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Comment by tcfhgj | Hacker News Reader

Storing is one thing. Performing data mining on them is another

That's a separate problem with hugely different latency concerns, likely done on a separate copy.

Also, people need to keep in mind that those trillions of messages are archived nowhere. Thanks to the walled gardens we're obsessed with building, far-future anthropologists will know more about Pompeii and Machu Picchu than San Francisco.

Firstly, no they won't. That's silly.

Secondly, how would such an archive work? Who would pay for it? How would it be safeguarded in such a way that it can be read by 'far future anthropologists' but not the people paying for the storage?

If we're only talking about public chat rooms, it shouldn't be difficult to archive the content of those.

There are open repositories of the entire internet text content (common crawl). These scrapes are periodically repeated. That's orders of magnitude more data than all discord messages ever.

So technically it's not a problem making such an archive. The financing is of course always an issue, but not because the costs are large.

I don't think every single individual message ever needs to be archived. Every text, every email, every post-it, every poke, every emoji, every reaction GIF...

Well, considerting annoying push for "let's resolve the issue on discord" it's very annoying. With things like github issues you can search for a problem and find a solution. Even ancient mailing lists most of the time have archives. Not so much with all those fancy "realtime" :/

I agree with the sentiment but GitHub issues is not a good replacement. First, it’s also owned by a corporation and is available on the open web today because they let us (is it even scrape/api available today? Can people build tooling on top?). Anyway, this “openness” can easily be changed once the “value extraction knob” is turned.

Secondly, GitHub is a developer platform, not a user/enjoyer platform. Issue reports are high-barrier even for devs. People get upset if you’re asking a random question, don’t check for duplicates, etc. Some people even get upset about issues without a PR.

Again, I’m all for good open alternatives but when HN is like “you just configure Gentoo and type 30 commands” we don’t stand a chance to actually win users over, gotta accept reality before we can improve it…

GH was only an example of something quite common and seachable. It could be codeberg.org or similar

Definitely not everything, but it's still wild to me that so many products and services have all their troubleshooting and customer support in a discord server.

It makes sense to me. The number of people who actually create useful open source software is so vanishingly small compared to the number of people who use OSS, it seems obvious that we should optimize for their time, not the other way around. I agree with you that using mailing lists or GitHub issues or whatnot would be globally more efficient, but if I’m working on a product, I’m going to work in the way that is most efficient for my time. I owe my “customers” nothing because they are not paying for my work. We keep seeing discord as a means to communicate about products because devs see it as the best use of their time. The fact that so many people use it should be an indictment on the alternatives, not the devs who choose to use discord.

Sadly, I can understand why Discord doesn't have a lot of incentive to do this. Maybe the community should popularize an open-source free/low-costing bot and hosting solution for exported chat? (I couldn't find one in a few minutes of searching).

Here ya go: https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow

Even FOSS communities. shame on the devs who decide to do so.

It used to be IRC channels on Freenode and I didn't see anyone complaining back then.

That's the thing. No one ever complains at the time.

Why do you and GP think so many FOSS projects choose to use Discord like this?

For many people the fact that discord is not easily discoverable is a benefit, just like in many other messaging services

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