Their privacy policy says they don’t sell your data.
Not that you should automatically trust any communication platform (present Lemmies excluded), but exchange of data for services is at least not the business model on paper.
In a sense, you still “are the product”, because people won’t buy Nitro if there’s noone to talk to.
But that’s different from like… tracking micro-motions of your mouse to categorize your personality traits and increase ad conversions.
Looks like that’s based on an outdated TOS. Even then, those terms are pretty tame except for the one about transferable license for uploaded content, which has thankfully been narrowed by a lot in the current TOS. (Now it just means: We’re allowed to store your images on S3, resize them, and show them to people you specifically selected to send them to.)
For a company that’s worried about 230 safe harbor, GDPR, CCPA, and wants to promote their first-party products at you, this is all standard.
it’s still a proprietary centralised platform that depends on a single private entity that we trust. I don’t see why to choose that over libre decentralised ones.
Discord shouldn’t be the only client you can use to access the communities
Discord shouldn’t be the only host you can use to create and run the communities
I don’t see any problem with Discord being the most widely-used client and/or server host, nor with Discord selling premium features and doing analytics in order to sell those more effectively.
The general problem here is lack of interop.
But like, I can’t get too upset at Discord specifically. They wanted to make something cool, they did, they seem to be doing it about as ethically as you can while still making a living in this frenzied tech VC culture we’ve encouraged through basically free money for investment and insane speculative finance instruments.
Things will improve. It seems like we’re hitting the next tech bubble. And at the same time, there’s a consumer (and governmental) backlash against data hoarding, walled gardens, and anti-interop mechanisms.
I’ll say though: “depends on a single private entity that we trust”… that’ll pretty much always be a piece of internet life. Whether it’s a for-profit or non-profit entity, if you’re sharing infrastructure then you’re also sharing trust.
People lately — especially crypto bros — have been saying “trust” like it’s a bad word. It’s not. Trust is essential to the human experience, and we need to be okay with trusting each other. But what we have right now in big tech is not trust, but coercion.
The answer to that is not a new monolithic “zero trust” model, but an array of alternatives. Some private, some public. That can be built on top of a skeptical framework, like the web, but the eventual user-facing part of it needs trust in order to function.
Discord also makes you pay with your data.
Their privacy policy says they don’t sell your data.
Not that you should automatically trust any communication platform (present Lemmies excluded), but exchange of data for services is at least not the business model on paper.
In a sense, you still “are the product”, because people won’t buy Nitro if there’s noone to talk to.
But that’s different from like… tracking micro-motions of your mouse to categorize your personality traits and increase ad conversions.
Please have a look at this about Discord Terms of Service:
https://tosdr.org/en/service/536
Looks like that’s based on an outdated TOS. Even then, those terms are pretty tame except for the one about transferable license for uploaded content, which has thankfully been narrowed by a lot in the current TOS. (Now it just means: We’re allowed to store your images on S3, resize them, and show them to people you specifically selected to send them to.)
For a company that’s worried about 230 safe harbor, GDPR, CCPA, and wants to promote their first-party products at you, this is all standard.
Also:
it’s still a proprietary centralised platform that depends on a single private entity that we trust. I don’t see why to choose that over libre decentralised ones.
For sure. There are two specific problems I see:
I don’t see any problem with Discord being the most widely-used client and/or server host, nor with Discord selling premium features and doing analytics in order to sell those more effectively.
The general problem here is lack of interop.
But like, I can’t get too upset at Discord specifically. They wanted to make something cool, they did, they seem to be doing it about as ethically as you can while still making a living in this frenzied tech VC culture we’ve encouraged through basically free money for investment and insane speculative finance instruments.
Things will improve. It seems like we’re hitting the next tech bubble. And at the same time, there’s a consumer (and governmental) backlash against data hoarding, walled gardens, and anti-interop mechanisms.
I’ll say though: “depends on a single private entity that we trust”… that’ll pretty much always be a piece of internet life. Whether it’s a for-profit or non-profit entity, if you’re sharing infrastructure then you’re also sharing trust.
People lately — especially crypto bros — have been saying “trust” like it’s a bad word. It’s not. Trust is essential to the human experience, and we need to be okay with trusting each other. But what we have right now in big tech is not trust, but coercion.
The answer to that is not a new monolithic “zero trust” model, but an array of alternatives. Some private, some public. That can be built on top of a skeptical framework, like the web, but the eventual user-facing part of it needs trust in order to function.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.