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Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

> I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability...

I personally have found the search on Discord to be very robust and good, actually. I'm curious to see why you are saying it's not searchable?

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It's searchable if you've already found the Discord server and are in it. You won't find any of it if you're doing a web search.

You can search across unjoined servers from within Discord.

That's neat. How do I proceed to do that?

Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final entry is "Discover"

It's still out of reach of traditional search engines like Google, right? Stack Overflow and other forums have the huge advantage of being indexable by outside services.

Really? I’ve never found a good single source for discovering servers, only ever find expired links buried on old posts online

Yes. Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final entry is "Discover"

This sounds like something Google would want to fix ASAP. Are they talking to Discord about the issue?

I hope not. I can’t think of anything that would make me leave Discord faster.

But then you run into the problem of having one username across Discord "servers". I don't want what I say on servers with my friends to be easily cross-searchable from what I say on a "server" for some software development library.

You can set your username and avatar per server and people can only see your mutual communities AFAIK.

Discord accounts have hidden (until someone uses a bunch of hacking tools known as "dev tools") IDs which uniquely identify an account and never change. The username#1234 stuff is pure fluff. The per-server thing is also just an alias on the server, it still shows the foo#1234 name if you click on a profile.

I've thought before about how Discord could deal with this. Ideally we would be able to set up aliases, and when joining a server get to select which alias is used. They would have to look externally in every way like they were distinct accounts including when friending or DMing people.

Alternatively, in the UI they could let you sign in to multiple accounts and then provide another layer of tabs to let you switch between those. That would help keep things organized but also can make navigation more difficult by adding another level to the navigation tree.

Easy account switching is the sort of thing that browser extensions would have been developed to cover in the past, something like like RES for Reddit or XKit for Tumblr.

That's obviously less relevant when a majority of users are using desktop or mobile apps rather than browsers, but a plugin interface even for closed-source commercial desktop software used to be far more common than it is now, leaving users dependent on the development team to add features and usability.

I assume this decline is due to security concerns, wanting to be able to develop faster internally rather than needing to continue supporting old APIs for external developers, and marketplaces like Google Play and the App Store not wanting to enable competing marketplaces within the apps they distribute. It's a tradeoff to be sure, and I'm not sure moving past plugin functionality is a bad thing, but I find it a bit sad.

Many, probably most, Discord servers operate under assumption that discussions are private and are limited to invited users. Making all of these discussions public would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.

Sounds like it's time to write a Discord crawler...

That won't work. Discord is pretty eager in protecting their data. They even kill legit bot-abilities to prevent people from harming their space. But to be fair, discord-space is also very toxic and borderline in some content, with phising and other attacks are being quite common. So it's justified that they protect their customers.

I guess if a big name like Google would ask them and ensures that privacy is preserved, they might cooperate to some degree.

Search engines are a big deal, so much so that I could see crawling with a browser extension or browser automation. However, Discord also discourages use of the web app.

How about if when the app's data is fully locked down, people start recording their screens and OCRing them? Incentivize it somehow. That way at least content that the participating users viewed would be indexed. Then you get back to trying to block people from recording their own screen with software, and after that hardware[1]. Never ending cat and mouse game.

1: https://pallycon.com/blog/choose-your-weapon-to-fight-screen... (see "Screen recording using camera")

Of course, will it be always possible to catch data some way. But it's a difference whether you actively work against the company and must invest money and time into it, or not.

And outside the technical level, discord also has the legal way. They can try to shut down your service, remove your code from public space and make you sink more time and money in an uphill-battle.

This is the same battle people are fighting against all walled gardens. And so far the gardens usually win. So someone taking on that fight, should be aware of this.

Because the only way to find info on a Discord server is to join the Discord server. That means the info is hidden from standard search engines and that even just to see the info I need to reveal myself to the Discord server.

You will never find content from Discord in any system outside of it. It is an isolated island.

New users will have difficulties finding any discussion.

The search straight up doesn't work. You have to search for an exact word or it wont find it, ie 'hell' wont find the word 'hello'.

There's no global search across all your DMs and guilds you are in either.

Or group servers for a search query. This simple feature would be a game changer.

How would that work, in terms of retrieval? Each guild is operated by a particular instance of the guilds server in a many-to-one fashion.

are discord servers indexed by search engines the same way regular forums are?

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