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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)

#111

Post by DaSHacka »

charcircuit wrote: post #67
trevor-e wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS?

You'd have a more convincing argument if you said something like "oh these servers have the implication of semi-private chats so people may be more inclined to share personal information" or something.

Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo when people dont obey their 500+ page long legalese ToS designed to maximise ownership over each user.

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

#113

Post by ysavir »

lolinder wrote: post #82
ysavir wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Discover server's status isn't permanent. Any invite-only server can be into a discoverable, public server, and any public server can be taken private. The public/private distinction isn't a permanent reflection of access but is just a reflection of the current permissions. There's no guarantee that users in a public server were in a public server when they joined and engaged.

That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public. The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discor…

Eh, depends on how you look at it. "Public" is a pretty vague term. Something might be public in the sense that anyone can come and view, but it can also be public in the sense that anyone can join and participate, but you still must be a joined member to participate (and that participation can be revoked, etc). Twitter and Reddit are the former, publicly visible communications avenues. Discord is ultimately a private communication channel where anyone can join, but must be joined, to participate.

Unlike Reddit and Twitter, Discord was never meant to be a space where your contributions are intended to be publicly viewable. People forget that while Discord is oftentimes used as a replacement for forums, it is actually the spiritual successor to IRC, AIM, and similar chat services, where the data is typically ephemeral. Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition, and what we're seeing now is the consequence of that data being available.

Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one.

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

#115

Post by hiccuphippo »

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 wonder if LLM companies don't have ways to scrape private Discord servers already. Creating accounts and pulling all the historic data doesn't sound impossible.

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

#117

Post by lolinder »

daft_pink wrote: post #110

Does anyone else think it’s super creepy that someone’s going through all our messages this way?

They're not going through all of my messages. I don't use public Discord channels for anything that I wouldn't want the public to see.

Mostly I think it's weird how many people on here seem to have been under the illusion that Discord is somehow ephemeral and private when I can hop on any public server and scroll back indefinitely to see anything that anyone has ever said on that server. And that's before I get into the API and the (admittedly bad) search feature.

I think what you were looking for is Signal or similar.

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

#119

Post by NoahZuniga »

lolinder wrote: post #106
cflewis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual, 404 nails it: ---- It should be noted, however, that almost no one reads end-user license agreements and many of Discord’s users are children and teenagers. Discord is, first and foremost, a platform for gamers to organize communities and it’s not plausible that a 15 year old looking for a Fortnite meme server ever thought their dumb jokes about Tomato Town would end up in a public database five years later…

On the contrary, I think that what these researchers did was the only ethical thing to do once they discovered that this was possible. There's no way that this hasn't been done dozens of times before by intelligence agencies, hacker groups, and whoever else you care to worry about. Most of us here were well aware that public Discord channels have always been public and durable. It's hardly a secret from the technical…

A while back there was a site that allowed you, for payment, to look up all public chat messages of a Discord user. Clearly this database exists, and if criminals or government agencies want to get their hands on it, they can.
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