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Comment by u2077 | Hacker News Reader

u2077·

I never understood why Discord servers keep messages indefinitely. Especially with no way to delete them in bulk. I also had an issue with support where I lost access to my email address, but still had username, password, and 2fa. Went to change email in my account and it sent the code to the old address.

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Discord isn't ephemeral like IRC, that's a big part of why people like it. Why would they auto-delete old messages?

Why should they keep so much data that just raises their storage bills?

Text is very cheap.

Images, a little less so.

Video--I would expect them to eventually evict this.

Because it's great to be able to find that one link someone mentioned, or the thing talked about a year ago, etc. Same reason one might keep their texting history for as long as possible.

They even specifically make a powerful search function to make looking up things easy. You can make a combine query of something like `post by me` `contains image` `in certain channel` `before 2020/03` `contains certain text`. And it will filter out any matching result for you.

It's currently the most useful search function i ever seen in IMs

Both Twitter and Facebook keep messages/posts indefinitely with no (official) way to delete them in bulk.

You are thinking of Discord like IRC. It's not. Think of Discord like a forum/wiki instead. That better represents what Discord is, and how people generally use it.

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