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> I don't know what they (Discord) did right to get communities to lock up all of their community and data into such a hard-to-index walled garden.

I wonder why they not let google index their content. It would only drive extra traffic to them from google search, wouldn't it?

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Because there's not a need, or at least there wasn't originally. Discord started out as text/voice chat for gamers; small friend groups don't need Google indexing or similar. Larger communities could likely benefit from it nowadays, I agree, but the problem is that it's not search-index-friendly content imo: How do you appropriately index chat for search? I would think this is where LLMs could be useful -- digest an entire chat group and spit out insights/answers/etc.

Same reason Reddit locked down their API. AI training models. Reddit's traffic has been on a down trend over last six months as people consult GPT instead of googling "search term" + reddit.com .

Discord has been locked down for years. Well before the AI training stuff occurred.

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