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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)

#141

Post by Voxany »

squigz wrote: post #62
strogonoff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

[dead]

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

#142

Post by Kiro »

chneu wrote: post #137
Kiro wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I follow a lot of solo game developers who only use Discord and I completely understand them not wanting do deal with multiple platforms. They should focus on on the game.

Discord is horrible for this kind of stuff. There's a reason that GitHub and other type of sites exist Discord is walled and hard to search. If a channel or server closes then all that information is lost. Tons of data will be lost to discord when it goes down. Idk if you've ever tried to use discord for mods or other software but it sucks. It's confusing. Information isn't cataloged well. It's search sucks. It just…

What kind of stuff? Gamers want to talk about the game and engage with the developers. GitHub must be the absolute worst alternative.

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

#143

Post by giancarlostoro »

ldoughty wrote: post #40
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 think the average server size here is in the ballpark of 1200 people. These are servers that asked to be advertised by Discord ("Discovery"). These are unlikely to be any kind of servers used for private or even semi-private discussions. You likely don't know most of the people on the server. Most likely, the 'hottest' kind of data you might find is someone accidentally leaking info akin to the World of Tanks forum…

A fair number of those servers have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of members. I admin two with over 50 thousand members, both listed in Discord's Server Explorer.

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

#144

Post by bawolff »

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 can't help but think that if you say something in a public forum you should implicitly give up the right to privacy.

E.g. if someone scraped hackernews and made a dataset containing this comment, i don't think i should have any right to complain.

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

#145

Post by BizarroLand »

encom wrote: post #79
SunlitCat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, GPT-4 being so overenthusiastic with using emojis isn't peak AI chat? :D

How to fix ChatGPT: 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 intera…

Ran this as the context in a local qwen 14b model and it kept context for quite a while. Not bad

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by __loam »

DaSHacka wrote: post #121
__loam wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome analysis dude! I'm sure the judge will love that when discord sues these guys.

He said _ethical_, not _legal_. Would you agree abusive ToS's by massive corpos are unethical? What about the Disney+ ToS hiding a binding arbitration agreement preventing you from suing them? [0]. Or are you one of those "my personal ethics are whatever the law says" folk? [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/disney-says-man-cant-su...

The last guy who scraped discord like this was a freak who also got sued to hell by them.

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

#148

Post by __loam »

DaSHacka wrote: post #127
__loam wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Not really, when devs use discord as a hub of documentation and discussion it inherently makes the information harder to access, especially searchability-wise. You could argue "well you can just scrape it and post it online, like OP", but: 1. That's still an extra step and requires an account that could get banned doing it And 2. Others (like yourself, even!) in this thread take issue with that approach. So which is…

The original comment wasn't "Oh this is inconvenient for me" it was "I hope they go to hell". That's a lot of entitlement in my view. If you don't want devs to run their community on discord then write your own software.

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

#149

Post by ysavir »

lolinder wrote: post #126
ysavir wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 privat…

> it is actually the spiritual successor to IRC, AIM, and similar chat services, where the data is typically ephemeral I can't speak for AIM, but I've never assumed IRC was ephemeral. Most IRC servers had and have numerous people idling in the channel with their client just archiving everything that happened. Many of those archives ended up published on the internet and that usually surprised no one. Discord is even…

Sure, but there's a massive difference between an actor joining a chat and maintaining indefinitely, constant access to it vs an actor joining a chat and having access to the full history automatically.

> All these researchers have done is expose the kind of archiving was always possible and always happening.

What they've done is brought forward another instance of "this is why we can't have nice things". A useful feature being used in unintended ways without regard for ethics and privacy. The authors of this paper did not have respect for people's data and privacy. They did the bare minimum to make the claim they took privacy measures, regardless of whether the claim is true or not. I guess that's enough for them.

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

#150

Post by ysavir »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #122
ysavir wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 privat…

> Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC. > 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…

> Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC.

Almost a decade, yeah. And Slack had similar functionality in the few years before Discord arrived. But chat services have been around since, what, the late 80s or early 90s? Services like Discord are still the new kid on the block. Now we're seeing it being taken advantage of (or at least the first instance of someone publicly and proudly taking advantage of it), prompting curiosity of what comes next: Will this disregard for privacy simply become the default expectation, will people shift to more private spaces less susceptible to abuse, or privacy regulations protecting people?

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