Good on you (and everyone) for releasing it as Free Software. Just the target is unfortunate.
Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#32While I see the value here, I don't really think most Discord communities are appropriate to be indexed. It breaks the whole cozy web aspect of it. [1] [1] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
The "cozy web" is out of control these days. A lot of social utility is lost by default because everyone uses Whatsapp and Discord and other such information black holes, places where knowledge goes to die. It's OK if you're using these to chat with your family or friends, but it's kind of... less OK, when every open source project these days, including major programming languages, tells you to join their Slack or Di…
I am an advocate for knowledge sharing and have previously contributed (a tiny amount) to the community mentioned above, Reactiflux. There, I was able to share my knowledge freely without fear of being penalized or judged through a voting system, or being heavily moderated as is the case with Wikipedia or StackOverflow. I also didn't have to worry about my contributions being eternally indexed on the internet. As a contributor, this is a feature (much less so for the lurker).
On that note, I recently had to request a deletion from Internet Archive because I shared content on my personal website that violates a ToS (it's a Slack archive that I have already anonymized). Unsurprisingly, my request went unanswered.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#33Telegram need that too
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods. Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation…
It's beyond ironic that Discord called itself that, being the successor to OpenFeint and its privacy lawsuit scandal, and being proprietary. Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.
Unfortunately, it's a natural result of Discord moving from being a useful little service to a "platform" with investors and needing to constantly be updated with useless nonsense to keep the "value" of the product alive.
Realistically, once everything was up and running, and they had moved their DB over to their current platform [1], someone should have taken the keys away from them and just said "Discord is done, it's complete". We likely wouldn't be having this much of a problem with useful information being hidden away behind Discord server invite URLs.
[1] https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-mes...
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#35Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with? I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
Discord has 'indexing' and search, just like how Slack does. It's just not on the public & open web - only searchable inside of Discord.
Pretty sure that wasn't the spirit of what GP was asking
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#36People who give their consent to Discord to host their writing don't necessarily do so for third parties. Isn't there a copyright issue here?
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#37People who give their consent to Discord to host their writing don't necessarily do so for third parties. Isn't there a copyright issue here?
Not really for a few reasons:
- The API grants you essentially a sublicense to the data, since Answer Overflow is a bot going through the official API and following the ToS properly, that should cover it for any potential issues - Answer Overflow gets consent from users to use their messages https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods. Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation…
It's beyond ironic that Discord called itself that, being the successor to OpenFeint and its privacy lawsuit scandal, and being proprietary. Now it is one of the most privacy-hostile AND preservation-hostile platforms around.
I'm not sure Discord knew what it wanted to be. Private for your friends, but not end-to-end encrypted. Chat for streamers with rooms, but not a streaming platform. (They tried. Twitch also tried to make a Discord-like desktop app.)
Now they seem to be leaning into being Slack (notice that you can switch accounts, so your coworkers don't know you're xXxedgygamer69xXx or whatever.)
My takeaway is to always be a little scared about accepting investments. Your investors will make you hire people, who will want to work on something. The end result is a Frankenstein's Monster of a product.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#39People who give their consent to Discord to host their writing don't necessarily do so for third parties. Isn't there a copyright issue here?
Not really for a few reasons: - The API grants you essentially a sublicense to the data, since Answer Overflow is a bot going through the official API and following the ToS properly, that should cover it for any potential issues - Answer Overflow gets consent from users to use their messages https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...
Oh you're getting user consent, so that makes sense. But I don't really understand how the API would grant you a sublicense to host written works.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I wonder is why would anyone that cares about archiving/search would choose to use Discord?
Apparently because it is very easy to setup and offer a place where people can join. More and more open source projects are using it and I don't really like it, but what easy alternatives can you recommend to them? Genuine question, as it is an open issue for me. I want to focus on my project, not setting up and maintain a forum, mailing lists, etc. on top of that.
I don't know either, but I'm not the Discord target audience. I've tried but it gives me a headache like a Vegas casino.
I'd rather see something simple and plain (and functional) like phpbb.