Another Reason Hive Needs To Break It's Discord Addiction

Those who know me know that Hive's use of Discord is one of my hobbyhorses. I keep banging on about it to anyone who will listen, endlessly.

Image made by me in Paint from Discord logo. I'm gonna say "Fair use" on this one !

Why Don't I like Discord ?

What I hate about Discord is summed up in two simple reasons.

First, it's a jumbled mess of a place. You can lose an evening just working through all the channels and sub-boards. I'd say some of it is down to channel admins who create unneccessary boards, but more of it is that there isn't a single "read it or not interested" button to mark a whole channel as read.

Second, and more important (for me, at least) is that it's a Web 2 place. There's no decentralisation, it's an owned business and comes with moderation policies.

What's New

I received an email from Discord today advising that they were introducing new T&C's effective 29th September. It's a fairly normal approach adopted by most corporates these days; "accept these terms we're shoving down your throat of f**% off". Louis Rossman has been doing a lot of good work on YouTube, Oddysee and Rumble raising awareness of the issues around this, but that's a tangent.

The key thing that jumped out at me is that despite not being a British company, Discord has totally caved to the demands of Ofcom (the British media regulator) on the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act. Ofcom are working hard to establish the principle that they can regulate the internet globally.

What Is The Danger ?

For those who don't know about it, the Online Safety Act is a UK law that came into effect recently, supported by both wings of the Uniparty. It's supposed to "protect the children". That's politican-speak for any measure establishing authoritarian control. So far, it has been used to target people in the UK using social media to criticise the government, particularly around issues of immigration policy.

Figures are hard to come by, but it's reckoned that 3-400 people may have been imprisoned for social media posts, and only one person that I know of has been charged for using the internet to obtain indecent images of children (and that is a Labour member of the Scottish Parliament....go figure). It is thought the UK may now have 6 times as many political prisoners as Russia.

Part of what Discord is doing is creating a requirement for UK members (and so far only UK members) to submit to identity and facial verification if they want to view anything Discord considers to be intended for adults - which will no doubt include any discussion of politics. They also reserve the right to ask for it at any time from UK members.

While only a few Hive users are from the UK, I can see more countries introducing similar legislation aimed at abolishing internet anonymity. I have no great trust in the ability of a third party in a foreign country to keep my information safe from hackers, governments and dishonest employees who might want to trawl my site usage. The KYC required is easily enough to steal my identity, so a treasure trove for hackers.

One of the things I like about Hive is the anonymity. I don't say anything particularly controversial here (although the relatively mild criticism in this post is probably enough to get me a year inside), but I don't particularly want to break that anonymity by effectively doxxing myself to meet Discord's requirements.

What Is The Solution ?

We're always going on about how Hive is the most wonderfully flexible blockchain, and it is.

So why aren't we using it to create an equivalent to the good bits of Discord without the bad bits ?

Effectively, at it's core Discord is just a different way to organise short-form content. The music, streaming and live chat facilities are bolt-ons which could be planned for initially and added over time.

We've already got a few tools - PeakD Snaps, Ecency Waves, InLeo Threads - which have short form content. I'm sure someone could code the structure which allows sub-boards to be set up within communities or on a front-end that could organise them in a more-Discordy fashion rather than as merged news-feeds, with those Discord-style tools which are actually useful. Hopefully in a more streamlined way !

Now, I'm not a coder, but we've got amazingly talented people here, so I'm sure it could be done if there was a communal consensus that it was time to spread our wings and create in-house solutions, and then agree to use them.

I also think that a Web3 alternative to Discord might be an app which, if it gained internal traction and was then promoted externally with enough vigour, could bring new users to Hive.

Posted using The BBH Project