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Social Networks

Discord Bans 68,000 Servers, 55 Million Accounts (thegamer.com) 29

The social media platform Discord recently published its quarterly safety report which notes that some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022. From a report: According to the company, the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses." The number of accounts that were disabled for reasons other than spam definitely pales in comparison, amounting to a mere 1,821,721. The bans in this category were mostly handed out for issues relating to "child safety" or "exploitative and unsolicited content." Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter of this year, meaning that of the 235,945 users who called for a second opinion about their ban, only 3,098 of them were reinstated on the platform.
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Discord Bans 68,000 Servers, 55 Million Accounts

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  • Oh great (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @03:53PM (#63013231)

    Seriously Elon, stop buying these companies! Leave the bots alone!

    • Yes, will no one think of the poor bots!

      We clearly need a robot liberation front!

      But luckily we have already some of the needed pieces ready with the Skynet military satellite network and have had Linux 4.1.15 for a while and soon getting walking artificially intelligent robots from Tesla..

  • "Discord Bans 68,000 Servers."
    Bans.
    Present tense.

    "Some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022."
    Were.
    Past tense.

    English. It's the language you are paid to edit.
  • by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @04:23PM (#63013307)

    My wife set up a test server and asked me to get on to test video.
    I allowed cookies from the domain, but then I got banned, apparently for not allowing cookies from some other domain(s).
    Now it seems my email address is permanently banned.
    I hate it when a website won't tell you which domains you have to allow to set cookies in order for the site to work. but Discord took that to the extreme.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Hmm. My first thought when I read the summary was "I think we're supposed to trust that they're being honest about their reasons.".

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Well it's not like we have a say in what they're doing anyways. It's their platform, they can ban anyone who wears purple on video chat if they want to.

  • Discord Bans 68,000 Servers, 55 Million Accounts ... the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses."

    The Vikings [wikipedia.org] won't be happy ... :-)

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter...

    A two-percent success rate implies that 98% of those who tried to appeal ultimately failed, but that hardly means the initial action by Discord was justified. It merely means (spoiler alert!) the Corporation won the argument.

    Also, if Discord revenue is based on advertising, they weren't banning "spam or spam related accounts". They were killing the competition. I certainly consider online advertising a form of spam these days.

  • man i miss IRC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ganjadude ( 952775 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @05:05PM (#63013401) Homepage
    IRC was the best system, decentralized, anyone could run a server. hell even discord uses the same or very similar syntax as IRC

    I really should package a new IRC skin, i havent made one in 20 years. make it mobile friendly
    • Combine screen sharing, voice calling, and image hosting and I'll sign up! Discord sucks.

    • So, go back to it. My old school friends and I are still using it. We even have an IRC bridge to jack into the Matrix. ;)

    • Even without voice chat, some major features of Slack and Discord that are missing from IRC are built-in logging, built-in link summary, and built-in attachments.

      Logging
      Logging lets a user view conversations and participate in a limited manner [cheney.net] after the fact. The usual workaround is for each user to subscribe to a shell account on which to run a bouncer.
      Link summary bot
      Link summary bot lets a user view a summary and primary image of an article or other web document whose URL a user has posted. The usual wor
  • by Anonymous Coward

    A little at a time, like how to cook a frog.

  • by hAckz0r ( 989977 ) on Monday October 31, 2022 @08:45PM (#63013827)

    I tried signing up with Discord for a software support forum about a year ago and I was banned before I even logged into it. I went round and round with tech support for about a month and finally just gave up. There was no path by which I could take to get both my email and phone/2fa configured into that account without triggering their automatic banning of my account. It simply would not accept my phone number for 2fa. There was no way to reset my account because I could never login. How could I possibly be "abusing the system" if I never even succeeded in logging in? They just didn't seem to care.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday November 01, 2022 @04:07AM (#63014299)

    Do I sense some discord here?

  • has always been aptly named.

As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one. -- Dave "First Strike" Pare

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