Even only hearing your side of this, I think Discord is being reasonable. It sounds like anyone could grab a cheat from your server and go wreak havoc on an unmodded server for this game... surely your mod isn't universally used?
Then Discord were not being reasonable, since (according to the story that the rest of these details are from) the channel had the blessing of the game's developer.
I think the question for discord is rather if it allows that precedent on one platform it becomes much easier for cheat distribution communities to use this sort of rhetoric as a disguise to avoid being banned.
I think not allowing the distribution of cheat software even for benevolent purposes on a platform so widely used by a general audience is probably a reasonable choice.
No, that's a bogus argument. People always try to justify misbehavior by saying that acting appropriately would create precedent, and applying that precedent to a totally different situation would lead bad results. This argument is bogus because you can just...not do the second part.
The actual slippery slope is that making excuses for companies that act inhuman just allows companies to act more and more inhuman.
Discord is a private company. I know it has been pointed out repeatedly, but there is no slippery slope here because discord is not obligated to host any content it deems bad for its business. This isn't inhuman, nobody is entitled to use anyone else's private platform.
Precedent matters when it comes to what you host because it does put a significant burden on discord to distinguish what content is malicious and what isn't once they allow malware to be distributed on their service. If the platform becomes infested with people spreading malware for games users or other game developers will avoid it, harming discord's business.
If you want to have a community of people that shares content that violates the terms of service of a lot of existing software then you'd probably be wise to host that platform yourself rather than expecting a game chat company to facilitate the sharing of game-breaking software for you.
> Discord is a private company. I know it has been pointed out repeatedly, but there is no slippery slope here because discord is not obligated to host any content it deems bad for its business. This isn't inhuman, nobody is entitled to use anyone else's private platform.
This seems like kind of a red herring, because it doesn't address the question of what behavior is reasonable. You're throwing out a generic talking point that would make essentially any behavior "reasonable" if we actually accepted it as a justification. This is like getting caught cheating by your spouse and trying to justify it with "It's a free country!" It doesn't matter, because your legal obligations are not the point.
> Precedent matters when it comes to what you host because it does put a significant burden on discord to distinguish what content is malicious and what isn't once they allow malware to be distributed on their service. If the platform becomes infested with people spreading malware for games users or other game developers will avoid it, harming discord's business.
This is not saying Discord's treatment of OP was reasonable, it's just speculating that Discord are unreasonable because it's cheaper to be that way. I agree that's probably true. And I'm saying I think we should carefully consider whether we want to deal with companies that have that particular set of priorities. Maybe the answer is yes for you, but a lot of people and businesses have been burned by similarly inhuman customer service from (for example) Google, so I think it is at least worth recognizing unreasonable behavior.
>Discord is a private company. I know it has been pointed out repeatedly, but there is no slippery slope here because discord is not obligated to host any content it deems bad for its business.
You're right. And this is another reason why Discord should not be used.
No. If the game dev agrees this particular collecting mechanism (a discord server) is worthwhile then they've granted an exception. This overrides the "not suitable" aspect by virtue of that granted exception. Cheating communities can still be shut down even with one community having the exception. "Fairness and equal ability to apply an exception to a rule" is not a valid defence in this circumstance.
It would be like saying that police aren't allowed to speed when they have their lights flashing. No. The exception has been granted. You can't use the police's exception when you speed because you aren't operating with that granted privilege.
If someone came here complaining that the cheats that they were developing and selling got banned from Discord, their comment would have been downvoted and flagged. I'm responding to their justification for why they said they needed to host cheats on Discord in the first place, not Discord's ToS.
How would anyone know? I keep seeing HN posts of people losing their Google accounts for some unspecified ToS violation (that is, if they can get any information about their ban from Google at all).
No one ever reported that by the way. With their massive user base it would have already happened at least once especially in the light of all of these scandals of lack of platform neutrality.
What are you talking about? People constantly report their Google accounts being banned, very often for things they did in their emails. It seems impossible to me that you've never heard of someone being banned by Google because of something they sent with their Gmail account. Usually Google reports it as an unspecified ToS violation, but that doesn't mean it wasn't related to things they did in "private" correspondence via email.
I believe it has been many years since any Google employee has looked into a Gmail accounts message contents without prior permission from the account holder.
If you're referring to the fact email is usually not encrypted / verified, that is clearly not what OP was referring to by "privately". Email is in general a "private" (as opposed to "public") means of communication.
