<story><title>Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse</title><text>I recently tried to make a separate work account in Discord.
To do so I created a new account with my main accounts phone number. This caused discord to delete my primary account phone number and used it for the new account.&lt;p&gt;However, this alone caused me to be instantly banned.
After reaching out to support, they basically told that me I could not use my present phone number for verification and that they couldn&amp;#x27;t tell me why, and couldn&amp;#x27;t help me further with that.&lt;p&gt;I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?&lt;p&gt;I have contacted Discord support through their ticket system twice, I have contacted Discord on Twitter (DM); but to no avail</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>moss2</author><text>Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera).&lt;p&gt;If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.</text></item><item><author>JonathanBeuys</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t get it.&lt;p&gt;We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?&lt;p&gt;I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is &amp;quot;Sorry, this page isn&amp;#x27;t available.&amp;quot; and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is &amp;quot;Sorry, this page isn&amp;#x27;t available.&amp;quot;. Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.&lt;p&gt;But when say &amp;quot;Ok, let&amp;#x27;s build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof&amp;quot; then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always &amp;quot;But what if you lose your private key?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) &amp;quot;decides&amp;quot; to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.&lt;p&gt;This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you &lt;i&gt;AND&lt;/i&gt; you lose your private key.&lt;p&gt;If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.&lt;p&gt;I could sleep way better if I knew that &lt;i&gt;two&lt;/i&gt; have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; the platform.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TuringNYC</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued.&lt;p&gt;Nice example you gave, because this literally happened between 2002 and 2015: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;No_Fly_List&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;No_Fly_List&lt;/a&gt;
The No Fly List eventually swelled to close to a million people. There was no one entity you could sue, because airlines had their own algorithms for matching, so even if you werent on the list, but the algo fuzzy-matched you, you were effectively on the list. Matching names is notoriously bad. There was an ACLU lawsuit, but it was a much bigger effort than anything being described on this thread.&lt;p&gt;In summary: lawsuits against Government systems are slow and not necessarily something to aspire to as a better system.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Discord banned me with no recourse</title><text>I recently tried to make a separate work account in Discord.
To do so I created a new account with my main accounts phone number. This caused discord to delete my primary account phone number and used it for the new account.&lt;p&gt;However, this alone caused me to be instantly banned.
After reaching out to support, they basically told that me I could not use my present phone number for verification and that they couldn&amp;#x27;t tell me why, and couldn&amp;#x27;t help me further with that.&lt;p&gt;I would really like to keep my primary Discord account, is there anything I can do about it?&lt;p&gt;I have contacted Discord support through their ticket system twice, I have contacted Discord on Twitter (DM); but to no avail</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>moss2</author><text>Another idea would be legislature. Have these online public spaces serve under the same laws as real-life public spaces (museums, parks et cetera).&lt;p&gt;If a town banned you from the train station because you refuse to give them your phone number, that would open them up to being sued. That should absolutely apply to Discord, Google Mail and Amazon AWS.</text></item><item><author>JonathanBeuys</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t get it.&lt;p&gt;We keep seeing these dystopian stories again and again and again. Does anybody really believe it will ever stop? Or will we all live in fear of losing a lot of work and valuable connections by being banned from one of our social accounts?&lt;p&gt;I already lost one Instagram account that I put a lot of work into. One day, Insta suddenly asked for my birthday. After me putting it in, all I saw is &amp;quot;Sorry, this page isn&amp;#x27;t available.&amp;quot; and thats it. Whenever I try to log in, all I get is &amp;quot;Sorry, this page isn&amp;#x27;t available.&amp;quot;. Some kind of ban or bug. I dunno. I never managed to get it back. Feels very 1984.&lt;p&gt;But when say &amp;quot;Ok, let&amp;#x27;s build social tools where the user owns their social graph via cryptographic proof&amp;quot; then there is nothing but (blind?) hate.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes there are real discussions. Then the main argument is always &amp;quot;But what if you lose your private key?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Well, we could build something like Discord (FB, Twitter, Insta, HN, you name it) where losing our private key throws us back to the current system. So if the platform owner (say a DAO) &amp;quot;decides&amp;quot; to deplatform you (say via a DAO vote) you can use your private key to prohibit it.&lt;p&gt;This way, you can only become deplatformed if the platform decides to deplatform you &lt;i&gt;AND&lt;/i&gt; you lose your private key.&lt;p&gt;If you only lose your private key, then you can ask the platform to please transfer your account to a new private key. Then the usual authentification mechanisms (email, phone, id etc) kick in.&lt;p&gt;I could sleep way better if I knew that &lt;i&gt;two&lt;/i&gt; have to mess up for me to lose my digital life. Me &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; the platform.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mdrzn</author><text>This feels like the only way to move forward.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t wait for EU to propose something similar to fix these kind of issues, or a minimum level of customer service per every thousand users.</text></comment>