Extremely creepy. Queued my account for deletion. Matrix it is.
It’s been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn’t want to ask people for their gender when they registered, but we still needed a rough split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.
I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.
But why predict gender ? How do we use that information anyway ?
Oh so it’s perfectly ok then.
First I get misgendered by actual humans, and now I’m potentially gonna be a victim of misgendering by robots.
I bet they’re gonna say I’m a girl too. I am not. I have never been one. I was assigned male at birth, identify as male, and use he/him pronouns. Stop telling me otherwise.
Discord didn’t tell you your gender and they didn’t put it on your profile either.
It’s only guessing it internally for their own purposes, like most companies out there.
Then tell them what your pronouns are? I don’t get the issue here.
Sometimes people apologize, othertimes other people insist that I need to “behave like a man” even though it conflicts with my personality massively.
You too, huh?
Yep.
Is it only for people who have put none? Or is it overriding people’s preferences?
It’s a backend identification, likely used to target advertising in the future.
They’re also tagging people with their suspected age bracket.
I believe it’s everyone.
You don’t give your gender to Discord when signing up. It’s also nothing to do with the pronouns that you can set with the integrated app/bot, that only counts for the server you’re in
From the article, it seems like it isn’t overriding preferences if you have it set in the app. Looks like it’s an analytics thing in the backend at the moment. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past them to eventually require ID if your settings don’t match their prediction.
What if my gender is undefined?
Discord: “Then we will define it.”
My gender is
null.My gender is not important.
male’); DROP TABLE Gender;–
'); UPDATE users SET gender = NULL;–
Then the wise and benevolent machine learning algorithm will make it so that it isn’t undefined anymore and you will live by it’s holy verdict.
My gender was assigned randomly at account creation
I identify as an attack helicopter, will AI figure that out?
Old joke is old.
Down to the model and loading.
r/onejoke
Never heard of that subreddit, then again I wasn’t on Reddit for long when the API migration began
But surely you’re aware how played out that joke is?
Apparently not, I’m not as chronically online so I’m like still in 2015 era, heck I recently ditched all my playlists and started listening to songs from 1960s like Elvis Presley
Most of the music I listen to is from the 1930s and 1940s and I still knew that joke comes from the paleolithic.
I also have a hard time believing you weren’t aware that was an old joke since you used the specific phrase ‘attack helicopter,’ which is what makes the joke so old, and not virtually any other phrase you could have used.
I asked people not to talk about me in my gender section. I’m just paranoid.
I’m faking my pronouns if I can’t leave it blank I hate those things
Oh cool the 100th article about Discord being a hot pile of dogshit.
Well everyone will still use it anyways
Lemmy users get so precious about privacy when it comes to every company except the ones that would be inconvenient for them to stop using.
Serious question: what is an alternative? They’re all dogshit.
Matrix.
It still sucks, but it’s at least FOSS, and you can host your own instance if you want full control.
XMPP
My instance is on it. What else could one need!
Oh right all the documentation that gets Discordwalled. Perhaps if we keep whining fewer FOSS devs will dare use it [exclusively].
Discourse is a way, but matrix works as well
Revolt (it’s FOSS)
Ok. How do I get my friend group to use Revolt?
thats the fun part, you don’t.
there will always be alternatives that are a fraction as bad as the current options but nobody will ever use them.
case in point: people still use twitter.
case in point: people still use twitter.
And WhatsApp over Signal/Molly.
It’s like everyone forgot teamspeak exists overnight
The alternative is IRC. I’m not sure why that’s not an option anymore when Discord is just IRC with a few extra features.
XMPP
I mean yeah, I guess, but why fix what was never broken?
IRC’s netsplits still haunt me in my sleep. jk
At least then when someone was considered a nuissance they got kickbaned instead of their account deleted because someone somewhere somehow got offended. Thicker skin crowd i guess, did allow for more discourse.
In IRC’s heyday online communication was mostly centered in groups (the channels) rather than 1:1. In the age of whatsapp 1:1 is king, kinda sad. It’s my perception at least.
I still do think XMPP is a better IRC though, more modern.
Would be quite surprising if there was an ads-based platform that doesn’t do that. Age and gender are among the most relevant things when targeting ads.
Except discord is not an ads-based platform? I’ve never seen a third party ad on there
Fair enough. I don’t use Discord so I’m not sure but my understanding is that it’s free to use. So how do they fund it? I presume by collecting user data to target advertising or to be sold to 3rd parties.
My point here being that collecting data to figure out the user’s age and gender isn’t particularly uncommon.
It’s monetized through server boosts (upgrading a community to have premium features) and premium accounts that give users additional perks and features.
Let’s see if we can trick it into using a fictional gender. Like Andorians from Star Trek or something.
Alternatively, “it/that.”
Discord turning into Facebook
The gender thing is creepy, but if they could predict age groups then in a perfect world they could analyze adult users talking to children and shut that down.
In a perfect world though, I doubt they’d put effort into making their app safer, heavens no.
Pedophiles drive engagement so why would they be against that?
Yk, there are genuine conversations between adults and teenagers outside of paedophilia
On Discord though there’s a lot of unchecked predation. Theoretically if this were implemented it would let them see the most suspicious users that interact with an unusual amount of children and review if the messages are inappropriate.
But all that’s unlikely because if they actually cared they’d implement other simpler solutions first. So this idea is just hypothetical but not ideal.
Maybe even this discussion is involving both teenagers and adults
I don’t think the severe privacy consequences could ever justify any use of this
Not unless they’re forced to.
Discord users when they get a pronoun slot to fill shouldn’t be suprised when it gets used by AI.
Man, everything about me will be fed to a machine somewhere eventually. I don’t have the resources nor will to go sufficiently off-grid to prevent that so I’ll just take people knowing my pronouns instead.
“Like other companies, we use information to help us understand our business and improve the product. That includes certain inferences we may make about users. We include this information in users’ data requests for transparency, and users can limit the information we use by toggling the “Use data to improve Discord” off in the Privacy & Safety settings.”
So nothing really interesting. They are allowed to make a guess at my gender, I don’t care. They don’t have 3rd party ads and don’t sell my data, so it’s cool.
I know this goes against the grain here and we love to pile on walled gardens, but it’s really nothing out of the ordinary.
I don’t see a valid reason to guess the gender of their users other than to sell profiles to ad providers. I can’t see how discord may evolve their discussion platform differently depending on the gender mix of their platform.
As https://lemmy.world/u/efstajas pointed out, it’s pretty common.
Discord doesn’t sell your data. They repeatedly state they don’t in their terms of service, and they would be in big trouble if caught lying about that.
Edit:
Discord’s privacy policy repeatedly states that they do not sell your personal information:
We don’t sell your personal information. Our business is based on subscriptions and paid products, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.
No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA.
This is a legal document that they will get in trouble for if they were lying. They’ve already been fined hundreds of thousands of euros for GDPR violations but that curiously did not include a fine for “took people’s personal information and then sold them without consent whilst explicitly saying they didn’t do that”
Discord further has no third party advertisements which they can use to “sell” your data by allowing those advertisements to target you.
Thanks to a redditor for this write up
Politics aside, im interested in how this will predict my gender. Many people mistake me for a woman, from text, and I have been unsure as to why. I’m intrigued to see what this would predict, for me.
