering insight.

      • Any kind of code or anything with multiple symbols (e.g. a URL you want to show as text to discuss something about the URL itself) is entirely impossible to post. Which is a problem on a tech site. Meanwhile I can insult and degrade freely, you fucking fucksicle. Idiot shit bitch. See? It doesn't filter obnoxious trolling, just the n word and maybe a couple other slurs I'm not going to check (but it's trivial to just change a letter or insert punctuation and post anyway), but countless technical comments I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Use the tt HTML tag to present URLs as plain text:

          https://slashdot.org/

          There is always going to be a trade off. Occasionally ASCII art would be nice to make a table or something, but it's worth losing that feature considering the kind of abuse that went on before the lameness filter was implemented.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What's wrong with ignoring annoying users? I mean even IRC had /ignore: if the moderators were asleep and someone was causing a fuss in the channel, everybody would simply quietly ignore that person and that was all it took. No need for regexes and rules. Best: they'd contnue ranting, totally unaware that nobody was listening.

    • banned_word, banned_word everywhere!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      Ignore/Block is "implemented" in Discord in the most retarded, absolutely braindead fucked up method I've ever seen. Ever....

      Basically. You can block someone, but every time they say something you'll see a "There's a blocked message here from someone you didn't want to see but we'll show you we blocked a message anyway. Nyah."

      It's... Yeah...

  • Apart from the new moderation options (Score:3)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Sunday June 19, 2022 @07:27PM (#62634578)
    That video they created to introduce the new features is just weird.

  • How much longer do we need to finally realise that word-based content filtering systems do not work well in practice? Languages are complex, highly-contextual constructs which cannot be easily moderated with such a naive method as a blacklist.

    • Old joke from the 80's (or earlier). A company had to send out an addendum to their Financial report because their software auto-corrected 'black' to 'African-American' which made statements like 'our financial projections put the company back in the African-American in the second quarter' instead of 'our financial projections put the company back in the black in the second quarter' because we all know that there are no positive connotations for the word black.

    • "How much longer do we need to finally realise that word-based content filtering systems do not work well in practice? Languages are complex, highly-contextual constructs which cannot be easily moderated with such a naive method as a blacklist." What a queer thought.
  • Perfect for kicking the FBI out of your white supremacist chatrooms

  • Won't someone think of the residents of Lincolnshire's most famous city?

    And what about the quaint Austrian village of Fucking? Or scenic Twatt in the Shetland Islands?

  • You will behave and sound like everyone else and you will like it.

  • Basically, they have the power, while you have to suffer the consequences of what they decide you should not see.

    Not surprising, considering that China owns more than a third of Discord.

    How long before they start enforcing things like no mention of a certain Square, and how Taiwan is a rebellious province (for almost a century now...)

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