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Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

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31–40 of 135 posts

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is les…

> The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Bouncers and log bots have been a thing even 20 years ago when I was active on Freenode. In fact, a bouncer and log bot was what made me get my very first own VPS... time flies. It lasted a year until my first attempt at a libc upgrade failed, that was a lot of work to fix.

We definitely had bots on IRC in the 90s.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#32
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…

This isn't Discord doing this out of the goodness of their privacy-concerned hearts. They'll eventually try to do a Salesforce-Slack kind of play here by preventing external entities from monetizing on their platform.

Tech will turn into a casino where the house (aka the platform) always wins.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#33
post #18

If you care so much about the users as you say then you will release the code in a docker image so they can continue using your product.

their target audience does not know what a "docker" is, much less wants to lease a server for hosting

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Sure you might use IRC for chatting and have some bots around that - but typically your long term storage of information would have been handled in something like a forum, website, email list, file repository, etc - so that even if an individual IRC server went down it wasn't a big deal to move along. IRC was/is les…

> The massive nuance you are missing is that IRC had a default expectation of being ephemeral in nature. Bouncers and log bots have been a thing even 20 years ago when I was active on Freenode. In fact, a bouncer and log bot was what made me get my very first own VPS... time flies. It lasted a year until my first attempt at a libc upgrade failed, that was a lot of work to fix.

[deleted]

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#35
post #23

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.

Discord has the plaintext of every single message ever sent via Discord, including all DMs.

Can you imagine the value to LLM companies?

It’s probably the single largest collection of sexting content outside of WeChat (and Apple’s archive of iCloud Backups that contain all of the iMessages).

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#38

Sorry for your loss. I too virtually stopped using Discord in favor of, mostly, Reddit (lesser of two evils).

Reddit is more evil than Discord IMO - they did this years ago, tried to shut down all bots and unofficial apps, and they heavily manipulate consensus opinion, which Discord doesn't as far as I know.

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#39
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…

After Reddit's API shutdown the writing was on the wall. Services like Reddit and Discord are huge data troves, and now this data has a concrete $$ value. Offering unrestricted API access means that third parties will store and sell this data. So shutting them down (and monetizing your data yourself) is an obvious decision. Slack recently changed its ToS to disallow this as well - https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals....

Re: Discord Is Threatening to Shutdown BotGhost

#40

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.

How are you going to avoid Microsoft, Apple, Google, and AWS? The most common OS, browser, and infra platforms.

You have to build on something, and there's going to be a corporation somewhere in your stack.

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