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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.

Discord also refuses to delete any data you give them. Deleting a Discord account sets a lockout flag, changes the nickname to "Deleted User" and resets the avatar to default. That's it. They don't even bother setting the user ID on your messages to something common, to a bot (and anyone who turns on developer mode) all your messages still contain your Discord ID.

I also learned from personal experience that they ignore any requests for deleting data coming in via GDPR. These people need to get slapped in a lawsuit.

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> Discord has the same issue, essentially everyone who works in a somewhat technical role has access to their moderation tools that have zero auditing and reports of abuse (reading people's DMs "as a joke") are not uncommon.

This is the first time I hear of this, can you please link a source?

The Discord subreddit has a few threads about this, but it has always been an open secret back when the Discord Developers guild still existed. I'm pretty sure it got axed because some staff members got too memey about abusing their database access.

So Discord has the same issue should be Discord had the same issue - I also can't find any mention of such abuse of power. The only thing is supposedly this Trust & Safety employee that revoked the vanity url /furry to give it to another server[0], and T&S needs full database access like that for obvious reasons (even if this employee did abuse it).

0: https://discord.news/trust-and-scam/

That's one incident. I'm talking about a pattern of behavior where staff members act unprofessionally. That includes telling your users "I can just change your ID lol" even if they don't end up doing it.

Discord didn't fire the person who was joking about database edits the most (or anyone to my knowledge). All they did was close the outlet for staff to show their badge off and brag about it. That doesn't fix anything, my assumption is that this is still going in.

> I'm talking about a pattern of behavior where staff members act unprofessionally.

Could you please provide some sources? As the other poster noted this is the first time we hear of this. Would be keen on knowing more

As long as you provide yours about Teamspeak servers.

I dont believe I spoke about nor said anything about Teamspeak. What are you referring to?

However, individually deleting messages using their API does delete them from their servers[0].

[0]: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...

It does, but that is not always an option. What if you shared personal information on a server you no longer have access to? Your only option is to wait a week for your data export and then wait another 2-3 weeks for a support ticket to get to the stage of threatening Discord into actually removing individual messages. What if you're being stalked? What if you said something incridebly dumb on a server you assumed was limited to very specific people? A month to removal is untenable. Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.

Discord considers all servers public, not because they actually are (many are for friend groups or even classes etc.), but because that'd mean your consent for keeping any message you send is in question whenever someone is invited to a guild you were not expecting there. Their argument against removal is always "following public conversations is in the public interest". Any European court would tell them to fuck off if someone finally sued them over ignoring GDPR requests, because in the end most Discord servers (absolute numbers, not by volume) can not be considered public.

Not only that, Discord communities are all invite-only, even the discoverable ones are technically invite-only (discoverability process of Discord requires a permanent invite).

I tried the data export, but did not get any of my messages from the guilds I am no more a member of.

> Discord needs searchable dashboard that allows one-click removal.

The thing is there is no user→message mappings stored in their database. The data structures are designed for message→user traversal. Nothing like Facebook's user activity log.

at least on large servers, the search indexes are reasonably up to date and include user IDs.

(on small servers they're unfortunately on-demand, but you could still store a set of all guilds a user ever joined and build an overview)

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