It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
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.
> What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
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.
Don’t forget the multiple severs multiple logins hassle, I wasn’t particularly bothered until I got to about the dozen mark at which point I started to resent any new slack I had to interact with, because even with a password manager it was a shitty interaction, because your likely matching on the slack TLD not the per slack unique FQDN, and given that owners can rename the slack and change that it’s not a bad thing to have the slack TLD be the login domain… anyway some people found this a problem immediately (likely not using password managers) and you can tell that it’s been an issue given that Slack really pushed the Magic Link logins pretty quickly, they obviously felt the pain.
> 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.
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.
No, it fosters a less safe experience, when the behavior is hidden. For someone willing to spend just about 30 minutes, it isn't hard to have a script log in to your own account to record messages without anyone noticing.
That's against TOS, and my line of reasoning is that it helps against opportunistic and casual abuse, and there aren't really mitigations against more determined abuse.
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.
You like that it's easy for an abuser to hide proof of their abuse? I know what you're actually trying to say and I'm saying in reality you picked the wrong side bud, ignoring a very bad problem to protect against a comparatively trivial problem.
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?
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.
But is TOS enforceable. That is the question. We have yet to properly test it in US court. I would like to finally get a binding court opinion whether a company can just put 'and we own your soul and youngest pet in perpetuity' and make cops come to your home to enforce that. I would like some clarity. Not this weird purgatory that benefits companies only.
Companies have successfully forced people to go through arbitration through terms of service, with courts agreeing. ToSes, as a whole, are enforceable, though several lines in them might not be, just like contract law.
If the data ended up on someone else's system you need to assume they can store it. Pretty much every IRC client ever has the option to save logs, everything from channels to private messages. Assuming someone can't save conversations is not wise.
Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients. All of them, in case of one-to-many communication.
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."
I agree with you. Analogously, I find the notion of forced read receipts to be weird. I can accept having a "delivered" status, to indicate that the message reached one of my devices, but a "read/seen" status is intrusive. The physical equivalent of this is sending an internet connected camera and let it send a message back if I opened your box.
This is very much a framing issue and trying to apply physical interpretations on non-physical things.
> 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?
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.
I think this has gotten wildly off track. It started with whether it's a feature that you can delete a discord message, there's a lot of steps from that point to wiping information from your mind.
> 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.
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?
I think the same applies to the Mastodon or blog example (or Twitter, or Facebook) - to me, these are closer to broadcast publishing than to producing creative works, so copyright issues notwithstanding, I feel GP doesn't have full ownership on what they published on the public web either.
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.
I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it?
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.
> 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 derive from physical mail, not phone calls
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.
This is a feature because you can feel safer sending messages to people you currently trust that you are less comfortable sending to people you don't trust as much, 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 something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "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.
> This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot.
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.
> There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't.
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.
This "feature" is placebo. All they have to do is save the data somewhere else and your "power" to delete the messages is gone. Simple screenshots will suffice.
Just as exploding messages are subject to retention by the other party. Yet the friction of doing so makes opportunistic abuse harder by somewhat trustworthy and decent people.
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.
If you have a social life there are people in your circles of varying degrees of trust and interests, and as people change, you want your inner life and history's exposure to them to change as well. I feel like you are treating a complex phenomenon that you can obtain regular feedback from like something that's complete-trust or zero-trust.
There has been a use for exploding messages, and there's a use for deletable messages too, despite the screenshottability by zero-trust parties.
the messages are rendered client-side and there's no way discord will bother messing with detection of client-side bot "tampering" that scrapes the output, and that's assuming it would be even necessary to do it this way. It's entirely pointless, if someone wants to do harm with the information its trivial to get it regardless of TOS, and those that don't get the short end of the stick.
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).
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.
Why do you think the threaded discussion feature is awful? I find it useful to keep track of multiple running conversations with someone or have a topic discussion within say a #Help room.
> We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.
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.
> Discord is filled with people under the mistaken impression they have documented anything by having a chat with a search feature... when the "rules" are in fact buried, no longer accessible, or just hidden in a wall of conflicting information.
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).
IRC can be accessed by any client adhering to IRC standards which are free and open.
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.
>Discord can be accessed by any client adhering to Discord standards, which are closed and proprietary.
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.
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.
