IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.

Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.

We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.

Ultimately, publicly searchable information is a voluntary act.

Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.

Nobody has an obligation to publish information for public access, nor is free necessarily superior to proprietary or vice versa, but Discord is absolutely less accessible than IRC or HTTP(S) as an objective fact.

Notice that every single chat software used by normal humans (iMessage, Google chat, FB messenger, etc) has most of these features, just with much lower bitrates than Discord.

For the very few users that don't need any feature they didn't have in the 90s, IRC is still around. The rest of us just add one of many text logging bots to our discord servers.

Of course sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens.

Plain text protocol with poor (and optional) auth? Please where are the adults in the room

"oh but extension XYZ etc" yes and how many servers do implement that in a mandatory (and user friendly) way?

The user wants their images and reactions and I can't blame them because it's the 2020's and IRC was already limited 20 years ago

What do you mean "they"? I'm the dev in this scenario and I also prefer to eat tasty food that supposedly kills me. I know how to count my calories.

> sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens

I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

Somewhere, the ghost of the man responsible for the iPod and iPhone is laughing at you.

Besides clients/users you have (not in any order): investors, employees, security, stability, sustainability, usability, education, learning curve, ethics, morality, honesty(?), the community, the environment, the economy, humanity, history...

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things.

Maybe if they spent 1 minute thinking about their software as a product and decided to enable those plugins by default, Pidgin would be relevant in 2023.

>Twitch uses IRC for instance

That's not at all what I'm talking about, Twitch has nothing to do with Discord.

Eg your friend's Discord status shows you what they are doing in-game and many games let you join your friend's team directly from discord.

It's worse. Official Twitter account: >All 3rd party apps or client modifiers are against our ToS, and the use of them can result in your account being disabled. I don't recommend using them.

https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

In practice you can't have a client that has local chat history, local search, or just better information density on the screen, and simultaneously hope to not have your account nuked.

Discord standards include "official Discord", which doesn't take away from the point.

IRC didn't pretend that you had information stored there, though...

Discord hides this fact better by offering semi-permanence and a "search" feature, so it seems like its a real-time forum, when in fact its just slack with better video features...

Its very different. The IRC of the yester-yore was filled with people sharing links to more-permanent docs, mailing lists. Discord is filled with people under the mistaken impression they have documented anything by having a chat with a search feature, (and this is has happened to me) claiming that the "rules" are documented somewhere in a channel and why haven't I seen them, when the "rules" are in fact buried, no longer accessible, or just hidden in a wall of conflicting information.

If you have an IRC, you have a dedicated community of people who try because they must, if you have a Discord you have a group of randos at best, or at worst a delusional echo chamber.

Part of this is a result of some communities not being organized well enough but also making do with fitting an IRC-like format ('servers'/channels/message buffers) into a more structured one. People are willing to compromise on having less suitable structure for denser/more important information since Discord offers such attractive and easy-to-use features in one place.

That said most communities I know of create channels devoted to rules/FAQs, though for things like lists of file announcements/releases (in eg: modding communities) it's messier.

The new forums channel feature has helped by making things sortable and more structured but those only apply to new channels not existing. The forums feature also highlights Discord has recognized how communities have been using their site like a forum for certain channels such as Q&A/releases/showcases (and why comparing it to publicly indexable forums is even more relevant since the feature set will only grow).

so the death of lore happened essentially when textual knowledge moved from the printed, physically stored version to the electronic version that has no easy way of going and getting the verifiable source of lore for reference when needed?

sounds about right.

But it is patently false to say nobody used IRC as a source of information. IRC was essential in sharing information quickly back in the 90s. Information on things like natural disasters and the fall of the Soviet Union were shared live using IRC.

Server owners have the option for message logging bots. If communities wanted logging, they do have that option with server owner buy-in.

Arguably, difficult-to-archive by default if you aren't a server owner helps foster a safer chat experience.

e.g. your relationship with someone has soured. Your IRC client has your private messages with them saved in a backlog. You can access them at any time. vs. you normally wouldn't save a backlog of messages because Discord remembers your message history, and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.

How is that a feature?

In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard.

In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting.

