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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback

This concept is far more popular now than it might ever have been in the 1990s. Look at Discord.

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Can’t blame communities for putting up their drawbridges and filling in moats either on an increasingly hostile internet. Unfortunately many don’t realize that discord is its own prison of sorts.

What is meant by this ?

AI scraping, online harassment, etc. makes people like me want to build more of a “fort” than an open community because I feel a responsibility to protect the community we’ve already built.

Discord makes it somewhat easy to keep folks/entities out that you don’t want around, hence so many hobbies and such moving into the space off traditional forums and social media. But it also silos off knowledge which means other folks can’t find it. It’s a real catch 22

Okay, I think I understand, but Discord users typically use other apps too. So I wonder about the extent of this

It’s just something I have observed both with professional and hobby communities I participate in. I can’t say it with any sort of real numbers behind it. Just ~vibes~ or whatever we want to call it haha

Discord still works fine in your normal browser. I'm not aware of any content that requires the use of its Electron app—obviously it has more platform integration features, like slightly better screen sharing (and audio sharing on mac), but nothing groundbreaking.

> Discord still works fine in your normal browser. I'm not aware of any content that requires

A browser that can only go to https://discord.com is a proprietary browser.

Correct, but OP was talking about access being conditional on using a proprietary browser. Users can use normal, non-proprietary browsers to access discord.com. Nothing in Discord requires users to use their proprietary browser, like this Perplexity subscription does.

So? Everything in Discord requires users to use discord.com.

?????

Considering BolexNOLA left a comment demonstrating perfect understanding of this situation before you left yours, I'm not sure what you think is supposed to be confusing.

Discord makes a proprietary browser available. You can run it from your desktop or from your web browser. All content in Discord can only be viewed by going through Discord's proprietary browser. Your regular web browser can't access it at all.

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