Hacker News Reader

Comment by aliqot | Hacker News Reader

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc.

Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say that newsgroups were well indexed and searchable. We are in a 'dark decade' of lost history search-wise in some hobby communities.

View on HN

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit.

I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.

People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com <my discord name>".

We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).

Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people think they are.

What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing.

The solution to this problem is to have a very clear indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If you really want to, make it a link that explains what that means.

And you're done.

This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern software that went to crap, not the users.

> Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike

This is exactly what used to happen on “legacy” forums, too. I’m all for reasonable guardrails[1] but at some point you have to just let people take some individual responsibility.

1. Alert users who are posting publicly, allow them to disable posting to public channels in their account settings, etc.

Right, they are. Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.

> Choosing to communicate on a private platform such as Discord, rather than something public like Twitter or Reddits is exercising that responsibility.

I find it difficult to believe that people choose Discord over eg Reddit because they value privacy - you can create a private subreddit much more easily than you can create a new Discord instance. People choose Discord because they want live chat that works.

Anyone who is consciously choosing Discord for privacy reasons shouldn’t have a problem policing themselves when it comes to public vs. private channels, no?

I think people chose Discord because they want a private place to chat with friends.

I'm fine with only privacy-conscious people getting privacy.

Privacy should be the default so that people who go for privacy don't stick out.

Sorry, my comment was overly brief and flippant. I see this change as a net positive for privacy, and the fact that it's of only limited benefit for people who are less scrupulous about privacy is unfortunate but I am still pleased on the balance.

(1) Most forums are pseudo anonymous. You happen to be on one right now.

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

(2) This is a very "techie" take. Facebook has proven most people don't care about their privacy. Note - not saying privacy ISN'T an issue per se, I'm just saying that we've already proven the general population really doesn't care.

(3) AVS Forums, Tesla Forums, Malibu boat owners, etc. are all forums I regularly use and have great indexed content that would easily get lost in a Discord server. Also, no one knows who I am there. So as long as YOU want to stay pseudo anonymous while still contributing...you most certainly can.

This kind of reminds me of Facebook back in the day. You had a space that was sort of private-ish, in the sense that people had to sign up and you could set things so that only friends/friends-of-friends would see your posts. But in the end, even if you try to be private, your friends-of-friends network is eventually infiltrated and scraped.

Semi-private in the long term is public. It makes sense -- the platforms want us to feel comfortable and over-share, but this is because they are on the surveillance capitalist team, not because they are benevolent.

Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity? I absolutely do not understand this need people have nowadays with associating their identity and personal information with online aliases and then complaining when people find it. Discord even allows using multiple accounts on the same client now.

This is not really practical without good opsec because of the risk of doxxing. You basically need to have strong discipline to censor out every information that could remotely be traced back to you. The doxxer need to succeed to id you only once; you need to protect yourself on all and every comment you make.

Take a look at my comment history. Can you figure out who am I? I worry constantly about this.

I was targeted once in a politically motivated witchhunt on Reddit (that also targeted other moderators of a national subreddit), and there were a doxxing pastebin that circulated in hate groups. It contained the real name, addresses, id number, etc of many moderators; a lot of them had made a conscious effort to not leak anything, but they could be traced nonetheless.

In my username it had "none information could be found". But I later checked out my comment history on reddit and found out plenty of information leaks; people were just not determined enough to comb out the comments.

For something like Discord, I'm eventually going to form human connections with people. I'm not going to post my address and SSN, obviously, but my real name, my occupation, the company I work for? Yeah, that'll probably come up.

To say "just practice good opsec and never tie your name to your real identity" is the same as saying "just don't make friends on Discord" to me. I understand why people would do that, but I really don't like the idea of being a pseudonymous blur on the internet like I am on HN/reddit.

> Have you considered simply not using a username that ties back to your real identity?

I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now. To the point I don't remember when I used my real name on the Internet. And whenever I do, it must be a really important and a well thought-out reason.

Moreover, I use a different nickname for every service so that if someone looks up dvfjsdhgfv they will only find HN and HN-related posts.

>I assumed it's been Internet 101 for several years now.

people can be extremely naïve.

It has also been a problem with people who make content on platforms like Onlyfans. A lot of them learned a bit too late that it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live.

>it's a bad idea to take pictures that show the street where you live

Reading this it just hit me that GeoGuessr is basically doxxer training.

In the 90s we were taught, never give out your name, your age, where you live, or anything that can be tied back to you.