But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said:

> knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them

This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate.

The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.

Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.

edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.

edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.

Fair. I think a good argument against my current position is the one made by the Black Mirror episode "The Entire History of You"[0]. In fact, I see at least two different strong points made by that episode:

- Everyone having an easily-accessible, high-fidelity, shareable record of the mundane things they saw, heard or said, stretching back years or decades, is something we might not handle well on an interpersonal level. Our cultures, habits and rules of behavior - hell, even default emotional programming - are all built on an implicit assumption that memories are ephemeral, internal, and not indexable. So e.g. any "he said, she said" argument suddenly becomes something else entirely, when either side can pull up a recording of what happened.

- Having such recordings creates a risk of someone wanting to force you to reveal them.

Thinking about that, I concede that having some conversations be ephemeral may be desirable, at least for as long as humans remain so immature that past behavior can be used as a weapon in future arguments.

EDIT to respond to your edits:

> "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship.

Could you elaborate? I can't see how the ability to unsend messages would be helpful here. If anything, it feel like showing person A the door or giving them a slap in the face - a clear signal the relationship just dropped a few notches.

This reminds me of a case when I realized a certain person unfriended me on Facebook. I wasn't very close personally to that person, but we've spent years building a real-life community together, and we were (or I thought) at the very least good colleagues. I casually mentioned the Facebook thing to that person the next time I bumped into them, and they explained it away as "you know, I'm curating my Facebook friend list, every now and then I unfriend people I haven't talked to in a while; it's nothing personal". Well, it felt quite personal to me, and that explanation made me want to keep the relationship going even less.

> friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics

Hm. That's a slightly different case though. The problem here is that the selfies weren't sent to people who joined afterwards; them having access to it is a decision made automatically by Discord. If the server was considered closer to a private conversation space, and not a public gallery, then I find it perfectly reasonable that person A wanted to remove those messages - they were trying to retroactively exercise control over who gets the message, something they should've been able to do before the fact.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You

You have a measurement problem here. Unless you can fast forward to the end of these trustworthy and decedent peoples life and give a quick review as it pertains to you and your information, you have no idea if any of these people are trustworthy at all.

It's an exercise in probability that's impossible to measure.

There has been a use for exploding messages, and there's a use for deletable messages too, despite the screenshottability by zero-trust parties.

If there's someone least entitled to message ownership, IMO it's the sender. To grant the sender the ability to take messages back is to allow them to encroach the "personal space" of the recipient - to make unilateral changes to the sphere of reality they considers their own.

Physical analogy: to "unsend" a letter, you'd have to break into my house and steal it.

Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.

"Unsending" e-mail exists in corporate (organizational in general) contexts, but this is tied to an artificial environment following a much different sense of rules - those e-mails aren't truly yours, they're the property of the company (org) as part of which you're communicating. In the same way, corporate might let you "unsend" a physical letter too, at least internally. But this is an exception, tied to acting as an agent of an organization; private communications have different defaults.

Also in general, as I mentioned in another branch of this subthread, I don't like solutions that let someone mess with someone else's perception of reality. "Unsending" is doing exactly that, so at the very least, it must not be silent - it must always leave a visible mark. "There was a message here. It was removed by the sender."

> Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there.

They're not on your computer or mail server though. They're on discords servers, which grant you permission to view them upon you providing credentials to prove you're allowed to see them. Removing the message is removing your access to content I have authored and previously granted.

It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. If I hosted a page and gave you login details which I later rescinded, that wouldn't seem odd would it?

None of these are conceptually all that different though. I write a thing and let you read it. I later don't want you to allow you to read it any more. Having granted access once, must that always translate to permanent irrevocable permission? That seems like an extreme position - the most obvious place that comes up is with mistakes. I mistakenly "send" a message to you intended for my wife. Do you have a permanent and fundamental right to it? If you've not even seen a notification that it's arrived, is it encroaching on your personal space for you to not be able to read a message I don't want you to read?

But that's more of a forum or a publication than an interpersonal communication. I think when you and I talk, we both own the content. The conversation is two-way, and thus it is ours. You have no right to take those conversations from my email server any more than removing them from my mind.

