4 ms·

Will Discord even be around in 20 or even 10 years or will all that information be lost? Can people find that information in the Discord by googling now?

cube00 5y ago
They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out today let alone in 20 years https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360035147072-Export-Entire-Chats https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600351...
- cosmotron 5y ago
  I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself. Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
  - Jensson 5y ago
    If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel wrong if the only way to contact support would be via discord.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school. So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time. It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things. Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes. Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.
rchaud 5y ago
This is true of any PHPbb-style forum as well. If the site goes offline, there will be no statically generated archive available.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can find some nugget of information on a web forum without having any prior relationship to that forum.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine. I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question. Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites. I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.
    - 5y ago
zeku 5y ago
I'm sure even if they fold, the info will be sold to some group for ML at the very least.
jlokier 5y ago
The company I work for is in the process of migrating internal chat away from Discord to something else. It's a fully remote company, so chat is really important. I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the company's values, and there is a constant search for better, more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google services as well.) I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be active on it in the old days). The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with publicly archivable channels, would be great. But the way high quality information is constantly being posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the company's online materials will never find the content in Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by far, the highest quality and quantity of information is. As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the years of high value content people have put into Discord will effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when they aren't even using it any more. What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord content to be available in other platforms, generally searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for public channels. If our Discord content was more openly accessible and shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.
- vel0city 5y ago
  An interesting web-based IRC client I've been looking at was The Lounge. You might like it. https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your messages are in a database you control, you can translate them to whatever you want.
- 5y ago

cube00 5y ago

They're not exactly keen on allowing you to get your data out today let alone in 20 years https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360035147072-Export-Entire-Chats https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600351...

cosmotron 5y ago
I feel like there's an interesting irony here (on HN, not in the particular link you shared). In a thread where folks are discussing how they like/dislike how companies shutter their forums in favor of Discord, you then see how Discord themselves use a more traditional thread based tool to manage their own support site rather than using Discord itself. Why wouldn't Discord's support site say, "Meet us in the Support Discord"?
- Jensson 5y ago
  If you have an issue starting discord then it would feel wrong if the only way to contact support would be via discord.
- Fogest 5y ago
  Discord never really advertised themselves as a good tool for support operations of large companies did they? They have mostly always focused on a more community focused side of gaming. Like one of their recent bigger features is that you can add a University you attend and verify your account via your uni email. You then get access to a hub that displays all the different Discord servers people have marked as being associated with the school. So now I can easily find a ton of clubs Discord servers and join them. These clubs would not be suited for a forum at all and they make more sense in a more "live" kind of setting. I see people in these club discords doing voice chats and streaming games to each other all the time. It seems like this is more the target for Discord, but a lot of people have repurposed it for their own things like using it for their companies chats and support. It's no surprise that you need to use a ton of bots to make this better supported as Discord so far hasn't really focused much on that side of things. Discord very-much seems like a younger generation kind of tool and a lot of older people come to it and try and make it fit other purposes. Reading another comment about someone whose company used this for their internal communication is just crazy. While yes it is a good platform they should have known it was a poor choice with having their historical chat history locked into the platform.

rchaud 5y ago

This is true of any PHPbb-style forum as well. If the site goes offline, there will be no statically generated archive available.

giantrobot 5y ago
At least a web forum can be spidered by search engines and the Internet Archive. The forum may go bust but its content may live on. With Discord, once they go bust all of their data will likely disappear. There's also no way for me to search a Discord server without being in Discord. I can find some nugget of information on a web forum without having any prior relationship to that forum.
- Fogest 5y ago
  I personally think from a privacy standpoint I actually like that the chat messages I post on Discord aren't logged and archived on some random websites. Maybe this is because I don't use Discord like a forum, but I use it more like it is a live discussion. Just like if that discussion happened in person you can't really go back on it unless it was recorded somewhere. In the case of Discord you can go back on conversations, just not via a search engine. I think any important and useful information should be stored via other methods. And I actually have seen this done as well. I've seen common answers to questions that will get added to some kind of FAQ style page online and that will be linked to when someone asks that common question. Discord is pretty focused still on the gaming/community side of things and I think it does this part pretty well. I have seen it used to supplement many things. Many game servers have a Discord associated with them. Twitch streamers have their own Discord communities. Each game typically has at least one main Discord for it. Discord now supports discovering discord servers for clubs at your University. But in all of these cases I am mentioning being able to search this from a Google Search is not important. In fact in some ways I think it's preferred from a privacy standpoint to not have random chat messages I send be archived on random sites. I think the problem is that people are trying to use Discord for purposes it wasn't really designed for. So it's funny when these people then complain about it.
  - 5y ago

zeku 5y ago

I'm sure even if they fold, the info will be sold to some group for ML at the very least.

jlokier 5y ago

The company I work for is in the process of migrating internal chat away from Discord to something else. It's a fully remote company, so chat is really important. I think most people like the Discord interface enough. That's not reason to leave. The migration away is because it's an open source company, so Discord is poorly aligned with the company's values, and there is a constant search for better, more open alternatives. (They are migrating away from Google services as well.) I really like the Discord interface for real-time chat. Nicer than Slack or IRC (and I'm comfortable with IRC, I used to be active on it in the old days). The Discord GUI on top of a "modern IRC", specifically with publicly archivable channels, would be great. But the way high quality information is constantly being posted then lost forever in practice is a big loss. Searching within Discord works if you know exactly what you are looking for. But you have to know, and wider searches such as with Google or any other tool that look through the rest of the company's online materials will never find the content in Discord. That's unfortunate as Discord tends to be where, by far, the highest quality and quantity of information is. As a result of the company's migration away from Discord, we expect an abrupt discontinuity, as the new platform won't have access to the old Discord conversations. Then all the years of high value content people have put into Discord will effectively disappear, as nobody will search Discord when they aren't even using it any more. What we'd really like is a gateway that allows the Discord content to be available in other platforms, generally searchable on the company's intranet, and on the internet for public channels. If our Discord content was more openly accessible and shareable, even while using a closed source product, we might not be migrating at all. We'd probably let people choose their preferred client instead to access the shared real-time content. But it's not that accessible, and it's unfortunate so much expert knowledge will be lost in the migration.

vel0city 5y ago
An interesting web-based IRC client I've been looking at was The Lounge. You might like it. https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ Also, at my company we've really enjoyed Mattermost over the years. The main chat platform is open source, they make money by selling a paid enterprise plguin suite. All your messages are in a database you control, you can translate them to whatever you want.
5y ago