Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search & find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity. Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on.

All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown, especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so rarely a real issue.

The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly, saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the public-ness of these mediums.

Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes. Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see whose gotten world.

Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private, exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make a public conscious possible).

That you don't see this is an indication that it works and dissuading those spammers.

Consider all the nearly forgotten repos out there that you occasionally stumble over and that there are no "work from home and get $30/hour - click here" or a dozen forms of "somespam.example.com" links peppering it.

Compare that with the old Wordpress blogs out there that haven't disabled comments and yet still have search indexing (or not, but spammers don't always dig far enough to see if there's a nofollow attribute on links).

So, for the most part, GitHub isn't indexed by search engines - and its across the board for the entirety of the site. Spammers realize that it is pointless to attempt in any of the forms that they could on other user created content sites and so expend no effort at all to post spam links.

Github discussions is searchable within GitHub in that repo. For example https://github.com/laravel/framework/discussions?discussions...

The wiki is fairly useful - and again, if you are searching for content in GitHub you can search wikis ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github... ) and get only content within GitHub (without having to sift through Google search results) with arguably a more powerful query language than Google's search bar ( https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/getting-started-wit... )

Personally, if I am looking for content for a FOSS that is hosted on GitHub I use GitHub's search for discussions and wikis first before trying to search for content in google.

And yet they have not been purchased yet.

> Discord collects everything you do inside

Make a post on HN saying "disable newrelic if you value user privacy" and see how well that goes.

> Things tracked outside the program include : programs you run and other system specific information that can identify your hardware (such as your HWID's)

Discord does not collect the programs you run on their server. It does scan for them to enable the game tracking feature. See the post by u/GlenMerlin:

> Logging your opened apps is an optional setting (mostly done to detect discord rich presence for games, so your friends can see you're playing halo infinite and join with one click) and you can turn it off and the data is stored locally.

> All it takes is 1 breach to make every message you ever sent public information.

I can assure you extracting any sizable fraction of Discord's messages will incur at least a few hundred petabytes of data transfer fees within a day, triggering DLP alerts or maybe even regular billing "unnatural increase in data transfer costs" alerts. Even if Discord were hacked, their infrastructure makes actually downloading user data both infeasible and riskier than just dumping the user DB containing emails and hashed passwords. To add, that's just for data stored on the server - the actual "science" api containing things like how you use Discord likely accumulates hundreds of petabytes worth of data a month on its own, it'd be easier to download the generated user behavior reports than to download the data itself.

The E2E criticism is valid but users obviously don't care enough to move off of Discord, even with the privacy campaigns against them and efforts to move communities over to Guilded.