It doesn't take away from the point but it adds to it. Proprietary chat protocols are nothing new but in the past alternative clients were either ignored or blocked. Now it is getting more common to punish the individual users of such clients, like Discord here threatening to nuke your account. This is a much worse situation than just "closed and proprietary standards".
In actual Discord practice, that clause acts more as a liability disclaimer. They do not actively look for and kill third party clients like, say, WhatsApp. However they have an antispam with a high false positive rate, which is tuned to almost always produce a non-spam result with their first party client.
99.9% of users don't care about any of that. Users want embedded media, custom emotes, free fully featured clients on every device they use (any client that needs a bouncer doesn't count), integration with desktop software such as games, video streaming / screen sharing, and voice calls.
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.
You only let users design a product or tool if they are better at it or more correctly if you are even worse at it. Users don't want fire exits or seat belts. They basically want tasty food that kills them. It if can be more tasty and kill them faster they all want it. Even better if the product kills other people but silently and far away. If it can be slightly cheaper and kill many more people you've done well in their opinion.
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.
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.
> 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...
Pidgin had lots of plugins (emotes too) and on integration with video games, that depended on the game and protocol.
Twitch uses IRC for instance. You could use any IRC client to comment on your channel, and you could broadcast to Twitch with common tools too, by just using FFMPEG to encode your video stream to h264.
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.
>We're complaining about a problem that was no different in the heyday of IRC.
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?
It's true IRC never stores anything server-side besides user and channel registration details, depending on the network's features and services.
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.
The wording was bad but I mean discord stores stuff from the start so you naturally say things with that idea in mind, for later. On IRC you come and talk, it might be logged or not, it's still not part of the spirit when you get into a chan.
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.
> I routinely run into the problem that can't I send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES.
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.
That is actually one aspect where I agree with Discord : free hosting isn't free !
(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.)
Sure, then allow me to send larger files and delete them after a while to reclaim disk space, and/or compress images and videos server-side so they take up less space. Heck, even the old-school ICQ-like direct file transfer, maybe through a proxy server of some sort, would be much, much better than this stupid limit.
You can send larger files if you pay for Nitro - basic is $30/yr and allows 50MB, normal is $100/yr and allows 500MB (they recently upped it from 100MB).
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...
They already process your images to generate thumbnails so that infrastructure is already in place. Then again, I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
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.
Oh wow, I wonder how Telegram manages it... because it has an order of magnitude more users than Discord, so economies of scale ?? Or because it might be used a LOT less for non-text ??
> 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 don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
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. Discord ime provides just enough free hosting to be broadly convenient, while for larger uploads with 'Nitro boosts' to a Discord group everyone participating gains increased upload limits.
While some forums do lock information behind registration-barriers, it's rare, whereas every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier. It's far, far worse for anyone who doesn't want to be part of your community or install an app just to be able to read the docs or download a patch or ask a question.
>every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier
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).
Ah, just re-checked that community and apparently they must have phone-gated it recently, as I haven't seen Blender use that before. Perhaps they got hit with spam, which I know is the reason some add the requirement, even temporarily (which I suppose circles back to the annoying side-effects of spam).
This isn't just a server-specific thing. Discord can and will randomly lock you out of your account completely until you verify with a (unique) phone number even if none of the servers you're in require it. If you have a discord account with no phone number, it will probably happen to you eventually.
I have joined 2 discords in the last week (as lots of 'community support' seems to be moving there these days). I set a username but I haven't had to supply any other info - I can't post anything and there's a banner saying I need to claim the account to avoid losing access but it's definitely not every discord which requires a verified account.
Doesn't help with the issues around searching for data from outside of discord.
Discord randomly (e.g. when a black box ML algorithm scores you naughty or if you just happen to log in from an ip that someone "bad" used) requires you to provide a valid mobile phone number before you can access anything.
That depends on the forum. Most forums could be searched and posts found via your search engine of choice. Well, the current crop of forums (discourse) prevents that with being JS based, but I would not count it as a good forum anyway.
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.
This is correct. Google became a monopoly and they stopped caring about surfacing any results that they couldn't immediately monetize. If your content is archived in a forum somewhere, Google won't find it anyway, it'll instead show you results from youtube, ads, and whatever is on top of their cache. Search is effectively dead, so we have to resort to asking other humans directly for answers. Which sucks, but that's the phase of the competition/monopoly cycle that we're in right now.
ignoring the problem of robots.txt inaccessibility, is it feasible to have Kagi-style "private google" with a more limited number of high-signal-to-noise sites, especially if you drop the concept of e-commerce and some other low-SNR feeds?
