I really think it's just the majority of Discord users being from everything but IRC.

Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.

Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling.

[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..

It’s as different as how jokes flying by in a locker room would have never been told in a restaurant.

I think for better or worse old days IRC was more of a locker room, while most Discords are wide audience places, more of the restaurants kind.

You still have a galaxy of locker room types of community, I see no real need to try to carve that out of every service.

Any on-line venue is a place where mods and admins make the rules. You know them before going in. Their place, their rules. It’s the same when going into any bar. Some bars may allow rowdy behavior, others have strict measures.

In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.

The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.

The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.

The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.

To reuse your bar analogy. I came in and said 'dont you think the tea is not warm enough' owner said 'uhh nooo' I said 'really, I never drank tea that cold, i think it's a lot better warmer' when suddenly the chair was removed from behind and I was thrown out.

Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.

If that truly is the case, then I should stand corrected. Thing is, I just looked at the responses on WSB, and “immature” would probably describe the comments really well. I didn’t see any arguments or actual coherent speech, to what is probably a lot of in-crowd signals / meme-ing.

What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)

Yup, I was permabanned from rockpapershotgun for arguing against rootkit multiplayer anti-cheat software and asking that punkbuster, VAC and their equivalents should be regularly reviewed and scrutinized. I didn't use a single swear word. No one reviews anticheat.

Discord is an app for kids to talk about playing video games. That's like being upset that you got banned for cussing someone out on Club Penguin.

The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.

Discord lets you tag channels as NSFW. There are clearly design features intended specifically for adults.

I had the same issues with PhDs you know. Immaturity is not a property of teens only.

should have read the fine print at the back of the box :) /quit

Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content.

In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.

I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).

I didn't have discord level issues. I didn't know about the long term history legal issues. But in my case there was none of that, only users enforcing their own rules, or having trouble dealing with disagreeing viewpoints. Setting rules is fine on paper but oddly people used to have less rules and less desire to enforce anything back in the days.

On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.

discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.

> In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.

This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.