> So what? It's a private network and a private service. They can have it function however they like. That's why free market economies work

You're commenting under a thread that proposes creating a government service to reduce the implementation costs of identity verification. When we start talking about essentially subsidizing a business practice, then this isn't really about the free market anymore.

But even if it was, criticism is a fundamental part of how the free market works. People are free to advocate against a company's policy, to publicly criticize them, to encourage people not to use them, to argue for an industry to move in a certain direction... the free market has never been a shield against the kind of criticism happening on this thread. The invisible hand of the free market isn't actually invisible, when you see people complaining about companies and making arguments about the overall direction of the market, that is the free market at work.

> Is requiring people to validate their identity before introducing something that has the potential to directly address millions of people all at once really that invasive?

In this context, yes. In a different context, maybe not. But the Internet has different social norms surrounding anonymity, and most people online aren't thrown off by the fact that they might not know the physical identity of someone who makes a website or runs a Twitter account or releases a piece of code/bot.

I think that Discord's policy runs counter to how people expect to consume content online, and I think it's reasonable to describe their request as invasive in the context of Internet norms. You're on HN right now. Does it bother you that the site hasn't asked you for your drivers license yet?

And just as a quick side note on this point, Facebook has been around for long enough that I feel like we should drop the argument that tying accounts to real-world identities inherently prevents abuse or curbs misinformation. Heck, talk radio and cable news has been around long enough that we should probably drop the argument that vetting guests in traditional settings inherently means we'll have less misinformation.

> If a bot can join 100 servers, and they have an average of 10,000 users, then that's literally 100,000[1,000,000] people that can attached with malware, scams, and more. Are you saying that's not a problem?

I think the much more interesting question in your scenario is why Discord thinks it's OK for a malicious bot to target 990,000 people. I don't think 100 servers is a particularly high limit for a popular bot or a meaningful line for when abuse becomes a problem. I don't see how identity verification solves the abuse problem overall when hackers/spammers can just create multiple bots that can target smaller numbers of servers. I think it's really weird to act like this becomes a problem at 100 servers.

> What is it about these tools that you feel could be better?

The ability to create private invites that can only be used by a single person, the ability to require users to be approved before they join your server. The ability to ban words, the ability to block links (or better, the ability to only allow links to certain domains), the ability to block bots outright from joining (what seems to be the entire reason this verification process exists), the ability to easily share blocklists between servers, the ability to hold comments from new accounts in limbo until they're approved.

Some of this can be replicated by setting up your own bots and figuring out some kind of custom role where new users jump through hoops; and that's basically what a lot of servers I run into on Discord have to do. But it's really awful and it's a bad experience and it makes moderation unnecessarily complicated for non-technical users. As a result, most servers don't really set anything up because it's time consuming, so we end up with bad defaults on most servers. And that situation doesn't have to exist. Why do I need to find a bot to ban certain words on a server? That's something that belongs in the settings in a text input. Why do I have to go through this weird song-and-dance with invite codes, why can't I add people by their account ID? Why is there no one-click setting to just block new bots from joining my server unless I specifically grant them permission?

I've joined Discord servers that have these complicated house-of-cards setups where you're entering passwords into dedicated rooms to get granted access to other rooms by moderator bots. It's really bad, moderators shouldn't have to spend hours building custom rube goldberg machine to handle new users. This is stuff that should be configurable within 30 seconds from the settings page.

You mention that you "don't believe they can" block bots from abusing servers this way. But I just do not understand what the technical problem is. If the problem is that bots are joining random servers, and if bots can join my server without my permission, give me a single checkbox somewhere in settings to turn that off.