4 ms·

insane. people doing awful stuff like this is why the world is retreating into private group chats. these researchers should be ashamed

pavel_lishin 1y ago
I'm not sure this is awful. These are public discords, no more private than newsgroups, or StackOverflow. Why is it awful to scrape this, but not that?
- spencerflem 1y ago
  they are "open invite" in the sense that its nice to have serendipitous encounters with people on the internet youd otherwise never meet. its for chatting, and the pace of things ensures whatever you say will be buried. the point isn't to make an artifact, like stack overflow. and certainly not be be experimented on.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    The pace of things does not ensure that whatever you say remains buried. Discord has a search feature that isn't great but does work. If you want to ensure that what you say is ephemeral you need to use a chat app that has that as a feature, like Signal.
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > the pace of things ensures whatever you say will be buried. It very clearly does not.
- ysavir 1y ago
  A Discover server's status isn't permanent. Any invite-only server can be into a discoverable, public server, and any public server can be taken private. The public/private distinction isn't a permanent reflection of access but is just a reflection of the current permissions. There's no guarantee that users in a public server were in a public server when they joined and engaged.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public. The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discord's responsibility and Discord's shame.
    - ysavir 1y ago
      Eh, depends on how you look at it. "Public" is a pretty vague term. Something might be public in the sense that anyone can come and view, but it can also be public in the sense that anyone can join and participate, but you still must be a joined member to participate (and that participation can be revoked, etc). Twitter and Reddit are the former, publicly visible communications avenues. Discord is ultimately a private communication channel where anyone can join, but must be joined, to participate. Unlike Reddit and Twitter, Discord was never meant to be a space where your contributions are intended to be publicly viewable. People forget that while Discord is oftentimes used as a replacement for forums, it is actually the spiritual successor to IRC, AIM, and similar chat services, where the data is typically ephemeral. Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition, and what we're seeing now is the consequence of that data being available. Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one.
      - pavel_lishin 1y ago
        > Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC. > Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one. I definitely agree with this, although the fact that anyone joining can scroll back does sort of mean it's available to anyone who wants to look for it - it's just difficult to do so.
Sanzig 1y ago
You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Similarly, we have a huge problem right now with massive partisanship in the west. Changing one's opinion should be viewed in a positive light, but unfortunately our society doesn't seem to see it that way. Someone with an odious opinion when they were young, who changes that opinion to something more moderate when they grow up, should be viewed as a positive change. But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment. So yes, shame on these researchers. I know they claim to have anonymized the data set, but let's be honest, that never works. It's always easy to find common threads and identify someone, and it's particularly easy now when we have access to all sorts of machine learning models that can really do very effective denonymization.
- trevor-e 1y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the outrage. Before Discord, everyone used forums. And those were archived by Google for the entire world to see. What's the difference?
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    One is against the rules of the platform and the other isn't.
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? You'd have a more convincing argument if you said something like "oh these servers have the implication of semi-private chats so people may be more inclined to share personal information" or something. Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo when people dont obey their 500+ page long legalese ToS designed to maximise ownership over each user.
d--b 1y ago
People should realize when what they write is public though. The world retreating into private group chats is not a bad thing.
- spencerflem 1y ago
  its a shame that we can't get the benefits of both. it sucks having to individually vet everyone one at a time. you miss a lot. but people like these researchers who only want to exploit are making it necessary
  - d--b 1y ago
    The two things that suck are: 1. The illusion of intimacy 2. The illusion of ephemerality People think they chat to a small number of people, and people think that it's going to go away at some point. So they think they're in a private conversation when they're not. They wouldn't behave the same if they realized what they say is being written down and stored forever in some database. And yes, it sucks that technology doesn't allow you to have it both ways => public because you want to reach far and wide, and private cause you don't want it recorded.
  - lolinder 1y ago
    These researchers are just using the tools that Discord made available to archive information that was already public. If anyone is to blame for users believing that their messages were private or ephemeral it's Discord, not the researchers. Look at it like this: There's no chance in hell that intelligence agencies, hacker groups, and whatever other nasties you care to worry about haven't already been using archives just like this for all their nefarious purposes. They just didn't make their usage public because why break the honey pot? What these researchers did is show what was possible and make their efforts public. Now you are better informed of what was always possible. It's always been necessary to think carefully before putting stuff on the internet, it's just now your bubble is burst.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Kinda, but, it's a dark forest out there and I'd rather have public red teaming than secret red teaming. At least everyone knows it now
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 1y ago
These researchers are making public scraping that was already happening in private. Do you really think they were the first ones to realize that public Discord servers were public? On the contrary, kudos to these researchers for bursting the illusion that people previously had that things said on public servers somehow would be ephemeral. That's not how the internet works, that's not how it's ever worked. If you send something to someone else's computer you have always had to assume that every recipient could have made a copy of it, and when the recipient list is "everyone who ever joins a public Discord server from now until the end of time" that makes it public information. Better that it be widely recognized and talked about as these researchers are doing than have accessing public data remain a dark art that lay people mistakenly believe can't happen.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

pavel_lishin 1y ago

I'm not sure this is awful. These are public discords, no more private than newsgroups, or StackOverflow. Why is it awful to scrape this, but not that?

