Look at stackoverflow. They made their information extremely accessible and now search engines are riddled with sites ripping the content directly from stackoverflow, rehosting it, and winning SEO on specific questions which bleeds advertising revenue.

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

Stackoverflow made their content available to other companies. This is different making using the discord client and service provide quick answers.

If a random unauthenticated user can find it, which is what I am assuming people mean by making it accessible instead of locked in a discord, then other companies can pull and use the data too. What benefit does discord have to gain by making their content more accessible, that outweighs the possible losses?

Discord having the ability to search through their history and provide knowledge is not the same thing as allowing unauthenticated/anonymous users to mirror all the data. The limiting factor is a human responding to the same question 1000 times or bad search through a channels history. Although one solution would be to give all their data to Google and hurt themselves, the alternative would be to make their own search better within their ecosystem.

I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.

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.

> I think it works perfectly for stack overflow. Rarely is the full answer in the Google blurb. I almost always click through to the actual SO post.

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 may be the case but it's rare enough I've never encountered it.

I encounter it on a daily basis. Anecdata aside, it’s some amount of lost traffic and humans react to measurable loss much more heavily than they do to potential gain

>I don't buy it: making discovery faster and more accessible may result in fewer hours spent on discord, but Discord as a whole becomes more valuable.

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.