It's not about one-to-one or one-to-many, it's about is the conversation one-way or two-way. Are you talking to someone or with them?

In this context, I feel it's OK for GP to remove their blog or Mastodon posts - not weird at all. However, I believe I am well within my rights to scrap GP's blog, screenshot all their Mastodon posts, and keep them for reference; I'd expect the blog to be indexed by the Internet Archive, and would find attempts at preventing the IA from making a copy as something between peculiar and antisocial.

That is, there's a distinction between owning the message itself, vs. owning its physical form or means of publishing. The former, I believe, is always shared between sender and recipient or recipients (up to and including everyone, if we're talking about a regular website without any access control). The latter is handled through normal property law mechanisms, but owning the medium only means you can decide who can access the message on/through that medium, not that you own the message itself.

Why not discord messages then?

By the why the physical universe you live in works the moment you let someone see an informational project (text for example) you no longer have a monopoly on that information. You can never remove access of that data from my mind, and with digital information under a end to end encrypted channel (and assuming you're not watching it with an OCR application from a monitor) you can't remove access to any other allowed person.

You have an extreme position, yes. It is extreme in the sense your idea only works in highly controlled situations or where everybody agrees to play nice. These rules do not work on the internet and there is no means or way of enforcing it.

Once you let photons go, you no longer have a permanent and fundamental right to recall it.

If only we could admit that about copyrighted work.

Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself.

Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.

Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient.

Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph.

Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms.

To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.

Chat messages are not physical things and trying to apply laws that are based on important distinctions with regards to physical things to features in an application is not useful. Even then, you can still send someone something but retain rights over it.

> Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation

Frankly I find it a little weird that a fast back and forth chat on discord over the internet is being likened more to sending a physical bit of paper with delays of multiple days per message than a chat over the phone.

First letter: Hi. Do you have a minute

Reply: Yes. What is it?

Second letter: I've got a problem.

Reply: Is this on the new product?

And it's a week later.

The name of it is even a chat message. To say chat messages are not like a chat is weird to me just because they're not audio files.

I strongly think either comparison is irrelevant but I'm quite surprised at the distinction you're trying to draw.

Worth remembering what the start of this was though, which was that deleting messages on discords servers was described as a feature.

Nobody even reads those things anyways. What they "allow" doesn't matter either. As users we should be able to do whatever we want. If we want to log messages, that's our prerogative.

If I were in a relationship that went bad, and the other person was as vengeful and irrational as you can imagine, and had access to everything I ever said, and did their best to cherry pick and strip context, sure, that would be annoying for me.

And it would be no worse than annoying. I'll take that hit considering the kinds of things that other people do to other people.

I'm clairvoiant, so go ahead and say it's about protecting gays in gay-murderering states. Perhaps you assume the only reason I take this stance is that I have nothing that I think could be weaponized against me.

What kinds of things have you done in your relationships that you fear your past relations so much?

Any way you slice it, wrong victim.

At the end of the day the last thing discord cares about realistically is keeping their users "safe" anyway (and rightfully so in my opinion).

Mailing lists and newsgroups are the proper mechanisms for this. And you should be able to use them with a browser forum-style too.

Doesn't help with the issues around searching for data from outside of discord.

Unless it's changed recently users can enter Discord communities without an email via an invite link*, just choosing a username. It's what made onboarding so easy and similar to just joining an IRC server with a nick.

What's been ironic is since Freenode had their spam issues years back there was a push among many channels on that network to allow only registered users (ie: email tied to nicks) to post, which has continued over in the migration to the Libera network and I find really unfortunate for such channels of those networks as low friction and less permanence in ties to identity have been a distinguishing feature of IRC. (Obviously this doesn't affect IRC broadly but those are among the largest networks for tech communities).

* Eg: https://discord.gg/blender

IRC was always an alternative/replacement for forums for many people (there was always the IRC vs forums debate for projects, gaming teams, etc.). Discord is just better IRC (Slack would have been this without the self sabotage via limited free accounts and sleeping on voice chat for years). Now it's more... Discord vs Reddit. But think of all the lost lore on those IRC servers or random private forums that are now gone.

