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

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 post 'corrections'.

The algebraic topology server probably contains a huge number of treasures in modern research algebraic topology. I really really hope it's archived in full

It seems they identified servers via the discovery feature, which servers need to opt into (and I think be recognised as a "community server"? Though that might be out of date). I guess this is better than just scanning the web for invite links, but it does mean that probably most of those game modding servers were not included.

I learned programming back in the day on the Tukui (a wow addon) forums. I hate that it's all discord now. Not well searchable and buried info.

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.

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 Discord, people would probably use some other closed community platform instead.

I expect this would become more widespread as more traditional jobs are subsumed by unregulated ML tech (which, incidentally, the encumbent job-holders are helping train) and more people turn to what used to be generally a hobby as their means of making a living (not that that would last for too long either).

You can still see them. Using alternate clients you will see them, and bots also see them.

This is still the case. There are even some client mods that let you view hidden channel names and know what roles/permissions are required to participate in them.

This is technically the case - I believe the existence of private channels is still sent to the client (eg. their snowflake IDs, which also reveal creation date) but the channel names are no longer sent as well.

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.

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?

As usual, 404 nails it:

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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.

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Same as other commenters here: I think this is shameful action under the guise of research and I cannot fathom why any IRB board would approve this (and perhaps it did not in this case, I do not know if Brazil has such a thing).

Back in the day (15ish years ago), I wrote a paper where I scraped the World of Warcraft API. It wasn't hard to do, I started on a realm, looked for arena teams, then went to guilds and got character sheets from there. I took the opinion that if Blizzard doesn't throttle me it's fair game.

Looking back now, I think that to have been pretty naive. I wouldn't say reckless, but definitely naive. In my mind, I had not made a delineation between "I can access this thing manually one at a time" and "I can access all of it automatically". As far as I was concerned, it was just the computer pressing the buttons. It was the same thing.

I think in the fullness of time we have collectively come to realize it is 100% not the same thing. The _availability_ of a thing and the _collection_ of a thing are two different issues with their own thorny problems. The researchers here have made the same mistake I did, but instead of it just being what gear your character was wearing, they took actual communications instead.

I hope this paper gets retracted, all data deleted and a sincere apology offered.

Would the TOS even prevent something like joining a guild, downloading all messages, then leaving?

It's not. At least in the RPG scene, which I experience, it's almost fully replaced forums, and lots of great fanmade content and insightful discussion goes into that low discoverability cesspool which may go offline any day and scrapes all of your data

A big difference is that on Discord anybody who joins a server gets access to full history of chat logs whereas with IRC you don't get access to any past logs. So compared to IRC, Discord users should have an even lower expectation of privacy.

Which ethical system demands that researchers from the DCC/UFMG not breach an unaffiliated commercial ToS during their research?

edit: Whoops

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

At least it will be able to help with winning at random obscure video games.

E2EE is definitely only possible in DMs (there's no chance for servers/guilds), but the cat is out of the bag in terms of user expectations on how DMs work.

So many users expect their entire decade+ history of DM contents, attachments included, to be available wherever they are and on any device, gated only by having their login/2fa or passkey. Switching to E2EE would be a major overhaul of that expectation, and it would be a huge task to train users to now keep their encryption key safe, backed up, and available across multiple devices.

Although, mostly unrelated, is that they absolutely are going to have to cull old attachments eventually. There are attachments sitting in their GCP buckets that haven't been accessed since 2015. I'm sure their storage bill is in at least a few million a month at this point, even if most is marked coldline.

There is a special place in hell for software (including game) developers who exclusively use Discord to release patch notes, documentation, technical support, etc.

> The biggest problem that sucks about discord is that it isn't normally publicly searchable.

This is a feature of the platform, not a bug. Because of the lack of discoverability people act more genuine, for better or for worse, than public places like Twitter, Bsky, Facebook, Instagram, etc where you have to maintain your public image and/or act like HR is watching over your shoulder.

That being said, this feature also makes Discord inappropriate for things like release announcements, patch notes, etc. which should be publicly accessible.

> which historically were publicly searchable

Forums? No not generally unless you were a signed in user and often signups weren’t available to the general public just like here not all Discord rooms are automatically joinable. Digg, Reddit, slashdot were intentionally generally public forums that you could indeed search but they were the exception rather than the rule (in terms of count, not traffic). Indeed even Reddit has invite only forums that I believe aren’t searchable unless you are a member. Oh and searchable if you’re a member? That’s true for Discord.

I remember seeing a ShowHN a few years back for an app/company that made synced your Discord server with a publicly-searchable/SEO crawlable website... I wonder how they're doing:

https://www.linen.dev/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908

This is especially a problem for devs/artists that post updates exclusively over Discord. It's even worse if they don't do so in a separate channel and you have to dig through everyone chatting to find what you're looking for. This as well and the absence of threads (yes Discord has threads but who uses those) makes searching for troubleshooting help awful. Thank god BBS's are still around.

Agreed. Some use it as a knowledgebase and issue tracker and forum and chatroom in one. I absolutely despise it for that use case.

I mean I use it for voice chatting with friends while gaming too and it's fine for that.

But if I have to beg and plead to a discord bot to join a channel to just read some docs, I'm just going to ignore your project. Not sorry about that at all.

It's hard because they want you to keep paying. Same reason AWS has free ingress and paid egress. The walled gardens are all built like carnivorous plants, the thorns face inwards.

There are tricks to get messages from Slack, though I heard they were changing soon if not already.

A year or so ago I exported all messages from a Slack group I ran and used a Discord bot to recreate the entire dataset including channels and user posts. So we now have our entire history of messages without being blocked by a paywall (Until Discord does the same, and we'll be off to find a new home).