...When you realize GPT-5 is going to be trained on your meme preferences...
Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#42insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed
You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for every…
if it's anonymized, is it your mistake and can anyone point single you out? I've not seen anyone point out 14 year old posts but I suppose it occurs. But at what arbitrary age can we start to hold them accountable for their posts? 70? What about people who flip flop on views whenever it suits their needs?
"It's easy to find common threads and identify someone?" Prove it because I don't think it's that easy.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#43insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed
You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for every…
I am incredibly happy that my teenage growing up period occurred on now-defunct forums and pre-Facebook social networks.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#44The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which historically were publicly searchable and often had a lot of great information about various hobbies and things.
> which historically were publicly searchable
Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Reddit has invite only forums that I believe aren’t searchable unless you are a member. Oh and searchable if you’re a member? That’s true for Discord.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#45insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed
You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for every…
> An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see?
Through the rest of us abandoning the, let’s call it, presumption of endorsement: that you having said or even done something stupid ten or five years ago (or even less, if you’re young) means you still endorse it now. Right now it feels like things are moving in the opposite direction, extending that presumption from things you said to things you allowed others to say, to things others said elsewhere that are entirely unrelated to things you allowed them to say in your presence.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#46Fantastic. I wonder how many random technical info is buried in these servers. I hate what it's done for game modding.
It seems they identified servers via the discovery feature, which servers need to opt into (and I think be recognised as a "community server"? Though that might be out of date). I guess this is better than just scanning the web for invite links, but it does mean that probably most of those game modding servers were not included.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder. That being said, this feature a…
>than public places like Twitter That seems to be a counterpoint to your argument. Users on Twitter usually do not hold back.
The environment is drastically different from how it was 1-2 years ago, but the average white collar fortune 500 employee is still not going to post anything too controversial on Twitter under their real name and picture. If they are posting controversial things, which has certainly exploded post-Musk, they're making an effort to ensure they're not getting doxxed.
Contrast this to Discord which is more like old-school IRC, in that even when everyone is using an alias, if you talk to the same people day-in day-out, you know a fair bit about their personal lives, such as name and where they work.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#48The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which historically were publicly searchable and often had a lot of great information about various hobbies and things.
> which historically were publicly searchable Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Red…
You couldn't search with the forum software's built in search feature unless signed in sure, but they were usually indexed and searchable via google, and indeed many of them disabled their forum software's search feature and just directed you to google's old Custom Search Engine feature (basically a search box with hidden prefilled "site:" parameter) setup to save on server resources.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#49The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable. And it seems to be a modern replacement for internet forums which historically were publicly searchable and often had a lot of great information about various hobbies and things.
This is especially a problem for devs/artists that post updates exclusively over Discord. It's even worse if they don't do so in a separate channel and you have to dig through everyone chatting to find what you're looking for. This as well and the absence of threads (yes Discord has threads but who uses those) makes searching for troubleshooting help awful. Thank god BBS's are still around.
Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Some use it as a knowledgebase and issue tracker and forum and chatroom in one. I absolutely despise it for that use case. I mean I use it for voice chatting with friends while gaming too and it's fine for that. But if I have to beg and plead to a discord bot to join a channel to just read some docs, I'm just going to ignore your project. Not sorry about that at all.
Speaking as someone who has been running discord servers since 2015 - plus I maintain my own discord bot and am deeply familiar with the API - it's absolute garbage as an issue tracker. People really need to stop using it for that. I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.
Yeah, I think they choose "servers" at the beginning because they were targeting the gamer VOIP crowd as a sort of teamspeak competitor and so they were trying to draw an analogy between a discord group and your MMO guild's Teamspeak/Vent/Mumble server, but the terminology has stuck long after it made sense.