Discord banned me with no recourse

I don't get it.

We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?

I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is "Sorry, this page isn't available." and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is "Sorry, this page isn't available.". Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.

But when say "Ok, let's build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof" then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.

Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always "But what if you lose your private key?"

Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) "decides" to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.

This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you AND you lose your private key.

If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.

I could sleep way better if I knew that two have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me and the platform.

Discord Trust and Safety in particular is downright useless. I feel I should share my story. It's a personal hell I've been stuck in for a while.

I'm disabled from severe depression resistant to first line treatments, bedridden a lot of the time, and I rely on the platform for most of my social interaction and resources for my hobbies, as far as I can pursue them of course. Discord is invaluable and is basically a monopoly in my cultural bubble.

On Jan 13, they disabled a 7 year old early supporter account with an active Nitro subscription with the reason "Your account posted content that sexualized individuals under the age of 18, or was involved in servers dedicated to such unacceptable content". I've never done this. I learned a lot of people were getting disabled for being in a server that they haven't touched in years and it went rogue or was raided and that stuff was posted there, so I figured I was a victim of a carpet bombing and it was a one-off.

But they continued to disable every new account (12 so far, I lost count). Most of the accounts were disabled in the last two weeks. They left me alone for 6 months until Sep 1 when my 4th account was disabled without the usual explanation email. I made an appeal and not only was it ignored, it was marked solved within 4 hours.

In fact they have not communicated with me at all. They have ignored all of my tickets, have not sent emails for each account that was disabled after the first. Except one time I got an email but the reason was left blank.

A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.

In the last two weeks it was always the same Discord staff assigning themselves to my appeals, "Violet". This includes the one that was marked solved without communication. And they're supposedly experiencing increased ticket volumes.

I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. Only thing I can hope for is Discord to basically die and everyone moves elsewhere, or they leave me alone.

The popularity of Discord always surprises me! It takes hard work and time to create an active community. Why put all that hard work and time into a corporate-controlled platform that can lock you out of it anytime they want? How do people feel ok taking such a big risk? Why not use an open protocol like Matrix (or IRC if you're savvy) to form your community?

I triggered some Discord flag where now they require me to give them my phone number to log in via the web. I won't give it to them. Luckily I have a still-logged-in instance on my home computer, do I can still use that for the time being. Super frustration though.

Seems like it's an old issue that hasn't been fixed [0]

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600556...

When they were doing the massive bans in November/December/January it looked like it was to try and boost their new user stats for the rumoured upcoming public sale. But more and more it just looks like they have an errant security algorithm that bans legitimate customers with no recourse. I suspect much of Discord's new user signups are people who have had accounts banned and then have to make a new account, there probably isn't much real growth happening now and there is growing disquiet about their terrible customer support.

Yeah you're SOL. Discord has a habit of banning people, saying that they investigated themselves and determined themselves to be correct in banning you, and then deleting accounts.

Somehow my phone number was removed from my account and now i cannot add it again. When asking support why it was removed they've responded multiple times with the same canned email saying they can't remove the phone number requirement. I repeated said I don't want it removed, just to know why my number was removed and how to add it back, but yet i receive the same canned message.

This happened to me - they absolutely will not unblock your # unless you know somebody who works there beyond the support queues. I was told by a friend who did a stint at Discord that standard flow is churn new accounts, and that's acceptable because their users are already used to name churn.

> I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?

Why? Discord has no obligation to its users, and it's a volatile platform to conduct any mission-critical or business-related communications. The best thing to do is to stop using it.

I have also tried to contact support and it was painful.

At first you get an automated response from some bot which is unhelpfull. After some more diggin and poking around you get to a human but they just told me that they don't know details about flagging and cannot do anything in regards to these processes. So basically useless.

I really don't understand why it got so popular

edit: typo

So you can just snipe peoples accounts if you know their phone number?

Write abuse@ and you stand a good chance they revert this quickly.

Stop depending entirely on corporate systems for your personal communication and recreation (I say on HN...).

And absolutely stop calling for the use of violence (regulations by government) in these situations. Just because Bob says you cannot come over to the weekly neighborhood BBQs in his backyard does not mean it is ethical for you to call up your police friend to threaten Bob and to make sure you can go. It doesn't matter if you're right and he's wrong. It doesn't matter if everyone in the neighborhood continues to chose to go to his BBQs and you can't. It's still Bob's backyard and he isn't inititing violence against you. Don't do it to him.

My discord user was initially blocked as they thought I was a bot. I had to write to support several times before it was unblocked and it wasted two weeks of my life.

Discord sucks. The only reason that I use it is because of work.

My idea is we should regulate a lot of online services like we do landlords.

I remember years ago Microsoft thought someone was pirating their software so they started reading their emails looking for evidence. That seemed wrong to me. A landlord wouldn’t be allowed to snoop through your drawers if they thought you were stealing, they’d need to convince the police to get a warrant.

And in this discord case, once a company agrees to create an account for you and start providing service, they shouldn’t be allowed to “evict” you overnight for no good reason. There should be a proper process with protections when ending the relationship.

Honestly at this point I just went to the cell phone store and added a new line with a new sim card

Its like $5-20 dollars/mo, circumvents phone number based account barriers, circumvents voip and burner number discrimination

each iphone has 2 sim card slots, can give dates and strippers a phone number that doesn't have green bubbles when texted, amplifying my broad population legitimacy by an order of magnitude (its USA obviously it matters), while still keeping them segregated

I pay more for an uber, or a drink, or some stupid SaaS seat. just a social and internet freedom tax.

at this point just make it normal

I did the same thing (also wanting to create a work account) with a similar result. Luckily it was the new account that got banned instead of the old one.

I hadn't added the phone number to my old account and when I later wanted to do so I was informed it could only be assigned to one.

So I removed the number from the new account, which immediately got banned, and then added it to my old account without a problem.

Something about "new account without phone" discord seems to dislike.

My old account also had some money spent with them, which possibly saved it.

Discord, Reddit, and Twitter are notorious for being infested with pedos as moderators. You're better off without them. And there are alternatives.

We really need a platform that would run open source for you as a service.

In many cases there are reasonable OSS alternatives (here, Discord itself!) but not everyone wants to be a part-time sysadmin.

Free/Libre Open-Source Software as a Service, anyone?

I had a similar issue where the support was useless (said I triggered some flag and nothing could be done). My conclusion was to avoid using the service.

Putting your phone number into anything is a big mistake.

Are you using a google voice number or something? A lot of big tech wont accept that type of number for verification.

It fascinates me to no end.

On the one hand many people more or less voluntarily use private companies’ free services and are surprised when they are shut out for arbitrary reasons. On the other, regulation is decried as government overreach.

Then there are the inevitable technologist voices calling for yet another technical solution for an issue created by technology and economic liberalism in the first place.

This is a social and legal issue, not a technical one.

They did the same to me, then I asked for a GDPR delete and they restored my account instead. If you are an EU citizen it's worth a shot.

Really. At this point legislature is the only way out.

Any service that forces a telephone registration for verification is crap in my opinion.

If you need an account professionally, you need a mobile phone to be provided for you. This is in your interest and that of the company if they decide they want to use your account beyond your employment for example.

Top G style.

Be happy they somehow think they have enough of your personal data and metadata.

> I recently tried to make a separate work account in Discord.

You should explain this to your employer and not use a gaming communication platform for work purposes.

Matrix is trivial to self-host.

HN needs a separate section for this sort of "media shaming" posts.

I understand why they are being made, but it's getting a bit tiring to see these on the front page so frequently.