Was there? IIRC for any non-tiny community the conclusion pretty much always was to use both, for different purposes.

In Matrix there is an awful "threaded discussions" feature now, where collapsed forks branch off from the main chat flow. Which you have to separately manage. Keep a chat a chat, and a forum a forum.

That part is such a joke. I routinely run into the problem that I can't send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES. In 2023. And Discord insists on storing the bit-perfect copies of original images and videos too to add to the insult. I would be perfectly fine with them being compressed and/or stored temporarily but nah. I have to resort to cloud storage services like Yandex disk to go around that asinine limitation.

Your files are too powerful, my ass.

Same. I can't just hit print screen and paste it into Discord, a single frame of my 3440x1440 resolution is too big for their free file size limit. I have to crop and/or scale it first. Just frustrating and an extra few steps.

(And I would prefer that my files weren't arbitrarily modified by the host. BTW, there is software, like ShareX, which allows you to automatically do operations on files when you capture them.)

And to be fair to them, they offer a ton of features for free - 8MB seems reasonable IMO - though I do agree that some form of auto-compression if your file exceeds the limits would be nice... on the other hand, the infra to run ffmpeg on videos or imagemagick on photos is not free either...

Direct file transfers don't incur any storage costs whatsoever, it's only bandwidth. They also already have the relay servers to support WebRTC calls. They could've solved this problem for little to no additional cost if they wanted to. The problem is that they don't want to.

As for paying, Telegram has mostly the same business model (selling subscriptions but also ads in channels for free users) and allows uploading 1.5 GB files for free. With the premium subscription that is doubled to 3 GB.

> my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.

Well, the whole point of this discussion is that (unless if you do it by PM) this counts as (folk)lore, so you shouldn't assume that.

It's simply the experience and some of the tech stack from VK because most people who built Telegram worked at VK before that. VK, being a Facebook-like social media service, allowed people to upload all kinds of things — photos, videos, music, and even arbitrary files up to 200 MB. Telegram even praises itself on "unlimited cloud storage". I never asked anyone about it, but I'm sure that it works out to each user, on average, not consuming much storage, because most of the media content people send is compressed images.

I'd suggest uguu.se for this. Hosts up to 134MB per file for 48 hours. No BS web interface and can alternatively use local ShareX screenshotting tool to upload directly to it to grab a link automatically.

Discord will render still the thumbnail for the link and then after the file expires it will just stop rendering in the chat history.

There are a few free, donation-supported temporary file hosts of a similar nature.

I join a discord channel and honestly most of the time I’m overwhelmed. There’s often a ton of sub channels for every specific thing… that aren’t very active. It’s hard to get a feel for what is going on.

I join some only to find everyone is annoyed by my elementary question, but hell if I can find any answers in discord.

I just never know the lay of the land.

The handful of highly active people do, but that’s it.

This means you need to know enough already just to get it to come up, and more to prune out the other 500 results if your term is generic enough. Basically, the search only really works if you want to find a specific conversation you remember (and it better be recent, given how easily you forget the specifics of things as time passes)

For the past couple years it's returned variations of words, eg: `installer` will return `installers`, `installed`, `installs`, `installing`. However it doesn't return synonyms. It's essentially just searching like one would with regular chat logs, except limited to searching only one server at a time.

I actually wish I could disable such matching since even with double quotes I can't get only an exact word matched (which is necessary when trying to filter a large number of results).

This all likely means fewer paying subscribers.

So, Discord search should be fine for a few months depth, and need not be good further into the past. Exposing historical data to external search engines is even less desirable.

Same of course applies to Slack, HipChat and whatever other commercial chat-like software.

Discord, and 99.99% of companies under capitalism, do not care if they produce more value unless they get to keep that value.

Again, discord improving search would make users rely on their software more, since searching discord for answers becomes a part of user's workflows. Slack offering a premium enterprise "Librarian" feature would probably have significant demand. Usually, companies that offer more value can charge more for that value. I don't see the logic I how gimping search functionality somehow ends up improving these companies' bottom lines.

No. There are websites that copy the content from SO to their Site, and then they SEO themselves to the top on Google, so that the SO Page is lower than the Copy Page.

This is not about the Google blurb.

