An Open Letter to Server Owners - Stop Selling Paid Ads
To server owners across Discord.
By now, I’m sure many of you have had your qualms with Discord’s ToS and Community Guidelines update regarding artificial engagement. The truth of the matter is many of you, whether through inexperience or sheer ignorance, have failed to understand the actual meaning of the updates. Tl;Dr - by continuing to sell paid advertisements that go against the grain of organic advertisement, as defined in this letter, you are in fact violating the Terms regardless of what a Discord employee may say.
Let’s start by breaking down a few key documents, references, and cases that I will be citing in this letter:
Discord has a set of Community Guidelines entrenched in their ToS that prohibits certain actions that would go against mutually and contractually accepted rules and regulations. It contains guidelines on topics such as misinformation, harassment, and artificial engagement which we will be covering today. Within the same breath, this set of Guidelines states the following:
“Do not use Discord to spam, manipulate engagement, or disrupt other people’s experience, including trying to to influence or disrupt conversations using bots, fake accounts, multiple accounts, or other automation. This includes purchasing or selling methods of artificially increasing membership, such as via advertisements or botting.”
What sections are we concerned with here?
“Do not use Discord to … manipulate engagement, or disrupt other people’s experience … [using] other automation. This includes purchasing or selling methods of artificially increasing membership, such as via advertisements …”
See, this wording is what most of you seem to ignore in your pursuits of monetizing your servers. While a lot of you will pay attention to the “or botting” section of the guidelines, you fail to understand the meaning of what is worded above. Using the guidelines - which, mind you, I have not altered or paraphrased beyond simple shortening - let’s check and see what you’re violating here:
1. Manipulated engagement. By providing paid ads, or doing plan-for-plans, you are manipulating the engagement stats of your server. This would affect your standing in regards to the Partner program (hmm, I wonder why no ad servers ever get accepted to that…) and any other Discord verification practices (for example, artificial engagement of, let’s say, a bot in verification.)
2. UX disruptions. By doing repeated pings in servers, you are disrupting user experiences through unnecessary and unwarranted pings. You ping everyone (or the member role, if you think you’re smart) to share an invite link, but will harp on your members for doing the exact same thing. Hypocritical in nature, no?
3. Vicarious manipulation of membership and engagement. Similar to point number 1, you are doing the exact same stuff to a server you don’t even own. I’d bet that, 9 times out of 10, a server that receives a mandatory join giveaway will lose at least 50% of those members once the giveaway is over. You are therefore throttling their chances to apply for Partner, or get into any other programs down the line because of your artificial spikes of joining and leaving.
4. Automation via advertisements. This violates exact wording of the guideline - it literally says you aren’t allowed to artificially bloat user growth via advertisements, and then a few keystrokes earlier says “This includes purchasing or selling” which I know the bulk of you do.
Now, on a point that I was harping on earlier - why does it not matter if Discord employees turn a blind eye? The answer is simply human nature. The fact that it takes an employee less time to turn a blind eye than file a report says all you need to know - just as there are corrupt server owners, there are corrupt staff who prefer to loosely follow rules until it benefits them to enforce them. It’s the same reason one particular mod on, say, Facebook or Twitter will leave a post glorifying hate speech up on the platform - a little thing called confirmation bias and the diffusion of responsibility.Â
Confirmation bias states that, if an idea or thought promoted by a person subscribes to another person’s beliefs, they are both more likely to believe it and more likely to agree with it, even if the information is wrong. In our case, if a member is an active user of large ad servers who use paid ads, and supports the system as it has helped them in the past when the rules were fuzzier, they will turn a blind eye and otherwise conform to the belief that paid ads in that particular server are alright.
Now, what if the mod doesn’t care, or finds that they have no moral objection to the idea because it doesn’t fall onto their scope of thought? That plays into something called the diffusion of responsibility. If a head honcho at Discord takes action, everyone will start to take action, but only because that head honcho, a leader and figurehead, took action first. The idea, in principle, is basically “no one enforces until one person enforces.” The fact that this statement is paradoxical in nature should tell you all you need to know about the situation at large.
What does this all mean for you, the server owner or simple purveyor of paid ads reading this far?
If you regularly purchase paid ads, I highly advise you to stop. You are letting large servers manipulate your engagement stats at their own will. Your membership will bobble up and down and you’ll inevitably get flagged for artificial engagement by a member of a Partner review team somewhere.
If you regularly sell these ads, I would also highly advise you to stop. Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t come from a place of fearing that your server may get deleted - I think the bullying that big servers do to the rest of the community is terrible, and I sadly once was on the side of the big servers - but instead it comes from a place of the humanity of the platform. You are engaging in the fulfilment of your own corporate greed, and that makes you no better than our ultra-billionaires who we criticize daily. You exploit the human nature of your young and impressionable crowds, all for a quick buck here and there, and I know many of us don’t agree with it.
And I know that by adding my signature to the bottom of this, I’ll receive plenty of hate mail and spam messages that will confirm my beliefs about this gross side of the community, but frankly I don't care. When I quit advertising servers, I quit for a reason, not just because I was bored. The community is a toxic cesspool of power structures and unchecked egos, and there is no restrictor plate on how egotistical and corporate minded these people can get. It takes someone with a real huge ego complex to exploit money out of 13-18 year olds, and I hold absolutely zero respect for anyone who conforms to this belief or ideology.
My servers have already outlawed the practice of selling or buying them, via giveaways or otherwise, and I can confirm that I am involved on projects that will be openly refusing access or provisions to server owners who promote the selling and marketing of these advertisements.
My suggested actions for promoting growth?
1. Advertise your server normally! Advertising is free, and it always will be. Go post a message in the server like the rest of us have to.
2. Engage with your owners through events, conferences, or networking! Experience trumps membership, because good experience can handle high membership counts and growth rates.
3. Focus on the humanity of the literal children you’re advertising to. Remember that you were once a young and impressionable child or teen, and that if someone took your money and gave you empty promises in return, you’d be pretty miffed as well.
4. Promote organic and healthy growth, via basic word of mouth and server ratings! Praise your community server owners, and help them when they aren’t facing much success. We all had to grow our servers naturally, and I can promise it works well when we have advice from more experienced members of the community.
I hope that this message has inspired some change in you, or you can at least find it in yourself to not spam me with hate mail or messages in regards to this. Thanks for reading this far.