Discord link petition results

[u/eric_is_a_tool]

Hi comrades,

As you may have seen yesterday, we had a thread stickied petitioning the banning of semi-frequent poster /u/RevolutionCanada for posting discord links and the banning of people sharing Discord links overall. We put it to a poll and the overwhelming majority of respondents voted in favour of banning both.

There are a couple of issues that need to be addressed however:

1. As pointed out by u/RevolutionCanada, they have not actually posted any Discord links in their post history on the sub (which I have verified) and despite having anti-communism on their official website, have not engaged in any of the bad faith sectarianism and trolling that we normally see as a violation of rule 5.
2. Discord remains a popular communication app and users here have expressed interest in an official subreddit Discord, which would be a little ironic to do given banning Discord for being not great for organizing purposes.

Given the general reaction, I take it that users are not a big fan of their posts so I think rather than outright banning them for something they haven't done we'll ban them from making posts and allow them to continue to comment, which I think is a fair compromise.

Regarding Discord, there haven't been any thorough objections to banning linking random discords, so I think we'll proceed with that as a rule going forward, but we should have some discussion around suggestions of what to use instead. Matrix? Email lists? Facebook? Shouting on a street corner?

As always we're open to any feedback on these decisions.

[u/undisavowed]

Any organizing should not be done on Discord or Meta platforms.

If you need a platform, spin up a forum. PHPBB or other alts are still free and easy to install and use

Reliance on tools you have no control over is a losing game.

[u/mfxoxes]

What if instead of banning Discord links we put an automod statement warning user of the privacy issues with the platform. Informed consent.

[u/Mind_Pirate42]

Yeah I'm pretty confused by the deep disdain held for discord groups around here.

[u/Shoddy-Jelly → u/Mind_Pirate42]

Their privacy policy allows them to keep anything typed into their client in perpetuity, and they do not use end-to-end encryption.

The combination of those two things makes them a pretty big infosec liability.

[u/Mind_Pirate42 → u/Shoddy-Jelly]

Right be infosec liabilities seem like weird reason to ban links from the sub.

[u/eric_is_a_tool → u/Mind_Pirate42]

It's definitely not the best for organizing because of their data retention, but it has so many users it's hard to ignore as a tool. Honestly one could say the same about reddit too.

I think the negative attitude towards discord also stems from the user culture on the platform, it can be very toxic.

[u/RevolutionCanada]

More than fair, thank you.