Hacker News
points by arjie 2 days ago | 0 comments
Funny to see the differences in reaction to this on various communities. Privacy fears, locked down Internet, what a diverse set of views.
[–] yunnpp 2 days ago
Privacy fears from people who didn't see the irony of surrendering their phone number to a company to chat with someone on the Internet.
[–] rcxdude 2 days ago
There's a big difference between the two. For a lot of people on Discord, the fact that the communities are not public is a big feature. That they're sharing information with one company is a much less significant issue (though I agree, it would be better to have a platform that required less).

(That said, I think the fear is a little overblown and borne out of a general distrust of the direction discord is going.)

[–] anonymous908213 2 days ago
Discord doesn't require a phone number by default. My experience is that it only does if your IP is flagged.
[–] yunnpp 1 day ago
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I am on a vpn, so yeah, my IP is probably flagged. But disconnecting from the vpn is not exactly a good trade-off either.
[–] morder 2 days ago
Individual servers can require it
[–] anonymous908213 2 days ago
Sure, but privacy-conscious individuals can simply not participate in those servers. The person I was replying to was acting like you have to give up your phone number to use Discord at all.
[–] burnoutdv 2 days ago
This is a fun one isnt it.

Back in the old days (tm) you would post (maybe under a pseudonym) in the internet and dont care that much. Someone could theoretically stalk you through all the sites with moderate effort and depending on how far back we are on the timeline, but still, the Internet felt somewhat private (an illusion) sure, but for a vast amount of people, your post on furry-forum-24 was probably never seeing the light of day outside of that specific space and then it got shuttered 2007. LLMs make that so easy, filing everything away, the web is already thousand times crawled over, but now there are handy tools to search it more easily, with vague concepts, see patterns with a way much bigger working brain so to speak. I myself are quite reluncatant to write anything on the internet these days that is to personal, which is a censorship in itself. I am not sure how it is in actual oppressive censorship states like china or the usa (if you got a left-ish opinion) but the will to not write anything personal is a loss of connection to strangers that was definetly there before. Usually in tiny tidbits that were harmless in itself. But now one can trivially gather all those tiny specs of data so easy..makes it hard to say anything anymore. Same if you are averse of helping the slop machine of getting more art, texts or thoughts.