Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost • Hacker News Board

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#21

Post by altairprime » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

pnw wrote: post #13

It feels to me like Discord is speed-running the developer relations playbook that we've seen happen over a longer timeframe with large platforms like Apple and Google. This is the second high profile incident like this in recent weeks IIRC. What's even stranger to me is that Discord was putting on a full-court press to get developers onto their platform over the last twelve months. This kind of response is certainly…

Discord has a monopoly on access to its users, and so does not need to concern themselves with making it attractive to build there: the users are the draw, not the developer-friendliness of the platform. BotGhost should seek anti-monopoly enforcement; having EU users file the appropriate EU claims to appeal for Discord to be subjected to the DMA would be far more a threat to Discord’s monopoly than user support tickets are likely to persuade them.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#22

Post by merb » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

The biggest problem is that discord has no way to authorize these platforms without the user giving them credentials. It’s really stupid because it would be so easy to fix.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#23

Post by paxys » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

Banditoz wrote: post #19

Playing devil's advocate a bit, if this service hosts a Discord bot you create for you, that means it uses the bot token, right? The service has to store and secure hundreds of thousands of tokens, if all of those get breached/leaked, an attacker can do a lot to a lot of Discord servers assuming it has the requisite permissions. However, they do claim that Mee6 (the biggest Discord bot by # of servers, iirc) offers a…

Discord holds user session tokens right? If those tokens are leaked then attackers will have access to Discord user data. Seems like Discord should be shut down.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#24

Post by haneul » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

czk wrote: post #2

I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things. A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if disc…

Yea the data market from discord bots is quite a thing. Really concerning, imo.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#25

Post by almosthere » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #5

Repeat after me and frame this. Never build your main business on somebody else's platform. Always assume that you will get shutdown / rugged when you do so.

Not really possible. If you're using the DNS system or even an internet connection - you're on someone's platform that may want to pull your plug.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#26

Post by areyourllySorry » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

czk wrote: post #2

I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things. A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if disc…

spy.pet used user accounts. botghost uses bot accounts, for which you need to enable certain intents in order to read messages.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#27

Post by shreddit » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

like_any_other wrote: post #6

colesantiago wrote: post #5

Repeat after me and frame this. Never build your main business on somebody else's platform. Always assume that you will get shutdown / rugged when you do so.

Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it, because you won't like what Standard Oil will charge you for their trains.

That’s actually solid advice. At a certain point it’s cheaper to build your own datacenter than to rent servers…

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#28

Post by Banditoz » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #23

Banditoz wrote: post #19

Playing devil's advocate a bit, if this service hosts a Discord bot you create for you, that means it uses the bot token, right? The service has to store and secure hundreds of thousands of tokens, if all of those get breached/leaked, an attacker can do a lot to a lot of Discord servers assuming it has the requisite permissions. However, they do claim that Mee6 (the biggest Discord bot by # of servers, iirc) offers a…

Discord holds user session tokens right? If those tokens are leaked then attackers will have access to Discord user data. Seems like Discord should be shut down.

Hmm, good point, but Discord can't control the security of a third party platform like this.

Not saying it's the right thing to do, but it seems to be their reasoning.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#29

Post by ocdtrekkie » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

czk wrote: post #2

I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things. A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if disc…

One of the things I found surprising is that many of Discord's bot permissions are not scoped to servers at all. I've been asked to authenticate with a bot service for one server numerous times that requests access to things pertaining to all servers I use, and that seems very wrong.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#30

Post by macspoofing » Mon, Jun 23, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

like_any_other wrote: post #6

colesantiago wrote: post #5

Repeat after me and frame this. Never build your main business on somebody else's platform. Always assume that you will get shutdown / rugged when you do so.

Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it, because you won't like what Standard Oil will charge you for their trains.

>Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it

You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.