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.
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.
Sounds crazy hard, a lot of moving parts, both human and technical. But if pulled off right I’d pay for that kind of thing, preferably hosted and cared for me in a datacenter
I'd like a browser plugin which allows me to vote up or down websites. This would go to a central community database. Highly upvoted sites would be crawled and archived, and available through a specialized search page.
The users of the plugin if it's at all successful will include SEO types. Without a way of sorting out quality input from generic promotional input, this plugin will not scale.
as chalst says, once your site becomes successful, spammers will make accounts and upvote their spam and downvote the good stuff.
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.
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.
Cynically speaking, platforms like Discord are not interested in their content being widely searchable. If a,user can satisfy their need for information by reading an existing answer (even within Discord), that user needs Discord less. The user depends less on there being an active community in Discord members of which could provide answers.
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.
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. If slack created some awesome feature that mined your company's chat logs to train something like the Librarian in Snow Crash that would be a massive selling point even if it means fewer chats between human beings. It's s valuable because it produces an answer without taxing another human.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else
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.
Yup - the most engaged members are usually running the server, so they optimise it for their use. Multiple channels and categories make it easy to remember context if you switch often, and prevent recent relevant conversations from going out of scope too quickly.
Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things
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.
Those communities iirc nowadays operate a dual mediawiki + discord server. Dustloop (arcsys, Guilty Gear & BlazBlue mostly) for example didn't vanish entirely to Discord, the discord is instead just used to organize edits to the wiki if I recall.
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).
GP mentions "lore", that has not been deliberately condensed to a wiki. A forum works much better for lore : to search and reply years later to some very specific question / answer.
(I guess wiki comments and especially talk pages can work too, but they are terrible and not the place for community discussion.)
I guess I should be clearer - I'm more referring to multiplayer communities rather than actual game-specific resources. Communities, rather than knowledge resources, are where it's appropriate, basically. Of course, these often end up bleeding into eachother over time.
What's far more unsettling is knowing that Discord's sysadmins, as well as their acquirer (which for a minute looked like it might have been MSFT) have the complete plaintext logs of every DM conversation. Every private link, every NDA'd product info, every insider crypto tip, all the passwords and credentials, all the sexting, all the nudes.... and all linked to your real world identity via the non-VoIP phone number you have to add to your account to join most channel groups ("servers").
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.
And the mundane reality is that they won't use it for blackmail or in any such personalized fashion (except for government requests). What they will use it for, is training language models. That's the new way of monetizing "user-generated content", especially one you've managed to lock up so it can't be casually scrapped by anyone else.
One of Discord's shareholders is Tencent (not Microsoft!!), however, the co-founders are still on the board and are highly occupied with day to day stuff. Message deletion on Discord is traceless from the outset (once deleted, no one, not even database admins, can retrieve deleted messages; the same thing also applies to the metadata, but not messages, of deleted users), in fact, this is one of the features they are bragging with. Traceless deletion is verified by both engineering related blogposts and interactions with support.
Unfortunately, even the LLVM community has chosen a combination of Discord/Discourse, and deprecated their mailing list/IRC channel. This is a very unhealthy trend, and only the most ardent of communities such as Linux/Git/GCC stick to old-fashioned publicly-archived mailing lists.
Most of German immigration information and advice is locked into private Facebook groups. This information is not good nor reliable, but it's the only way to tell how things actually play out at the immigration office, for example.
That information would serve a lot more people if it was available to them with a simple search.
indeed very disappointing that most games have wikis/subreddits where one can get the gist of it served in a consumer friendly format but public services do not
Well, it's people sharing their personal experiences. I'm sure the government has a public website where they try to be helpful, but personal experiences of immigration are very useful, and just not really something the government can collate (often because they work against each other - people trying to 'game' immigration).
It's absolutely horrendous, and supplementing this information is how I pay the rent.
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.
Reddit is still bad, not only because it's a platform, but also because it tends to lock threads after merely a couple of months (which prevents necroposting, which sometimes IS the right thing to do, while creating a new post is the wrong one) - so even if someone comes in later with a solution, they can't even answer the previous posters !