This could be completely hidden to the Discord devs though. They could very well be slavishly improving various internal metrics. If one of those is time spent in the app, then I could easily see search ending up a lower priority. It doesn't even have to be intentional.

What Google indexed was people's logger bots putting channel logs on the world wide web.

(and some of the new forums, seems like Discourse has it on by default?)

But now I wonder why duckduckgo never seems to show hn results (unless restricted to it of course) ? I have searched hn before as it contains a lot of "Lore" as GP calls it, some of it quite helpful !

I guess that hn is a bit to reddit what is IRC to Discord : because of its focus and lack of features, it's ironically better in this context because most people won't even try to use it for something more serious than "post-it's on the fridge door".

Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.

So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.

LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.

Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.

There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.

In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.

perhaps one interesting thing is that a decent number of the highest-SNR feeds don't actually need to be crawled at all - wikipedia, reddit, etc are available as dumps and you can ingest their content directly. And the sources in which I am most interested in for my hobbies (technical data around cameras, computer parts, aircraft, etc) tend to be mostly static web-1.0 sites that basically never change. There's some stuff that falls inbetween, like I'm not sure if random other wikis necessarily have takeout dumps, but again, fandom-wiki and a couple other mega-wikis probably contain a majority of the interesting content, or at least a large enough amount of content you could get meaningful results.

Another interesting one would be if you could get the Internet Archive to give you "slices" of sites in a google takeout-style format. Like they already have scraped a great deal of content, so, if I want site X and the most recent non-404 versions of all pages in a given domain, it would be fantastic if they could just build that as a zip and dump it over in bulk. In fact a lot of the best technical content is no longer available on the live web unfortunately...

(did fh-reddit ever update again? or is there a way to get pushift to give you a bulk dump of everything? they stopped back in like 2019 and I'm not sure if they ever got back into it, it wasn't on bigquery last time I checked. Kind of a bummer too.)

I say exclude e-commerce because there's not a lot of informational value in knowing the 27 sites selling a video card (especially as a few megaretailers crush all the competition anyway), but there is lots of informational value in say having a copy of the sites of asus, asrock, gigabyte, MSI, etc for searching (probably don't want full binaries cached though).

But basically I think there's probably like, sub-100 TB of content that would even be useful to me if stored in some kind of relatively dense representation (reddit post/comment dumps, not pages, same for other forum content, etc, stored on a gzip level5 filesystem or something). That's easily within reach of a small server, not sure if pagerank would work as well without all the "noise" linking into it and telling you where the signal is, but I think that's well within typical r/datahoarder level builds. And you could dynamically augment that from live internet and internet archive as needed - just treat it as an ever-growing cache and index your hoard.

your solution reduces to the reputation-network problem, it works if everyone is a good actor, or known-good actors (people you know personally) can "vouch" for others across the network (perhaps with reductions in vouch-iness across the network - friend of friends is good, friend of friend of friends ok, 4 degrees out maybe not so much).

But the trivial solution is easily attacked with the "sybil attack", which is one thing crypto was supposed to solve - people would have a good incentive to not forward shit if everyone had to put up a deposit and if they forwarded spam then they'd lose the deposit. But what is the definition of spam, and how can you assert that without attackers using that to kick legitimate users off the network? it's a tough problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

there's an old form-reply copypasta about spam filtering and how your clever solution will not work for the following reasons: and basically "it requires us to solve a user or server reputation ranking problem" is one of the main reasons spam filtering also will not work - remember Bitcoin originally evolved from HashCash which was meant to solve the spam problem! if I provably spent 10 seconds of CPU time solving this random math problem and the solution is provably never re-used, then it becomes infeasible for an attacker to send a bunch of junk messages because they'd need a whole lot of CPUs, right? Definitely not something they'd have access to via, say, botnets... ;)

the other core problem with a lot of these solutions is, attackers are a lot more willing to spend money to get spam in front of users (people make money running those websites after all) than actual users are to spend money to make a facebook post or whatever. 10 cents to make a bunch of impressions is cheap, but I'm not spending 10c to post my cat!

centralized authorities are a relatively cheap solution to these complex problems: if you post spam then facebook decides that it's spam themselves and bans you, done. If your IP or domain sends a lot of spam email then Spamhaus bans you, done. O(1) (or at least O(N)) solution. And that's kind of the neat thing about mastodon too - you don't have to moderate every message, you just have to ensure the groups you're federating with are doing a decent job of policing their own shit, and if they're a problem you un-federate.

