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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

So, is there a reason they could be doing this?

Like from Discord's perspective, what would this actually accomplish business wise?

I'm kinda drawing a blank here.

Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners -- being able to say they have approximately x 18-24s is valuable to pitching partnerships, etc.

Market research and marketing. Given their rollout of "quests", it's probably another marketing dimension that someone could tailor their ads for.

Ex, maybe don't show the "ad" during the day because they're likely at work if they're >24, or show a "quest" that's targeted towards nostalgia.

> Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners

I'm thinking about the workflow here.

First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male.

Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male.

Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior.

We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?

I think the world is being segmented into those who are exposed to targeted advertising and those who never or almost never see any advertising because we use uBlock Origin.

Oh, you. Thinking uBlock Origin actually blocks advertising. It doesn't block sponsored blog posts, sponsored comments, paid reviews, conflicts of interest, marketing copy on landing pages, etc. Advertising is everywhere.

And uBlock can't protect you from anything not in your web browser.

I don't think I use any proprietary web services outside of either my web browser (90%) or command-line CURL (10%).

I have 3 PC game platforms, Discord's desktop client, 4 cloud services, and probably some company hubs for drivers (Nvidia, Logitech, Razer, etc) that phone home. You can definitely access all these through a browser intermediary, but many don't. Steam sort of needs to stay on your device for DRM purposes anyway.

What? You mean it doesn't block billboards or radio ads either? It doesn't block my friends when they start talking about their iPhones or being Vegan?

There's just no avoiding those astroturfed marketing campaigns being pushed by Big Vegan.

Minimalism is a scam created by by big small to sell more less.

Inferences have uses. I’ll always try to target marketing based on user segments that are deterministic and I’ve read how the data is collected. If I can’t find that, I’ll look for modeled/etc audiences that include inferred data points. It’s likely discord would have targeting/data for self-reported demographics at a smaller scale and higher price point. Then the inferred demographics at a larger scale and lower price point.

That means your strategy is to make some assumptions about where your marketing will be well received, and insist on only showing it there.

This limits you to the quality of your assumptions. It's always going to be better to show your marketing where it actually works than to show it where you believe it works.

Well yeah you start with an educated guess and optimize once it’s live. So budget/etc moves fluidly and if discord audience 1 performs well it gets more budget. DSP I use doesn’t have discord inventory (if it exists?) but pretty much everything is optimized by deep learning outside of moving branding budgets around.

Selling ads for Red Bull to high school and collage age boys.

Selling ads for paroxetine to women aged 40-50.

This isn't just useful for their own marketing as some may imply. My guess is building out an ad network/platform for 3p advertisers to run ads on it.

Discord has nearly finished killing IRC, so it must be time to enshittify!

Until Discord makes it impossible to run an IRC server or client I dont see IRC going anywhere.

You, Me, and the 12 other IRC users remaining aren't going anywhere.

But denying that Discord has effectively killed IRC is just self-delusion in my opinion.

Yeah, protocols are unkillable, but the interest in IRC was definitely hurt by Discord. Had they started putting ads in the client from the start, I doubt so many groups would have migrated to it.

A non-marketing answer is determining whether users are under age for regulatory purposes. Discord was and still is a gaming chat platform so the draw of young children can be dangerous.

Could be used to trigger a verification workflow in the event certain municipalities start requiring it.

How does that explain the focus on gender? Admittedly there are countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia where there might be laws about what you're allowed to show women.

It'd be more remarkable for a Western company to not be focused on gender.

I recall hearing that they added some sort of advertising into the streaming built into discord. Maybe they're intending to gradually expand that and make them more targeted.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/discord-is-adding-ads-but-with-a-g...

In the best case it helps them identify under-18s to keep them away from adult content/creepers.

Maybe finding out if you've got under aged users in order to prevent them from using the service or accessing resources they should not?

The obvious answer is marketing but I think there "could" be a real use case for:

"We want to know if we've got under aged users accessing what they shouldn't and they're not honest about their age so we have to figure it out somehow."

Age and gender are super important for marketing but I'm not sure why it's a big deal. Your (inexact) age and your gender aren't private.

The fact that your online behaviour outs you as gay to an algorithm might be something that you want to keep private though.