(and some of the new forums, seems like Discourse has it on by default?)
Actually, HN has the same issue than Reddit here : it locks threads.
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".
HN may be like the forums for Advanced Custom Fields, which weren't even indexed. I sent a mail to them and submitted added themselves to Bing, which in turn meant being added to DDG afaik.
Discord is nice because it lets you have small talk and build strong communities with a more natural cadence. In the same way we don't record every spoken conversation, I think we don't need to stress about discord going missing. I imagine any historically relevant outcomes of conversations on discord will be recorded outside of discord.
All that said, it's still important to have knowledge bases to reference I agree, but I think that should be an 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.
I would say in something like speedrunning there is tons of information that only exists in discord pinned threads etc., and in the combined heads of community members.
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.
I will say what I feel like I say whenever this comes up: Discord could contribute to a solution here, even partially, by making Discord Forums search indexable. It would (theoretically) help with the "has my question been answered before" and it would (theoretically) make (some) archival efforts simpler.
I discovered one years ago that Facebook had a trove of useful technical groups that are completely invisible because they are not indexable. I wonder how much knowledge we have lost because of discord and FB are the new forum
I remember chatting on the RepRap 3D Printer forums in the early 2010s, everything searchable by Google and static text. That mode is long gone now, Discord's superior UX seems to have swallowed up most of the forums.
We've had the same thing happen with a local gaming club - we've pretty much wholesale moved from Facebook to Discord. Which is great for current members, but makes recruiting (which is sort of important in a college town) next to impossible.
> It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers
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?
I'd be happy even if they just didn't hijack Command/Ctrl-F. You can't even search for text on the screen you're viewing without being dumped into their shitful pseudosearch.
This is megabytes (at most) of text we're talking about, not gigabytes. And ripgrep is absurdly fast. Grepping a 5MB text file should be pretty much instantaneous.
The “text files” don’t have to be the primary backing store - merely a derived cache file that can be periodically refreshed with new content. It doesn’t have to be text either - SQLite is pretty structured if you need more features in a minimal container too.
And you can't even filter out spammy channels like bot command channels. On mobile it's particularly awful where if you look for a message's context, it's very likely you'll lose your "place" in the search panel and have to scroll from the top all over.
But not if you don't. Large servers tend to have information spread across many different channels and if you want to find out about something that may be in different channels, you have to search individually in each of them and that gets unwieldy fast.
IRC used to be indexed by Google and such though. Also because irc clients didn't have rich media support a lot of knowledge would make it outside of IRC like code snippets or microblogs that would eventually get indexed.
I'd say it's a symptom of how toxic the public internet (especially Twitter) has become. When there is an angry mob constantly scouring every community for transgressions (real or imagined), being unindexed and unsearchable is a feature not a bug.
That is if you get support at all. Many times I have not. At least on an issue tracker I can find other people who might have solved a similar problem on their own.
> more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before
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.
I wonder if setting up a discourse instance is too much of a friction that businesses are instead choosing a real-time chat inspite of it being awful for knowledge sharing as a whole.
May be there's a need-gap for a low friction forum.
Even more unsettling, when you realise there must be a lot of children talking to a lot of adults, about who knows what, on discords invisible to parents and police.
The search is per-server so before you even start you need to know which server has the thing you're looking for, which isn't always obvious, and you can't search a server without actively joining it, announcing your presence and using up your finite server slots. There's no equivalent to Googling something and passively pulling answers from wherever.
Unless i'm missing something (and noting the drawbacks mentioned elsewhere re. no google search), its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness. You can't think of some set of terms and have it bring up a particular thing, you have to know an exact word used in 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)
> Unless i'm missing something, its native search doesn't have any kind of fuzziness.
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).
Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.
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.
But how does this overlap with federated platforms? Then you can still balkanize into tiny groups but federate among compatible groups to rebuild larger networks bottom-up (I like to draw a comparison to how multicellular organisms are composed of many discrete cells). And if you don't federate with hosts that serve businesses, you can fly way under the radar (Pleroma even has built-in onion routing support IIRC).
It only really works for exact matches. If I have a general idea of what I'm looking for, I can usually hunt it down with google. Discord will give me too many results or no results, which sucks.
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.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.