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Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

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Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#61

Post by jowea »

Sanzig wrote: post #25
spencerflem wrote: post #15

insane. 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…

Why does Discord the company get to own the message history on public servers but Twitter or Reddit or traditional forums can get scrapped by anyone wanting to make their own commercial AI willy-nilly?

> 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 everyone to see?

Understandable, but really, if you want to solve that, then you're up against all of social media. The only difference is that Discord wants you to make a free 2 minutes account so you can join the public server to look at what they said, instead of putting it on Google.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#62

Post by squigz »

strogonoff wrote: post #60
msp26 wrote: post #18

Fantastic. I wonder how many random technical info is buried in these servers. I hate what it's done for game modding.

Game modding is profitable and people doing it professionally (which they increasingly do) are quite attuned to the fact that making it too accessible would decimate their revenue. As a result, you either pay for the mod (early access, extra content, etc.), or you pay to join some Discord, but ideally you pay for something . Discord, which I generally dislike, is not necessarily the cause of it; if there was no Disco…

> Game modding is profitable

It can be. As I understand it, it's sort of like streaming or other content creation - yes, it's possible, but difficult, as it's a saturated market. Most mod authors don't make much money.

As a slight aside, I think people would be more inclined to support creators like mod authors if it were simply easier. Patreon and the like make it fairly easy, but I don't think many people want to subscribe to 20+ Patreons for $5 apiece, as much as they might like to support those authors. On the other hand, I think more people would be willing to pledge $X per month to be split among all of their subscriptions. Sure, most creators would only get a few cents per user, but they'd likely get many more people subscribing, and I think it would add up quick. I might be wrong, and I don't take credit for this idea by any means; I read it some time ago, and possibly Patreon even offered this system before?

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#63

Post by d--b »

spencerflem wrote: post #32
d--b wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should realize when what they write is public though. The world retreating into private group chats is not a bad thing.

its a shame that we can't get the benefits of both. it sucks having to individually vet everyone one at a time. you miss a lot. but people like these researchers who only want to exploit are making it necessary

The two things that suck are:

1. The illusion of intimacy

2. The illusion of ephemerality

People think they chat to a small number of people, and people think that it's going to go away at some point.

So they think they're in a private conversation when they're not. They wouldn't behave the same if they realized what they say is being written down and stored forever in some database.

And yes, it sucks that technology doesn't allow you to have it both ways => public because you want to reach far and wide, and private cause you don't want it recorded.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#64

Post by Cynddl »

jowea wrote: post #52
kd5bjo wrote: post #13

A quick read through of their anonymization process seems to indicate that they didn’t scan the message contents for PII (other than usernames). If true, that seems like a huge oversight. I also wonder what would happen if someone finds their information in the dataset and requests it to be removed per GDPR or other privacy legislation.

I understand wanting to be careful, but didn't they only grab messages from servers that are already very public? Are Twitter message datasets anonymized?

That's not how GDPR works and in this case the data is clearly anonymised despite the authors' claims. Amongst others, there needs to be mechanisms for users to delete their data, whether it was at some point public or not.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#65

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

> Usernames are replaced with consistent pseudonyms generated by the mimesis library, ensuring that identifiers remain unique and contextually meaningful across records. Similarly, user IDs and message IDs are hashed using the SHA-256 algorithm and truncated to 12 characters. This deterministic hashing approach maintains linkage between related records while effectively masking the original identifiers. The global na…

Seems like this would be pretty trivial to reverse by simply searching for a somewhat unique message by a single anonymized user, you would then be able to quickly de-anonymize every user that was in a thread then you just graph that out across the entire network.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#66

Post by bee_rider »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #51
stronglikedan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no expectation that anything said on social media will remain private - zero - and anyone that thinks differently is just lying to themselves and everyone else.

Discord "servers" are groups you click on an "invite" to join, there is some framing where you are lead to believe the conversation is not public. Bluesky had a similar freakout when HuggingFace packaged up a snapshot of the firehose and this discussion was had ad infinitum - in Bluesky's face every post is explicitly public -- but a very vocal minority of users still felt they had been wronged because no one asked i…

Although, calling it an invite is probably not good or clear communication on Discord’s part. If an invite is publicly posted for anyone to see and there’s no vetting of who is getting the invites… that’s just a public space.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#67

Post by charcircuit »

trevor-e wrote: post #33
Sanzig wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm not sure I understand the outrage. Before Discord, everyone used forums. And those were archived by Google for the entire world to see. What's the difference?

One is against the rules of the platform and the other isn't.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#68

Post by jowea »

Cynddl wrote: post #64
jowea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand wanting to be careful, but didn't they only grab messages from servers that are already very public? Are Twitter message datasets anonymized?

That's not how GDPR works and in this case the data is clearly anonymised despite the authors' claims. Amongst others, there needs to be mechanisms for users to delete their data, whether it was at some point public or not.

Yeah there probably is some GDPR implication somewhere, I wasn't speaking on the legal aspects.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#69

Post by nixpulvis »

msp26 wrote: post #18

Fantastic. I wonder how many random technical info is buried in these servers. I hate what it's done for game modding.

I learned programming back in the day on the Tukui (a wow addon) forums. I hate that it's all discord now. Not well searchable and buried info.

Re: Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)

#70

Post by charcircuit »

>Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines

How is it ethical to break Discord's terms of service? An ethical researcher would respect any contracts that they agreed to and would not violate them to collect more data.

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