spencerflem 1y ago
they are "open invite" in the sense that its nice to have serendipitous encounters with people on the internet youd otherwise never meet. its for chatting, and the pace of things ensures whatever you say will be buried. the point isn't to make an artifact, like stack overflow. and certainly not be be experimented on.
- lolinder 1y ago
  The pace of things does not ensure that whatever you say remains buried. Discord has a search feature that isn't great but does work. If you want to ensure that what you say is ephemeral you need to use a chat app that has that as a feature, like Signal.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  > the pace of things ensures whatever you say will be buried. It very clearly does not.
ysavir 1y ago
A Discover server's status isn't permanent. Any invite-only server can be into a discoverable, public server, and any public server can be taken private. The public/private distinction isn't a permanent reflection of access but is just a reflection of the current permissions. There's no guarantee that users in a public server were in a public server when they joined and engaged.
- lolinder 1y ago
  That sounds like an enormous flaw in Discord's permission model, not something that should be patched over with "shame" on researchers for archiving data that Discord made public. The fact remains that if you post something in a private discord channel that someone takes public, it's now public information. All these researchers did is expose that fact—the fact that private messages can later be made public is Discord's responsibility and Discord's shame.
  - ysavir 1y ago
    Eh, depends on how you look at it. "Public" is a pretty vague term. Something might be public in the sense that anyone can come and view, but it can also be public in the sense that anyone can join and participate, but you still must be a joined member to participate (and that participation can be revoked, etc). Twitter and Reddit are the former, publicly visible communications avenues. Discord is ultimately a private communication channel where anyone can join, but must be joined, to participate. Unlike Reddit and Twitter, Discord was never meant to be a space where your contributions are intended to be publicly viewable. People forget that while Discord is oftentimes used as a replacement for forums, it is actually the spiritual successor to IRC, AIM, and similar chat services, where the data is typically ephemeral. Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition, and what we're seeing now is the consequence of that data being available. Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one.
    - pavel_lishin 1y ago
      > Message history in these services is still a fairly recent addition Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC. > Some people think that availability of historical data inherently puts it in the same camp as forums, Reddit, and Twitter, but I don't share that view. Discord data is still intended for present members of the given servers, not the public at large, even if anyone in the public space is able to become a present member. The distinction there is a meaningful one. I definitely agree with this, although the fact that anyone joining can scroll back does sort of mean it's available to anyone who wants to look for it - it's just difficult to do so.

Sanzig 1y ago

You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse. These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see? Similarly, we have a huge problem right now with massive partisanship in the west. Changing one's opinion should be viewed in a positive light, but unfortunately our society doesn't seem to see it that way. Someone with an odious opinion when they were young, who changes that opinion to something more moderate when they grow up, should be viewed as a positive change. But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment. So yes, shame on these researchers. I know they claim to have anonymized the data set, but let's be honest, that never works. It's always easy to find common threads and identify someone, and it's particularly easy now when we have access to all sorts of machine learning models that can really do very effective denonymization.

trevor-e 1y ago
I'm not sure I understand the outrage. Before Discord, everyone used forums. And those were archived by Google for the entire world to see. What's the difference?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  One is against the rules of the platform and the other isn't.
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    Who cares what the Discord coporation wants? Do you similarly get upset when someone violates the Facebook ToS? You'd have a more convincing argument if you said something like "oh these servers have the implication of semi-private chats so people may be more inclined to share personal information" or something. Otherwise, let me play on the worlds smallest violin for the poor massive corpo when people dont obey their 500+ page long legalese ToS designed to maximise ownership over each user.

d--b 1y ago

People should realize when what they write is public though. The world retreating into private group chats is not a bad thing.

spencerflem 1y ago
its a shame that we can't get the benefits of both. it sucks having to individually vet everyone one at a time. you miss a lot. but people like these researchers who only want to exploit are making it necessary
- d--b 1y ago
  The two things that suck are: 1. The illusion of intimacy 2. The illusion of ephemerality People think they chat to a small number of people, and people think that it's going to go away at some point. So they think they're in a private conversation when they're not. They wouldn't behave the same if they realized what they say is being written down and stored forever in some database. And yes, it sucks that technology doesn't allow you to have it both ways => public because you want to reach far and wide, and private cause you don't want it recorded.
- lolinder 1y ago
  These researchers are just using the tools that Discord made available to archive information that was already public. If anyone is to blame for users believing that their messages were private or ephemeral it's Discord, not the researchers. Look at it like this: There's no chance in hell that intelligence agencies, hacker groups, and whatever other nasties you care to worry about haven't already been using archives just like this for all their nefarious purposes. They just didn't make their usage public because why break the honey pot? What these researchers did is show what was possible and make their efforts public. Now you are better informed of what was always possible. It's always been necessary to think carefully before putting stuff on the internet, it's just now your bubble is burst.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Kinda, but, it's a dark forest out there and I'd rather have public red teaming than secret red teaming. At least everyone knows it now

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 1y ago

These researchers are making public scraping that was already happening in private. Do you really think they were the first ones to realize that public Discord servers were public? On the contrary, kudos to these researchers for bursting the illusion that people previously had that things said on public servers somehow would be ephemeral. That's not how the internet works, that's not how it's ever worked. If you send something to someone else's computer you have always had to assume that every recipient could have made a copy of it, and when the recipient list is "everyone who ever joins a public Discord server from now until the end of time" that makes it public information. Better that it be widely recognized and talked about as these researchers are doing than have accessing public data remain a dark art that lay people mistakenly believe can't happen.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]