You can download it, put it into ClickHouse, and get your own professional search engine.

I've made up the term "professional search engine". It's something like Google, but: - accessible by a few people, not publicly available; - does not have a sophisticated ranking or quorum pruning and simply gives your all the matched results; - queries can be performed in SQL, and the results additionally aggregated and analyzed; - full brute-force search is feasible.

PS. Yes, the Reddit dataset stopped updating.

I'm not sure Discord is necessarily good for "gaming communities". I mean, Discord is live chat. This is good for some aspects: match making, news, etc. - anything that has a short lifespan. However, a lot of things about games don't. Wikis are perfect for publishing this info. Think of a Street Fighter type game. Characters have their move set, that doesn't change. Imagine having to search through discord for how to do a fireball with Ryu. Then there's strategy - that changes, albeit periodically, after tournaments, etc. By all means, this stuff can be discussed in discord, but the consensus strategies have to be published because it's a terrible experience to search through chat logs and follow along with long finished conversations over who knows how many posts, figure out context, etc. compared to just reading it on a wiki.

I see Discord being used for things where forums (and non realtime conversations) used to rule supreme, like hobbies, tutorials, etc.

Why? A tutorial is not a real time chat. A showcase of hobby projects isn't a real time conversation either. And the searchability of these tools like Discord is terrible. I really don't understand why this terrible thing became popular.

Discord is absolutely terrible at storing semi-structured information like a wikipage and I don't see them fix that without completely overhauling their entire service (although I'm sure they'll try and muck up the death of publicly available knowledge even more).

(I guess wiki comments and especially talk pages can work too, but they are terrible and not the place for community discussion.)

Their search makes me want to pull my hair out.

Why can't I just search the history with grep? That's a feature I would pay for (if anyone at Discord is reading this and wants my $10/month)

I don't think it's bad at all, why do you say it's awful? I feel like you think it's bad because you have a negative bias towards discord

I like discord - It makes up a very significant (honestly, majority) portion of my social life. But it's not good for any kind of real information storage (FAQ, guides, expert answers and so on) compared to a forum.

That information would serve a lot more people if it was available to them with a simple search.

I'd love to be tasked with improving the official resources, and I keep making new contacts in the city government. This could happen eventually, who knows.

ime more often than not, the focus is not on being helpful to customers but to please organizational demands.

> people trying to 'game' immigration

exactly, why assume hostile intent? if somone wants to immigrate it should be welcomed since most industrial nations have a lack of births anyways.

The trove of blackmail and extortion data alone is worth a few dozen millions. The insider crypto trading that Discord makes possible is worth probably $20-50mm USD each month.

All that said, it's still important to have knowledge bases to reference I agree, but I think that should be am effort separate to Discord. I wouldn't want to search an arbitrarily long chat log to find answers to questions, it's not well suited for the task.

To those who care about that hobby a lot of very useful information would vanish if discord went away. That's not a great state of affairs and discord is a very bad place to keep that information, even at the best of times it's not easy to find things in there. But I think it's probably the case for a decent number of communities.

You could definitely argue that it's not historically relevant, since, if speedrunning as a whole disappeared it wouldn't really matter.

Not just on Discord, in general, everywhere: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and even here HackerNews.

It's not just about being searchable or long-lived, but that they can pull the rug anytime (or make stealth edits like the Reddit fiasco with their admin Spez)

How to solve this? Should the burden of searchability and archival be a requirement upon companies that provide social media services? Third-party bots already manually crawl all services and provide external search/archive interfaces (like the "Reddit Undelete" services) How to make that better?

[1]: https://public-inbox.org/README

The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.

Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.

It becomes painfully obvious and a little funny when the question triggers a bot to reply with a link to a pinned comment answering FAQ#36, and you see it happen a dozen times a day.

May be there's a need-gap for a low friction forum.