While this is largely identical to the API used in the client, using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited. Usage of third party clients can get you banned, and unfortunately this has already happened at times.
> using the API against user accounts (as opposed to bot accounts) is called self-botting and is prohibited
Gotta love how they reframe the conversation about user's rights. It's like how car companies of old redefined[0] walking as "jaywalking", reframing the conversations about street space in a way where the car became more important than the pedestrian.
What they call "self-botting" is arguably the whole point of having general-purpose computers available to general population. Bicycles for the mind and all.
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[0] - Allegedly; it's a factoid I saw repeated on HN. But even if not true, this doesn't affect my point.
To be fair, I think that a large part of trying to control automated access to Discord is genuinely in the user’s interests: a common reason to use the API under the radar would be to mitigate privacy protections, anti-SPAM, bot oversight, etc.
On the other hand, Discord has drawn some ire for their behavior. Third party clients are obviously not malicious or abusive, they are simply unauthorized. Tools that allow bulk deletion of messages are also very much not really abusive, though they may consume a lot of server resources if the architecture is poorly optimized for this use case. Yet these are probably the main legitimate use cases for so-called self-botting, and while many users have not been banned for it, many report having been banned for it. I have used both without issue, as well as done some manual self-botting, so I can only guess it is not really intentional to kick off legitimate users.
Personally, I did not mean to convey any particular feelings to the legitimacy or morality of Discord’s stance, just to provide what I knew in a relatively neutral fashion. That having been said, while I find Discord to be relatively inoffensive, I am getting a bit bothered by the recent rebrands and crackdowns, and I sincerely long for a federated open-standard IM that works like email. But, I know lacking a good product, with good UX and some decent mechanism to handle abuse, it is a pretty asymmetric battle against IM clients with huge network effect advantages. And with email, you can see some cracks in its openness, as a direct result of trying to deal with abuse…
Well, it's a private company and it's their infrastructure, their systems and their service. We all may dislike the practice but they have the right to enact their ToS, as long as they act legally in regards to payments, etc.
Discord is seeing a huge spam/bot epidemic with stolen accounts right now, makes sense that they want to get on top of something like that.
They're doing exactly what Twitter and Instagram do. They don't like people using their own automation because the companies either offer automation products themselves, or they have lucrative partnerships with companies that have exclusive API access to their platforms, who then go on to sell automation capabilities to users.
There's no technical reason users can't automate how they use the services, and the security angle is an afterthought. The reason user automation is banned is because it might impact these companies' revenue streams.