And then came LinkedIn that asked for full access to your inbox (yes, username and password! and people gave it away), Facebook with their "real name policy" (and people complied!), Android with automatic access to your contacts without your consent (I believe they fixed it at some point though) and so on. Everything seems upside down.

That's where the anonymity comes in. Why the hell would you use any personally identifiable info? Just use mjr69420.

It's this ability to find random comments on obscure stuff that really made me love the Internet.

Nowadays, the social media stuff, and frankly, the influx of idiots, has turned into garbage. Their thoughts should still be archived and searchable though.

> the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.

but plenty of it isn't, the growth of larger discord guilds necessarily changes that. discord has led to a net-loss for information sharing within the fighting game community, for example. join a half-dozen guilds, one for each game, your local group (and the local Smash scene doesn't hang out on the same guild as the anime fighters, etc etc), etc, and there's no way to search for questions across them, so everyone joins and has to interact with some bot to address FAQs or annoy the "regulars" or get shuffled off to some other chat room with its own anti-spam verification bot and its own document index and its own culture. you have to hope that folks have pinned messages to google docs you can still access with information about character matchups, frame data, etc ... and figuring out which/who to connect with to learn a new game is basically difficult to solve in this decentralized fashion after years of forums and wikis like shoryuken disappearing to be replaced with adhoc un-indexed chat rooms and google docs.

> On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit.

Not everything has to be so, but the things we cant search & find on the internet are of vastly less value to humanity. Being isolated apart & alone has some advantages, but endurance visibility maintenance & use is an incomparable advantage that is hot & trendy to take & counter on.

All in all the cases of most of us getting found & wrecked for past shit has been enormously vastly overblown, especially for not-obviously-shitty takes (which i definitely think we need to create permission & space to allow & amemd over time!!! without going full fuck-off turtle mode to greater reality). Anti-democracy fearmongering- the fear to speak (and the fear of more fearmongers using out-of-context low-brow anti-signalling-polarization-ammunition)- like most fears- sells, gets those eyeballs, captivates our imagination & holds our horror-sense. But what an overblown sad conservatism, what a unforunate & sad retinence to have tacits socially let in the door of our collective mind, so rarely a real issue.

The thing about reddit and facebook is they are fundamentally stream based systems. Whats at the top is tied deeply to freshness, anything else falls off. Judging so shortly, saying they are deficient may be perhaps true, but this structurality seems like the cause for war to me, not the public-ness of these mediums.

Alternative ways of collecting & gathering for longer term is exactly what we need. To me the participatory versus private debate is largely orthogonal. There's some influence yes. Leave it to the users I say; lets see which communities thrive in private versus which figure out how to tap the public world to see & let's revisit in a dozen years, see whose gotten world.

Just my own voice, here (in public, on a short temporal horizon site), but: a discord that keeps itself private, exclusive, denies the world & never ever grows the capability to permit real public engagement... is an abhorrent aborational monster deserving quick fate (or to adapt & make a public conscious possible).

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have some bad news for you.

Are you implying strong believes do not provide adequate protection from pervasive, non discriminate surveillance?

people don't think it be like it is, but it do

> People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched.

I have bad news for you.

As long as you're leaving unencrypted info on other peoples computers you're being watched.

This info can and will be used against you should someone in the right position feels like that.

Only proper end-to-end encryption (combined with plausible deniability where required) can protect you from that, iff of course you're in full control of the keys at any given time.

In any other circumstance there is no privacy on the internet. You're being watched, as the internet became the ultimate surveillance machine by now.

Since Snowden this—since a long time actually quite obvious—fact can't be talked away even by the most ignorant people.

The only sane way to deal with this given reality is to consider just everything done on the internet, where no very special protection measures have been applied to, to be compromised. As you're being watched you better behave like you're being watched. There is no other option, sad as it is.

Btw. in the days of the yore everybody knew that you never ever put any personal info on the internet. This was one of the first things you told people before you showed them how to use a news server.

But today people seem to act without due consideration about just nothing on the net.

For example people today hand out happily credit card info to more or less whoever asks, and than wonder that they get robed. I actually still remember the times when people were saying that it's extremely unlikely that anybody could do business on the internet because "Who would be so stupid to type in their name, address, and credit card number into some form on a 'webpage'? Trusting someone on the internet, LOL!".

Now the trust goes even so far that most people really think that there are "private spaces" on the web, where they're not watched. Well, LOL.

> Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

Maybe if you use forums with a real name policy? I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)

Unfortunately there are whole services offered to find said nicknames and tie the crap back to your real name. Frequently used for high profile job positions and their “background” checks.

Oh really?? First I've heard of it, I wasn't aware of that. That is indeed worrying. Do you have any examples? Would be good to try out. To see how much it knows about me.

Also time to start rotating identities more :) It's a bit more complicated not to mix them up now because almost every email service requires a phone number and I only have so many (here in Spain you can't just buy a prepaid sim over the counter, they have this annoying registration process with photo ID that also has to be renewed every once in a while).

It’s a service offered through LinkedIn for corporate accounts. One of my former bosses was able to do a crazy level of snooping into my private life.

They also were able to contact an advertising firm with it and get most of my Facebook activity. I had some albums with my drinking exploits (young and just out of college) and my boss could see it all even though he wasn’t friends with me and that info wasn’t public.

He told me all of this a few weeks into the job. It was shocking just how much info he could pull on me by just being corporate and asking the right people and paying some cash/using a background check.

Thanks, too bad it's corp accounts only so I can't try it :( I wasn't aware of this, I will be more careful in the future and start cleaning up some nicks (starting with this one).

What could be a greater way to start a professional relationship than some cyberstalking... /s

> I wouldn't give prospective employers all my nicknames :)

I wouldn't give them any, to be honest.

And it weirds me out to see people posting with their real names, be it youtube comments or on niche forums. That anonymity is a deeply held thing to me, I guess.

Some employers like to see their employees participating in online forums around their particular field of expertise. Mine also, though I've declined to do so for now.

I wholeheartedly agreed. Ironically, I already feel that Discord is a lot less private than IRC used to be. In a way, history not being accessible to those not currently in a channel is also a feature.

Scrollback is actually a permission that you can disable; but it's on by default and I've never seen someone turn it off.

Disabling it doesn't really work right. It doesn't let you still see history from when you joined; it just lets you see whatever bits of history your client has cached, which resets anytime you restart the client (on desktop) or anytime the client loses state due to memory pressure (on Android, no idea about iOS.) It doesn't really make much sense.

I guess the desktop behavior kind of matches IRC, but it's not what Discord users expect; the mobile behavior is just random, since you can't control when the client is "connected" or not.

Doesn't it? I'd argue that this is a perfectly reasonable outcome. Server-side history is disabled -- for everyone. Sure, you could have saved the conversation when you saw it, but it doesn't do it for you.

Ephemerality can be desirable. However, I do agree there should ideally be three options, including the one you're describing.

So it's really just IRC mode?

No, it's quite a bit less functional than IRC. Even just switching between channels on the same server doesn't reliably retain chat history, so it basically just doesn't work at all for anything but write-only channels.

That's a good point and now that you mention it I remember seeing that option. But as you say, it's almost always on, so it barely matters.

To be clear, I'm not saying Discord or any server admin are making a mistake here, scrollback is often very useful. But I've definitely opted not to share some things because I knew they would be searchable ultimately. Having witnessed the transition of some IRC channels to Discord, I dare say others must have felt something similar.

im in a few servers with it off and it works really poorly. even switching between channels in same session, especially on web will instantly clear it, they seem to struggle with session management

If you post on a public Discord, I think you are accepting that your comments will be made public. I totally agree with you on private Discords though.

There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be indexed.

I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.

I'm already coming across more and more communities who say "For more information/to download the example files/to see our FAQ just join our Discord!", which is an immediate turnoff. I'm not going to "join a discord" just to see an FAQ or download some prerelease build or something else.

Now even entire communities are going to move onto Discord and become completely unreachable for people like me who don't want to "join the community" just to read one post that one person wrote one time.

I also feel that "just" is very much an understatement when it means "sign up for a service that doesn't play nice with anonymous networks (Tor) and often requires to share and verify your phone number".

I'm hugely relieved that you see the black box as a situation to be addressed. For me, that circumstance alone turns Discord from a neat and useful tool into a tragedy that I'm forced to live with, and I'd love to see it move into the former category

Hopefully distinct from mere searchability: how about integrating a wiki service for big/boosted servers?

This would be a huge boost in adoption!

But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few to any links to content from discord.

I think with the amount of internal linking and original content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.

That sounds like Google's problem?

I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the size and popularity of discord.

I totally agree - I find myself missing the Google discussions filter (if you remember what that was?) very often. It would let you search only across forums, message boards, and other places where actual discussions where taking place (as opposed to SEO and blog spam).

