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It says they used ethical anonymization, but we’ve seen other scrapers are always completely in violation of Discord’s TOS. So did Discord cooperate, or give special authorization for this collection? It wouldn’t appear that they could do so, if privacy belongs to their users at all.
insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed
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…
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.
We have regressed from the open email standard and gone back to these opaque islands of data that do not adhere to any standard.
Slack refused to show me my own messages past a certain age unless I paid up, and eventually deleted them.
To save folks a click, the dataset itself has been made available here: https://zenodo.org/records/15170676 It's 118 gigabytes of JSON.
>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.
insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed
I'm not sure this is awful. These are public discords, no more private than newsgroups, or StackOverflow. Why is it awful to scrape this , but not that ?
Why is it so hard to export your own messages out of Discord, Slack, etc? We have regressed from the open email standard and gone back to these opaque islands of data that do not adhere to any standard. Slack refused to show me my own messages past a certain age unless I paid up, and eventually deleted them.
...When you realize GPT-5 is going to be trained on your meme preferences...
You mean, GPT-4 being so overenthusiastic with using emojis isn't peak AI chat? :D
System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
To save folks a click, the dataset itself has been made available here: https://zenodo.org/records/15170676 It's 118 gigabytes of JSON.