I think the "big deal" about it comes from the fact that users did not give that information willingly to Discord. If I did not provide you that information, why would I expect you to know it? And in a state that California (where Discord is based), I have the right to know how my data is used/shared, and request it be deleted. But I can't request information to be deleted if I don't know you have it. I can't know how you're using/sharing my data if I don't know you have it.

I guess they are saying they don't need to ask you anymore - if you willingly give your actions (servers you browse, things you say, chats you react to, etc.), and they can infer from that, then where's the foul?

I think it comes before that - the first pieces of data they are scraping. I don't buy that the problem is that they can and will infer your age/gender/etc. based on that.

The foul is that PII per California law the user has the right to know what information is collected, how it's used/shared, and request the data to be deleted. Discord is based in California and will be under subject to these laws.

Looking through Discord's ToS and Privacy Policy, gender isn't mentioned once. And age is mentioned once in the Privacy Policy in regards to account creation.

This practice circumvents the law by gathering this information without the user's express permission.

They aren't collecting gender. They're guessing at gender. If they're doing it right, they're just storing a score representing likelihood. I don't think it's a given how the courts would rule on that... even in California.

They are spying on you, looking for clues to your gender. That is the same as collecting the data, but more insidious and automated.

The foul is that I don't want to share my age and gender with every online service that I interact with. I'm bewildered so many people defend discord's actions here. If you give company your email address are they allowed to fully doxx you (your real name, home address, job history, age, gender, friend list, phone number)? Even though you've shared your email address and they just used it to infer the rest (using publicly available sources).

> If you give company your email address are they allowed to fully doxx you

I'm not sure but I'd also be interested to know why information that used to be printed in any phone book for the world to see is suddenly the most private information to hold dear.

I might have my hottest take of all: Anonymity is bad for the web and (ironically) makes us less safe. It creates a power imbalance. I'm only "anon" here because others are. If nobody was anon (somehow) we could know our attackers, trolls, and harassers and take action.

At least with a phone book you were able to opt out of your information being included in it. As of right now, there's no way to opt out of Discord.

Anonymity on the internet protects a lot of us from state actors, governments, and fringe extremist groups. We're already losing that anonymity with many state laws (submitting IDs to view adult content is one of those). Imagine if the President had a list of every person worldwide who said anything bad about him. Name, number, gender, age, address, list of friends on every network, etc.

Having to deal with trolls and harassers that can be blocked or removed from the platform for gross violations is a much better option than everyone in the world being able to find out who I am, who my family is, who my friends are, etc.

Yeah you wish that would work.

All the bad actors will do is steal someone else's credentials. Just like they do now. You still won't figure out who they are. They'll set up networks of fake names, fake friends, fake businesses, fake pages, fake comments, fake posts. They're not going to just roll over and start doing shady shit in their own names.

Note my (somehow). I'm aware it wouldn't be possible.

If you talk about cookie recipes, you might be the type that buys baking sheets. Discord knows you talk about cookie recipes. Presumably it's in their TOS or something.

To me, this strikes me as someone walking in the park with a stroller getting indignant about someone assuming they might be a parent.

Sure, but now consider that the government also has access to this data, and pair that with recently passed laws around gender & reproductive rights. It gets ugly fast. Discord is holding a dangerous piece of data, here.

> request it be deleted

You hear that, HN? Not providing an option to delete our comments is against the law (in California and probably in EU as well). No, anonymizing the comment doesn't count.

> No, anonymizing the comment doesn't count.

It would be nice if HN, or literally anyone, offered that option.

>Your (inexact) age and your gender aren't private.

"On the internet, no one knows you're a cat". Most people probably don't care enough to conceal such factors, but maybe we should be more careful divulging that information on a semi-anonymous platform.

Age is an especially dangerous thing to share if you're young.

Does the EU require it to track for underage users?

Not tracking, but EU and their countries have strong laws to protect children. And the Digital Service Act did raise the bar in all of EU. So figuring out users they are supposed to protect, might be beneficial to prevent high penalties. And DSA was finalized in October 2022, so the date matches.

Ads. These apps have no other way to monetize.

Under the UK Online Safety Act pretty much every website going forward is required to figure out the age of every user - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

This is almost certainly a starting part of implementing that, designed to reduce the amount of users they have to ask for harder age checks for.

> So, is there a reason they could be doing this?

Ummm... like, business?

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