I actually built a small tool for myself to try and replicate this. It searches across a few discords, a curated index of forums and message boards, and a little bit of Twitter (while applying some advance parameters to filter out the marketing spam). Works pretty well!

If anyone else wants to give it a go (desktop only for now): https://crew-rho.vercel.app

(the forum search takes a little bit of time to load, but you'll see it if you scroll down)

I've run a forum and worked on a couple of others. First one was for lactose intolerance when there was very little information available. Others were technical sites. In that case more information became easily available and in others, it's moved to platforms like facebook and twitter.

I do mourn the loss of these forums as there was a lot of good information, and more importantly some first hand experience in some of the posts. A lot of these things now are view or click driven so they lose the personality. While there are still a lot of good forum sites around and do well, I think the rise of spam posts and increasing work of moderating the smaller sights was too high and eventually killed them off.

It's important for a forum to be both externally searchable and internally. A lot of the old forums had internal search tools that really sucked, and external search engines didn't seem to cover everything.

Knowledge being accessible via search engines is the main reason we are sticking to a real 'forum' vs the new Discord feature (despite having a very large Discord community).

There is a lot of sophistication needed for managing a forum so it could mean that this Discord feature is meant to address a different need.

Apt association I'd never made before. Communication in discord does have similar traits as communication in IRC.

IRC is indexed via passive bots. I can still go back and search my old IRC user names in popular search engines and find messages I sent 15 years ago.

Searchable? Yes. Indexable? Absolutely not.

Even public servers are only public to human accounts and only server admins are allowed to invite bots. If you try to scrape Discord with a human account you will be banned.

That's AIcist :D

But really, you can't tell human accounts from bots.

Given what I've heard about people getting banned for "self-bots"[0] they seem to err more on the "ban humans that look too bot-like" side of that dilemma.

That being said, while there is some overlap between the two, it's not terribly difficult to detect specific things that bots would want to do, such as scrape a Discord channel, and ban any human accounts that match that profile. A regular human is going to be sending lots of messages and querying message history only rarely; a bot is going to hit the message history API as quickly as the rate limits allow and never send a single message.

Browser fingerprinting could also be used to sus out bots that don't look like a web browser enough. Most bot developers are just making HTTP requests rather than firing up a real browser and attaching to it with WebDriver[1]. Once you do that then you have to play walls-and-ladders[2] with the Discord user-interface team. Oops, your bot just clicked on the fake invisible "please ban me immediately" button that we snuck in right next to the link that opens #general! Oops, we decided to obfuscate all message content so that incoming message JSON is unreadable and outgoing HTML requires having your specific Discord CSS loaded to view it!

Just as there's unlimited ways to disguise a bot as a human, there's also unlimited ways to unmask them or frustrate them while remaining usable for human users. Turing completeness is a harsh mistress, and scrapers only work because people find economic value in being scraped - not that scrapers have an inherent advantage.

[0] Scraping your own Discord client token and using it to authenticate a Discord bot with your own account

[1] Writing a WebExtension content script to inject input into a browser would also work to self-bot

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120117-00/?p=85...

With a sophisticated enough crawler, sure, but that would require a significant amount of R&D. I don't know of any organization that both has the resources to do that, is willing to break Discord's ToS and make their index public.

PHPBB:Reddit::AIM:Discord

The name of the app is Discord for crying out loud. Have you seen the kinds of things people are using it for? Discord is *wildly* hackable chat, not forum software. There's tons of crap being slung around on Discord that doesn't deserve to be archived because that's not the purpose.

Is IRC indexable or searchable? No. Usenet served that purpose. People hacked in query bots to IRC. At least Discord comes with built in search.

If you want a forum, go use forum software.

Sure, but the problem is that so many communities are moving discussion around solving domain-specific problems to Discord. And the collective wealth of knowledge - some of which gets accumulated across decades - instead becomes an amnesiac experience where answering one person’s question provides no gain to the next person with the same question in a year’s time.

I’m not sure why this move is happening.

Exactly. This is a people problem not a software problem.

>If you want a forum, go use forum software.

Boy have I got some news for you about what Discord just announced. You should check out the link on the post you're commenting on!

I created https://sqwok.im because I wanted an open, indexable, public chat site tailored to kitchen-table conversations, influenced from my years growing up on IRC.

There's been an active discussion on whether to allow gifs/images in the chat, with many saying they like that it's focused just on conversation.

Discourse vs Discord

Not PhpBB

mehh, I'd rather use PHPBB-like forums instead of Discourse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com